![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinChad Orzel shares my skepticism about Technological Singularity, but Pirate PZ Myers thinks he's missing the revolution (non-piratical version here). (Correction: Myers was actually commenting not on Orzel but on Kevin Drum commenting on Orzel. Names in the rest of my article changed correspondingly.)
Myers' objection about airplanes, I think, actually only holds because of Drum's chosen time threshold: a lot of things happened in air travel after 1950, but very little of fundamental import happened after about 1970. The experience of air travel, and really travel in general, is essentially the same as it was when I was a little kid, except that some things became more unpleasant (though the banning of smoking on US domestic flights and the introduction of Internet ticketing make up for a lot). That's part of the reason that Zompist's story is as funny as it is. The great coming advance of the Seventies—the rise of the supersonic airliner—has even been undone before it really started.
His objection about the biotech revolution is more to the point. Jacob Bronowski said in the late seventies that the great emphasis in modern basic science was shifting from the physical to the life sciences. This has only continued and accelerated. There are tremendously exciting things going on in cosmology right now, but the real explosion is biological, partly because the microelectronics revolution of the late 20th century has led to the rise of bioinformatics, with its new ways to deal with the overwhelming flood of raw data involved in describing living things. Think how far ahead of schedule the Human Genome Project was completed.
While glib predictions about engineering superior offspring are almost certainly based on misunderstandings about how genes work, eventually this knowledge is going to be applied in ways we can't dream of now, with the corresponding risks and rewards. Some of these applications will involve exploding costs as Orzel predicted, but, on the other hand, not every technological explosion involves an explosion in consumer cost; chip fabs may be more expensive these days but fast computers (fast, at least, by the standards of five or ten years ago) are a dirt-cheap commodity.
I think of technological progress in terms of, not a single exponential or a single logistic S-curve, but a whole forest of S-curves dealing with different technologies. Any single collection of techniques is going to hit a fundamental limit sooner or later, but different things, not always predictable, will be in their exponential-growth phase at the same time. Sometimes one burst enables another in chain reaction, as in the case of computers and bioinformatics.
But there's no guarantee that everyday life will be transformed at any given time. With Drum, I think of everyday life in the industrialized West as having really changed very little in its technological trappings since the early 1970s, following a period of relatively rapid change after the world wars, which in turn followed a period of traumatically cataclysmic change in the whole first half of the 20th century.
Computers and the Internet are kind of big, but the biggest change that has happened since 1970 is a mostly social one: the changes in attitudes toward women, and the acceptance of female professionals as normal. That's bigger than anything that happened in science and technology, though the roots of the change are, I suppose, partly technological.
Myers' objection about airplanes, I think, actually only holds because of Drum's chosen time threshold: a lot of things happened in air travel after 1950, but very little of fundamental import happened after about 1970. The experience of air travel, and really travel in general, is essentially the same as it was when I was a little kid, except that some things became more unpleasant (though the banning of smoking on US domestic flights and the introduction of Internet ticketing make up for a lot). That's part of the reason that Zompist's story is as funny as it is. The great coming advance of the Seventies—the rise of the supersonic airliner—has even been undone before it really started.
His objection about the biotech revolution is more to the point. Jacob Bronowski said in the late seventies that the great emphasis in modern basic science was shifting from the physical to the life sciences. This has only continued and accelerated. There are tremendously exciting things going on in cosmology right now, but the real explosion is biological, partly because the microelectronics revolution of the late 20th century has led to the rise of bioinformatics, with its new ways to deal with the overwhelming flood of raw data involved in describing living things. Think how far ahead of schedule the Human Genome Project was completed.
While glib predictions about engineering superior offspring are almost certainly based on misunderstandings about how genes work, eventually this knowledge is going to be applied in ways we can't dream of now, with the corresponding risks and rewards. Some of these applications will involve exploding costs as Orzel predicted, but, on the other hand, not every technological explosion involves an explosion in consumer cost; chip fabs may be more expensive these days but fast computers (fast, at least, by the standards of five or ten years ago) are a dirt-cheap commodity.
I think of technological progress in terms of, not a single exponential or a single logistic S-curve, but a whole forest of S-curves dealing with different technologies. Any single collection of techniques is going to hit a fundamental limit sooner or later, but different things, not always predictable, will be in their exponential-growth phase at the same time. Sometimes one burst enables another in chain reaction, as in the case of computers and bioinformatics.
But there's no guarantee that everyday life will be transformed at any given time. With Drum, I think of everyday life in the industrialized West as having really changed very little in its technological trappings since the early 1970s, following a period of relatively rapid change after the world wars, which in turn followed a period of traumatically cataclysmic change in the whole first half of the 20th century.
Computers and the Internet are kind of big, but the biggest change that has happened since 1970 is a mostly social one: the changes in attitudes toward women, and the acceptance of female professionals as normal. That's bigger than anything that happened in science and technology, though the roots of the change are, I suppose, partly technological.