There’s an interesting piece up at the IEEE robotics blog, by Alfred Nordmann, with the subtitle “The story of the Singularity is sweeping, dramatic, simple–and wrong.” He argues that far from accelerating, technological progress is slowing down:


Nordmann then proceeds to diagnose the problem (of belief in accelerating progress when in fact it’s slowing down) as one of increasing specialization:


Now frankly, what he says about the effects of technology on the average person are quite true. The Leave It to Beaver family of the 50s had a life that was essentially as comfortable as ours is today. It seems clear that by that time, the middle classes of the developed nations had reached some kind of a “good enough” point in basic physical arrangements — that point at which concern shifted over to higher levels of the Maslow hierarchy of needs, perhaps.

Visions of what happens when all the basic needs are satisfied go back to H. G. Wells and The Time Machine, describing the Eloi:




It could be argued that Wells foresaw not only the huge shift away from productive pursuits over the twentieth century, but the sexual revolution and the breakup of the family.  The only thing that would have boggled his mind is that it only took one century instead of the 8000 he imagined.

But if you ask the average person of the industrialized world, they won’t agree that they are the Eloi, living perfect lives of ease in a Utopian garden. They would tell you that they struggled to make ends meet, life was hard, they were doing necessary jobs, and so forth.

The next needs up the Maslow hierarchy after safety and comfort are belonging and esteem.  The basic human psyche is evolved for the pre-economic tribal environment where esteem came from fulfilling a useful role and being appreciated for it, by others but also by oneself.

It is the absolute genius of the post-industrial age that we have created a society in which a growing majority of people are doing useless, and in many cases counter-productive work (plus producing luxuries and entertainment), but where we all feel like we’re doing something necessary and important, and that we’re making a difference in the world.

Unlike a century ago, today for everyone who is working on technological progress, there is someone else who thinks that they are saving the planet by stopping them.  Has the pace of technological change slowed?  It certainly has for technologies that have to run the gauntlet all the way into consumers’ hands and make an obvious difference, because those are the easiest kinds to attack.  It has also slowed in areas where scare stories are easy to generate, like nuclear power.  In a world of delusional, self-important Eloi, it is much more advantageous to be a screaming coward than to be brave and productive.

At the back end of the process, however, science is still advancing (animal activists to the contrary notwithstanding).  The rate of technological advance in areas without opposition, such as computer technology, has been tremendous.  Over the period that Nordmann decries as having had little technological advance, basic science has done things like solve the molecular mechanisms of life itself, produced a workable quantum electrodynamics, and mapped the human brain.

Normally in history, technology has led science. Tinkerers find things that work, and scientists come along and explain them, in the process laying the groundwork for more thorough exploitation of the principles involved.  The steam engine preceded thermodynamics by a century.  What’s happened in the late twentieth century is that something of an overhang has been created by the opposition to visible applications. Should there be a cultural shift, or should there arise elsewhere (China?) a culture that has the same gung-ho spirit that we had just a century ago, huge apparent advances could happen almost overnight as experimentation regains the lead, using all the “pent-up knowledge” of the past half-century.  Real nanotechnology is the most obvious example, but there are many.