First, there's the comparison of technologies that seem to catch everyone off guard compared with those that have a long history of antecedents in fiction/myth, serious speculation, and failed experiments before becoming viable. It can be difficult to sort these out from a modern perspective, so it is extremely useful to have the topic explored by someone like Ley who combines mastery of the science with extensive knowledge of the fiction.
Second, and even more applicable to our ongoing conversation, is the timeframe. As with many concepts in space travel, the idea of a space station was for all practical intents and purposes introduced by Hermann Oberth 30 years before the appearance of the following article. Within around a quarter of a century, scientists had developed the design into what we still think of today when we hear the words space station, a torus-shaped orbital platform where people and cargo from surface-launched rockets could be transferred to long-range spacecrafts.
This is very much consistent with the push into space of the period in particular and of the postwar science and tech spike in general. Most of the enabling technologies were either truly cutting-edge (like atomic power and transistors) or were developed during or between the two world wars.
By comparison, at least when it comes to 21st-century aerospace, the basic ideas behind most of our highly touted advances and "bold and visionary" proposals tend to be much older, often passing the 50 or even 60 year mark. This is not to say that impressive work is not being done or that major technical challenges are not being overcome, but the role of the cutting-edge and even the moderately recent discovery is far less than it used to be, and that might not be a good sign.
Mark:
ReplyDeleteI accept your argument when it comes to physics-based hardware. But for software, we've had real conceptual innovation. Even something as familiar as a google search, I don't know that anyone was talking about that, 50 years ago. Not to mention various more recent software marvels. Sure, AI is an old idea, but there had not been much of any clear imagination of how it might arise.
Also, I imagine there have been a lot of chemistry and biology-based innovations that people were not thinking about, 50 years ago. So I think your argument is slightly misleading, by focusing on a particular area--aerospace--where lots of the basic ideas are indeed old, in part because it's been too expensive to develop all these ideas that were already out there.
Andrew,
DeleteOne of the problems with chipping away at a big topic through bite -sized blog posts is that you don't generally pack a lot of nuance into each individual chip. I am not arguing for a lack of new ideas and genuine innovation since the postwar era. Instead I'm trying to get a handle on the way we perceive that progress and the contradictions in the stories we tell ourselves about it.
I will argue that, by most reasonable measures, the rate of scientific and technological advancement is slower now than it was in say the 1890s or the 1950s, but that is not meant to imply current day stagnation, rather it reflects both of those periods being peaks of extraordinary spikes in progress.
The constant advances in computing power muddy the water somewhat, but in terms of basic functionality, I would further argue that someone in 1895 or 1955 would have been more less likely to consider 10 or 20-year-old technology new. Take your example of a search engine. Undeniably a huge leap forward in the way we access and manipulate information, easily comparable in magnitude to the telephone, the motion picture, or the television, but it is also an innovation that is somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter century old. I'm saying that our standard of what qualifies as a recent development goes back further than it would have for someone 60 or 120 years ago.
This shifting cutoff for newness is entirely natural and probably healthy since it corresponds to our coming off the postwar spike and settling into a more normal rate of progress, but there is another more troubling side to this story. When I complained about 60-year-old ideas being held up as bold and visionary, the main thing that bothered me was that the hype machine was passing over genuinely important and revolutionary developments in order to stick with and antiquated and romanticized view of the future.
I focused on aerospace not because of a lack of innovation, but because the good stuff doesn't get nearly as much press. There are tremendously exciting technologies being developed, advances that have the potential to greatly reduce the cost of getting to places like Mars and the asteroid belt, making space-based industries viable for the first time, not to mention creating a Golden age for exploration and scientific research. Air breathing rockets. Hypersonic air launches. Railguns and mass drivers. Advances in AI and robotics that enable major construction projects and mining operations without a human presence (because we are the high maintenance part of these proposals). Researchers around the world are doing incredibly promising work in these fields, but because they are not part of some Silicon Valley billionaire's vanity project and they don't fit neatly with a decades-old sci-fi movie version of the future, they largely go unnoticed.
Part of the cost of Mars One and the latest hyperloop pitch is the real innovation they push out of the way
Mark:
DeleteThat's an interesting point regarding the crowding out of attention. But is it really true? The new technologies might be largely unnoticed now (and I agree that it's ludicrous that things like Mars One and the Hyperloop get any press at all), but maybe once they start to work, we'll hear more about them?
Andrew,
DeleteOn at least a superficial level, I would say that crowding out is self-evidently true – – we've seen before that the press has a limited amount of attention and the stories we see inevitably come at the expense of those we don't – – but as to the bigger question of how the way we discuss nascent technology affects or fails to affect its development, I can't give nearly as clear an answer.
It seems reasonable to assume that, since we are living in a hype economy, more attention should tend to lead to more money which in turn could tend to lead toward faster development. This appears to be particularly true with venture capital and investment in publicly traded companies which are especially enamored with (and easily conned by) these old technologies repackaged as cutting-edge innovations. Despite the standard narrative, in aerospace at least, the money for the most innovative ideas is much more likely to come from government agencies.
I've argued before that hype distorts markets. As a result, what should be a system for allocating resources efficiently starts to break down, but I think there is more at stake here than investments. Much of the technology narrative, perhaps most, revolves around tech that isn't really here yet. It is about proposals and limited prototypes and products that haven't really proven themselves. In short, it's about promises, and remarkably few people seem to notice when those promises are broken.
Remember a couple of years ago when virtual-reality was supposed to revolutionize everything? Hell, while were on the subject, remember 20 years ago when virtual-reality was supposed revolutionize everything? (For the record, any technology that was the central plot element for an episode of murder she wrote should be barred for life from being the next big thing.)
When we when we mislabel the old as new and the ordinary as visionary or when we exaggerate the promise of a technology, we undermine our ability to make good decisions whether it be what to invest in, what public policy directions to pursue, or simply want to spend our time thinking about this is particularly dangerous when the mislabeling and exaggeration is done in service of a wrongheaded and truly dangerous narrative like that of the Silicon Valley Messiah.