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The economist Robert Gordon seems to be a more sensible alternative to Roko's basilisk. Prof. Gordon predicts that technological growth is actually declining, as evidenced by the Concorde ending service in 2003, the lack of robots in public, and so on. (https://archive.is/Rv0Rl)
posted on May 04, 2023 02:13 PM by u/yhl3052
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u/yargotkd 20 points at 1683214336.000000

This seemed weak to me back in 2016, now more than ever.

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u/Jeep-Eep 3 points at 1683234225.000000
Not really? That they unleashed mass scraping with the expected risks on copyright is a sign that shit is stagnating.
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u/Landonian 9 points at 1683233750.000000

I’m not reading past the headline, but if that’s truly his evidence for tech growth slowing down, that is one of the dumbest things I’ve heard an economist say.

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u/yhl3052 2 points at 1683235060.000000
Where is evidence that the *rate* of tech growth is increasing?
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u/Landonian 5 points at 1683236434.000000
I’m not claiming that it is.
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u/Stirling-Newberry 17 points at 1683219907.000000

This is a known paradox: technical improvement does not mean technical improvement in a particular area.

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u/pusillanimouslist 19 points at 1683256027.000000
Hell, while we’re at it, jets *are* improving! The entire raison d’être for the infamous 737 Max 8 and the less infamous A320neo are new engines and aero improvements that cut fuel consumption by 15-20%. We lost supersonic air travel because it turns out basically nobody was willing to pay for it, especially since the cost equivalent seat in a subsonic wide body jet got much more comfortable. The tech is still there, but the market isn’t. Side note: there’s something really funny about an economist whining about lost tech growth when the real issue is that the market values different stuff than the economist does.
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u/yhl3052 2 points at 1683308119.000000
That still fits his prediction. He says the rate of growth is declining, not zero. In fifty years, the world went from the Wright brothers to the 707 (which was at the speed of the Boeing 747). There has been no equivalent rapid development since then. I would guess that fuel consumption would have to decline by 60-80% to be just as revolutionary.
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u/ElectorSet 7 points at 1683320958.000000
>There has been no equivalent rapid development since then. No equivalent rapid development in what? Speed? That’s because there’s no reason to go much faster. If you look at areas where there *is* a demand for advancement (stealth technology and sensor fusion in military aircraft, for instance) things are indeed advancing quite rapidly. In the article he compares the move from horses to cars to the difference between the iPod and the Walkman, then says that the iPhone doesn’t change much because a laptop can do the same thing. As if the same isn’t true of cars and horses. Now, he was writing on 2012 and couldn’t have known just how much would change due to the rise of smartphones and the like. But that’s the point. The invention of the car didn’t change much of anything. It was the assembly line making cars affordable which started changing things. And the development of the assembly line relied on a hundred other innovations, and the rise of the automobile spurred developments in petrochemical sciences, and developments in petrochemical sciences drive innovations in shipbuilding, and on and on and on. The reason that big, world-changing inventions are more common in the past than the present is that big, world changing inventions are just products of hindsight and don’t actually exist.
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u/Stirling-Newberry 1 points at 1683289144.000000
The market is still there but not at the risk it carries.
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u/AbsolutelyExcellent 4 points at 1683289524.000000

nothing says high-tec like having a machine massage your balls while you drink fine wine filled with microplastics and pesticide

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