Unless you are an airplane nerd, you would be hard pressed to distinguish the 787 from its grandfather.
And in fact, this revolutionary new plane flies slower than the 707.
The basic configuration of an airliner has not changed in sixty years. You have a long tube, swept wings with multiple engines mounted underneath, and a top speed of around 900 kph.
So what happened to the future?
.. The Russians got in on it too, with a plane derisively called the Concordeski. This proved too loud and unreliable for passenger service, so it ended up being a transport jet. It carried fruits and vegetables from Central Asia at twice the speed of sound.
..Because the technologies we had were good enough. It turned out that very few people needed to cross an ocean in three hours instead of six hours. On my way to this conference, I flew from Switzerland to San Francisco. It took eleven hours and cost me around a thousand dollars. It was a long flight and kind of uncomfortable and boring. But I crossed the planet in half a day!
Being able to get anywhere in the world in a day is really good enough.
.. So despite appearances, despite the feeling that things are accelerating and changing faster than ever, I want to make the shocking prediction that the Internet of 2060 is going to look recognizably the same as the Internet today.
.. Intel could probably build a 20 GHz processor, just like Boeing can make a Mach 3 airliner. But they won’t. There’s a corrollary to Moore’s law, that every time you double the number of transistors, your production costs go up. Every two years, Intel has to build a completely new factory and production line for this stuff. And the industry is turning away from super high performance, because most people don’t need it.
.. So the world of the near future is one of power constrained devices in a bandwidth-constrained environment. It’s very different from the recent past, where hardware performance went up like clockwork, with more storage and faster CPUs every year.
..But all this exponential growth has given us terrible habits. One of them is to discount the present.
When things are doubling, the only sane place to be is at the cutting edge. By definition, exponential growth means the thing that comes next will be equal in importance to everything that came before. So if you’re not working on the next big thing, you’re nothing.
This leads to a contempt for the past. Too much of what was created in the last fifty years is gone because no one took care to preserve it.
.. Since I run a bookmarking site for a living, I’ve done a little research on link rot myself. Bookmarks are different from regular URLs, because presumably anything you’ve bookmarked was once worth keeping. What I’ve learned is, about 5% of this disappears every year, at a pretty steady rate. A customer of mine just posted how 90% of what he saved in 1997 is gone. This is unfortunately typical.
.. It’s 2014, and consider one hot blogging site, Medium. On a late-model computer it takes me ten seconds for a Medium page (which is literally a formatted text file) to load and render. This experience was faster in the sixties.
The web is full of these abuses, extravagant animations and so on, forever a step ahead of the hardware, waiting for it to catch up.
.. The cult of growth has led us to a sterile, centralized web. And having burned through all the easy ideas within our industry, we’re convinced that it’s our manifest destiny to start disrupting everyone else.
Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS.
This is the correct vision... Vision 2: FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE
This is the prevailing vision in Silicon Valley.
The world is just one big hot mess, an accident of history. Nothing is done as efficiently or cleverly as it could be if it were designed from scratch by California programmers. The world is a crufty legacy system crying out to be optimized.
.. Marc Andreessen has this arresting quote, that ‘software is eating the world.’ He is happy about it. The idea is that industry after industry is going to fall at the hands of programmers who automate and rationalize it.
We started with music and publishing. Then retailing. Now we’re apparently doing taxis. We’re going to move a succession of industries into the cloud, and figure out how to do them better. Whether we have the right to do this, or whether it’s a good idea, are academic questions that will be rendered moot by the unstoppable forces of Progress. It’s a kind of software Manifest Destiny.
.. Consider how fundamentally undemocratic this vision of the Web is. Because the Web started as a technical achievement, technical people are the ones who get to call the shots. We decide how to change the world, and the rest of you have to adapt.
There is something quite colonial, too, about collecting data from users and repackaging it to sell back to them. I think of it as the White Nerd’s Burden.Vision 3: BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN CONSTRUCTION
This is the insane vision. I’m a little embarrassed to talk about it, because it’s so stupid. But circumstances compel me.
.. Here’s Ray Kurzweil, a man who honestly and sincerely believes he is never going to die. He works at Google. Presumably he stays at Google because he feels it advances his agenda.
Google works on some loopy stuff in between plastering the Internet with ads.
.. If you think your job is to FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE, then the web is just the very beginning. There’s a lot of work left to do. Really you’re going to need sensors in every house, and it will help if everyone looks through special goggles, and if every refrigerator can talk to the Internet and confess its contents.
.. And if you think that the purpose of the Internet is to BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN INVENTION, then your goal is total and complete revolution. Everything must go.
The future needs to get here as fast as possible, because your biological clock is ticking!The first group wants to CONNECT THE WORLD.
The second group wants to EAT THE WORLD.
And the third group wants to END THE WORLD.
These visions are not compatible.
.. We see businesses that don’t produce anything and run at an astonishing loss valued in the billions of dollars.
We see a whole ecosystem of startups and businesses that seem to exist only to serve one other, or the needs of very busy and very rich tech workers in a tiny sliver of our world.
.. We live in a world now where not millions but billions of people work in rice fields, textile factories, where children grow up in appalling poverty. Of those billions, how many are the greatest minds of our time? How many deserve better than they get? What if instead of dreaming about changing the world with tomorrow’s technology, we used today’s technology and let the world change us? Why do we need to obsess on artificial intelligence, when we’re wasting so much natural intelligence?
Chomsky’s Revolutionary Methodological Preliminaries
No linguists today think Aspectspresents the right way to design grammars for human languages. The book did not present discoveries about language that have since been confirmed as correct by subsequent scientific work. I’m skeptical even of its general approach in some respects. Yet it was truly a wonder. Not for what it claimed in detail, but for what it led to.
Why safety now trumps freedom
“We still barely understand why homicide rates have declined consistently across the western world over the past 20 years,” admits Manuel Eisner, criminologist at Cambridge university. The rise of screens may have helped: nowadays many violence-prone young males spend their days on WhatsApp or PlayStation. But Eisner and other thinkers suggest another fascinating explanation: starting in the early 1990s, western countries entered an age of restraint. Our generation has chosen safety over freedom.
.. Perhaps coincidentally, the EU experienced “a marked decrease in recorded adult per capita alcohol consumption” from 1990 through 2010, says the World Health Organisation.
.. We now have evidence – which Elias didn’t – that western homicides have fallen fairly steadily for 700 years.
.. American teenagers’ “use of illicit drugs has generally declined over the past two decades”, says the Monitoring the Future survey.
.. Only one western realm of disorder survives, says Pinker: entertainment. Violent video games, rap music and online porn are everywhere. But, argues Pinker, most consumers of this entertainment are ironic: they don’t confuse it with reality. In fact, real violent entertainment – as in ice hockey – increasingly generates outrage. Today’s security-obsessed media encourage permanent fear. The evidence suggests an age of restraint.
Enslave the robots and free the poor
The economist Robert Gordon, doyen of the skeptics, has noted that the average growth of U.S. output per worker was 2.3 percent a year between 1891 and 1972. Thereafter, it only matched that rate briefly, between 1996 and 2004. It was just 1.4 percent a year between 1972 and 1996 and 1.3 percent between 2004 and 2012.
.. An ancient Roman would have understood the way of life of the United States of 1840 fairly well. He would have found that of 1940 beyond his imagination.
.. The collapse in child mortality is surely the single most beneficial social change of the past two centuries. It is not only a great good in itself; it also liberated women from the burden, trauma, and danger of frequent pregnancies. The jump in high school graduation rates—from less than ten percent of young people in 1900 to roughly 80 percent by 1970—was a central driver of twentieth-century economic growth.
.. Yet except for the upward blip between 1996 and 2004, we are still—to adapt the Nobel laureate Robert Solow’s celebrated words of 1987—seeing the information technology age “everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
The American economy has enjoyed . . . low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, . . . immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies. Yet during the last 40 years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognise that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That’s it. That is what has gone wrong.
.. Raising productivity in manufacturing matters far less now that it generates only about an eighth of total U.S. GDP. Raising productivity in caring for the young, the infirm, the helpless, and the elderly is hard, if not impossible.
.. In their book The Second Machine Age, Brynjolfsson and McAfee offer as a parallel the story of the inventor of chess, who asked to be rewarded with one grain of rice on the first square of his board, two on the second, four on the third, and so forth. Manageable in size on the first half of the board, the reward reaches mountainous proportions toward the end of the second. Humanity’s reward from Moore’s law—the relentless doubling of the number of transistors on a computer chip every two years or so—will, they argue, grow similarly.
.. Yes, it is possible to imagine driverless cars. But this would be a far smaller advance than were cars themselves.
.. The idea that a small minority should overwhelmingly benefit from new technologies should be reconsidered.
.. It is also possible that the ultimate result might be a tiny minority of huge winners and a vast number of losers. But such an outcome would be a choice, not a destiny. Techno-feudalism is unnecessary. Above all, technology itself does not dictate the outcomes. Economic and political institutions do. If the ones we have do not give the results we want, we will need to change them.