Peter Thiel, the founding CEO of PayPal, has an essay up that makes the contention that the pace of technological innovation in the West, for various reasons, has slowed. He argues that this paradoxically may explain why, in the absence of serious tech change, investors are instead drawn to the dangerous finangling of asset markets such as property, and have fallen prey to the easy charms of high leverage. It is quite an interesting idea.
Here is an interesting couple of paragraphs:
“The most common name for a misplaced emphasis on macroeconomic policy is “Keynesianism.” Despite his brilliance, John Maynard Keynes was always a bit of a fraud, and there is always a bit of clever trickery in massive fiscal stimulus and the related printing of paper money. But we must acknowledge that this fraud strangely seemed to work for many decades. (The great scientific and technological tailwind of the 20th century powered many economically delusional ideas.) Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, innovation expanded new and emerging fields as divergent as radio, movies, aeronautics, household appliances, polymer chemistry, and secondary oil recovery. In spite of their many mistakes, the New Dealers pushed technological innovation very hard.”
“The New Deal deficits, however misguided, were easily repaid by the growth of subsequent decades. During the Great Recession of the 2010s, by contrast, our policy leaders narrowly debate fiscal and monetary questions with much greater erudition, but have adopted a cargo-cult mentality with respect to the question of future innovation. As the years pass and the cargo fails to arrive, we eventually may doubt whether it will ever return. The age of monetary bubbles naturally ends in real austerity.”
It does rather go against the ideas of Matt Ridley about whom Brian Micklethwait writes below on this blog. Ridley’s take on the pace of events is far more optimistic: he does not, for instance, share the gloomy outlook on food production that Thiel makes.
This rather gloomy “are the easy economic gains gone for good?” theme was also made recently in the Tyler Cowen book, called The Great Stagnation. Here is a somewhat critical review by Brink Lindsey.
Dale Halling, an entrepreneur and scourge of things such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and anti-patent campaigners, has his own take on why the pace of innovation in the US may have slowed.
I can see why a certain gloom might set in. Many of the innovations we see today, especially in things such as consumer electronics and mobile phones, don’t have the majestic appeal of a space rocket, tall building or breakthrough in medicine. But these things are continuing: materials science, for example, which is an area that is not very “sexy” (to use one of my least favourite epithets) is full of innovation. And there are the developments in biotech and nanotechnology, to take other cases. And let’s not forget that even in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, some people claimed that all that could be invented had been.
And here is another example of the sort of concern that gets aired about where all the big inventions have gone, taken from The Money Illusion blog:
“My grandmother died at age 79 on the very week they landed on the moon. I believe that when she was young she lived in a small town or farm in Wisconsin. There was probably no indoor plumbing, car, home appliances, TV, radio, electric lights, telephone, etc. Her life saw more change than any other generation in world history, before or since. I’m already almost 55, and by comparison have seen only trivial changes during my life. That’s not to say I haven’t seen significant changes, but relative to my grandma, my life has been fairly static. Even when I was a small boy we had a car, indoor plumbing, appliances, telephone, TV, modern medicine, and occasional trips in airplanes.”
The worry is, of course, that in a world of low innovation and weak genuine economic growth, political fighting over the economic pie becomes nastier, and certain groups find life becomes very uncomfortable. Not a happy thought.
Poppycock. As someone who is at the coalface of technology and innovation, change is not slowing, it is accelerating. One big area is bio and medicine. If extending healthy lifespans at the pace we are doing is not an innovation I don’t know what is. Nanotechnology is exploding and the results of that are going to be pure SciFi. Commercial Space will utterly ‘dust’ the old Space Kommisars programs within this decade. Computers and software are following the expected curve of becoming ubiquitous and invisible. The world of 10 years from now will be ‘alive’. Human made objects will all be networked and carry their own memory. There will be emergent properties of these changes too, ones which are utterly beyond our ability to predict.
No, we are not slowing down. We are in fact into the ‘frame dragging’ period as we approach the singularity.
I really don’t know where we find these people. Like the guy in 1984 who told me that microcircuits were about to hit the wall and the electronic revolution was coming to an end.
Idiots.
The political scum are the problem.
For example–the componants needed for a true flying car are gradually being developed/lined up. Does anybody think we will have one in our garages?.
The ruling class don’t want ordinary people to have the cars we have now, let alone something that could bypass their barriers and the groin-grabbing oppression that goes with the transport we already have.
Innovation is not slowing–but innovations are not going to bne allowed become mainstream if they undermine the status quo. “A Place to Stand” blog has an essay in which they show their belief that, without the antics of the state, our electricity bills could be 7% of what they are now for unlimited electric power. Does anyone thing that will be allowed?.
I wonder if this is the guy that Musk took over from … before he turned PayPal into a big thing and the used that money to go out and innovate big time in SpaceX and Tesla?
“My grandmother died at age 79 on the very week they landed on the moon …”
So his grandmother witnessed both Kitty Hawk and the moon-landing. That was certainly a unique advance in technology.
But I’m confused when he says he has witnessed nothing like this in his own 55 years. In my 55 years, I’ve wtinessed Mainframes to laptops, GPS, Kindle, and maybe even thought controlled cars.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/28/nissan-car-reads-drivers-mind
And I’ll probably live to see all the stuff that Dale Amon posts on.
Theil is not a technologist or scientist; he is a venture capitalist, a businessman. I’m not inclined to put too much stock in his assessment of where technology is going (even if he does have a front-row seat to some of it). And frankly, it seems to me that anyone who can ask “whether ‘supply-side economics’ really [is] just a sort of code word for ‘Keynesianism'” actually understands either.
Still, his larger point is that our rate of economic growth has slowed considerably, and it’s not going to generate the surplusses necessary to pay for our current profligacy. That much seems indisputable. He posits that the reason for such slowdown might be a reduced pace of technological innovation, and he may be correct with respect to the sorts of technological innovation which leads to rapid material gains. Biotech may lead to longer lifespans but that won’t provide the sorts of economic growth as, say, microcomputers and cell phones.
Theil’s heart seems to be in the right place, even if he may not be completely correct about the absolute pace of technological change. The rate of economic growth has markedly slowed over the last decade, and shows absolutely no signs of increasing. Economic growth is largely fueled by productivity gains, which in turn are a function of technological improvement. We’re not seeing such gains (and really haven’t for several decades), so his causal inference can’t be simply dismissed by anecdotal evidence of advances in certain narrow fields.
And it’s hard to dispute his assertion that “we are seeing a quiet shift from the optimism of Jack Kemp to the pessimism of Ron Paul, from supply-side economics to the Tea Party, and from the idea that we can combine tax cuts with more spending to the idea that money is either hard or fake.” Theil specifically rejects the idea of massive governmental initiatives like the Manhattan Project, and understands that traditional Keynsian economics (always a fraud) is not the answer. In fact, he has no answer; it’s a profoundly pessimistic article (which seems to fit perfectly the mood of the country, as well as that here on Samizdata). The best he can conclude with is “The first and the hardest step is to see that we now find ourselves in a desert, and not in an enchanted forest.” To me, that sentence reads like someone trying to put on a happy face because it’s expected of him, although he doesn’t truly believe it. And I don’t think he’s wrong.
Dale, you say:
.. and you are correct up to a point. However there are a few itty bitty things that have dramatically slowed the west’s ability to innovate.
Most obviously over the last 30+ years where progressive education has devastated skilled manual labour resources, by teaching people how not to learn, and converted vast quantities of otherwise educated people into credentialed imbecility.
Then the credentialed imbeciles get drafted into the ever increasing bureaucracy where they further stifle innovation everywhichway possible.
Add to that – the last 20 odd years the world’s politicos and their “scientist” fellow travelers have spent the majority of their innovative skills in finding innumerable ways to screw every last penny out of every poor soul they can exert power over, especially via the global fraud of AGW.
To complete the mix top those little innovation crushers off with a liberal dosage of lawyers and laws, et voila, there you have it: not innovation – rather something more along the lines of “pseudovation” or perhaps “idleovation” ?
For one small moment… sit back, relax and just imagine what humanity might have achieved without all that crap!
/shrug!
Not sure how Thiel combines this with his transhumanist enthusiasm, which rather depends on the singularity happening.
Anyway, I think the key thing here is perspective. The quote from the Money Illusion blog is from somebody comparing his own experience to that of his grandma. I bet his grandkids may end up saying something similar about him. Especially if Dale’s vision comes true 🙂
Surely the reason that ‘political fighting over the economic pie becomes nastier’ (last paragraph) is that when the state takes a larger share of the pie, the importance of being in power (from the point of view of competing political parties), and therefore choosing how to distribute the state’s take increases. Which leads to increasingly nasty partisanship. Or is the theory that of increasingly nasty partisanship just a myth? I genuinely don’t know.
Wot Dale said.
We have cars. They are getting better, but they will always be cars.
We mow have broadcast mass communication, however it improves, whatever happens, it will remain broadcast mass communications.
We don’t have consumer claytronics, but we will, and possibly, although not guaranteed, before the decade is out.
Smart self configurable fibres – A jacket which reconfigures itself from thin to fluffy as weather conditions change. We don’t have that either. Want to bet we don’t have it Real Soon Now?
Mass needs were the first to have been met, doesn’t mean others won’t be met too. We are now on the verge of learning how to repair the human body, instead of just hacking it about. That won’t be as visible as a television or an airbus, but it will still be pretty cool and just as spectacular in its own way.
He is right.
In past everyone could invent something. It was easy and was right at hand.
Now to change something at same level we need to go to biology, genetics, bionics and robotisation.
So there is the need for very specific education that very few people are capable of.
For example look at Music, Painting, Cinema . They are areas were almost everything is invented.
So they need to go to 3D video.
And we enter into diminishing returns.
It is also my contention that we are seeing the same in ideas. Look at University they are into political correct mode and i think all idiotic and crap things that came from University today is due to the fact that 90% of sensible ideas have been already created. So to justify their existence they have to invent something idiotic. It is akin to pop art vs impressionism.
Same for politics. All typical political functions are all fulfilled so for the Statism to grow the state had to make problems and then try to fix them and invent things like “social justice” and like.
We are into Overcreative mode. A Baroque period.
I believe the confusion here is ubiquity vs pace. Many of the inventions of Grandma’s era were invented and lost and reinvented over the last few thousand years. It is only the last 200 that communications and record keeping have become robust enough to spread technologies and innovations far and wide.
Much of the industrial revolution was spent plugging together old ideas from different sources to create new innovations. Read the histories of steam, electricity, tv to realise how much was group evolutionary effort rather than a single revolutionary idea.
As a science fiction reader, I have noted that the technological advances of the last 75 years have not matched the expectations of futurists (such as SF writers).
The previous 75 years (1860-1935) saw a complete restructuring of the ordinary human condition. Human and animal power was replaced by machine power, electricity was mastered, infectious disease largely conquered. Societies which had consisted primarily of farm dwellers became urban.
And most of the world we live in today was built then. 95% of the rail mileage of the world today was built pre-1935. Our cities are full of buildings and houses built then. Newer structures are built to fit into the old pattern. Our motor vehicles are moved by engines using the same basci technology as then, on streets and roads mostly laid out then. Our soldiers in battle carry weapons using the same technologies as then (and some even carry weapons designed then – many U.S. soldiers prefer the M1911 .45 pistol to its 9mm successor). Air transport has gotten relatively cheaper, but speed hasn’t changed in 50 years.
Has innovation slowed down? In some key ways, yes – because we found the easiest and most powerful innovations first: the low-hanging fruit.
Derek Lowe at In The Pipeline blogs on drug development, which is lagging more each passing year. It’s not for want of effort – Big Pharma spends immense sums on research, as do biotech startups and academic and government researchers. But the problems to be solved are getting harder. The complexities of biological systems are mind-boggling – intractably hard to understand.
Sure, there have been recent successes: but nearly all incremental gains, not great leaps like vaccination or antibiotics.
The big changes have come in new areas: nuclear physics. electronics.
But even there, stagnation has set in. The atomic bomb and fission reactor were invented 60 years ago, and nothing really new has come in since. The basics of atomic structure have been known about as long. A great deal of theoretical bashing has gone on, but no recent discovery in nuclear physics has been useful, as far as I can tell.
Electronics has made more progress, and continues to gain. But again, the low-hanging fruit have been plucked. Numeric and textual record-keeping have been automated with great benefits, but areas such as computer vision and natural language translation remain intractable.
One odd fact is that science fiction, even today, often takes as premises changes which were anticipated 70 years ago, and which have not only failed to materialize, but are becoming wholly implausible.
The future isn’t what it was, and we should accept that it never will be.
I think he’s probably wrong right now, but may well be right in the medium-term. The reason is that nearly all demographic profiles point to global population peaking around the middle of the century. If so, then the prospects for economic growth, and associated technological change and advancement begin to dim. It’s the flip side of intelligent anti-Malthusianism.
It’s possible that this is already at work in parts of Europe (how many innovations have come out of Italy recently?), and possible – though less likely – that at the margin it is slowing things down in the US.
And since the Western economies continue to define the technological frontier (by definition, if China et al are catching up using exogenous growth models), then if their tech innovation slows, it does so for the whole world.
Over-regulation and the Big State/Big Business stranglehold is enough to explain the slowdown, imho.
A large number of the innovations of even the 19th century wouldn’t be allowed if they were invented now.
Piping inflammable gas into peoples’ houses for them to cook and heat with? You what? Elf n’Safety will never allow it!
Motorised vehicles that the general public can drive themselves? You’re having a laugh!
And so on.
What Andrew said. Plus, as noted above, the problems that need solving are becoming increasingly complex, thus requiring more advanced scientific and tech education – which is on the decline. Finally, technological progress and relative prosperity are mutually dependent and feed off each other. There will never be a lack of brilliant ideas, but the big question for the foreseeable future is: will there be capital to help these ideas materialize. I do share Dale’s optimism, but only for a very long term.
Contrary to Dale and co…..
Just look at what the science fiction writers (and I mean the best selling ones) predicted would be happing by now (maned colonies on Mars and so on, nuclear power, fission and fusion, generating most electcricity down here……) compared to the world as it actually is.
Compared to what not just science fiction writers but mainstream scientists thought the world would be like by now (when they made their predictions back in the late 1940s) the progress that has been made is pathetic.
I will not even go deeply into the cultural and industrial collapse – that story is too well known to be worth retelling in detail. Many cities are not wonders of high tech production – they are now waste lands, where the only jobs are government jobs, service jobs (low skill ones), or financial credit bubble related jobs.
Now we have gone beyond the people who think that denial is just a river in Egypt, a more important question.
Why are things such a mess?
Is it some sort of collapse of the human spirit?
I say “no”.
I believe that if government (Federal, State and local) had stayed the same size it was in, say, 1948 the predictions for the development of Western civilization (led by the United States – but not just the United States) would have been perfectly reasonable hopes – quite likely to be achieved.
We would not be going around in cars powered by black sliime, and we would not be dependent on power stations fired by coal.
And YES there would be manned bases on the Moon and Mars by now.
Also the CULTURE would have gone on improving.
The average person in 1948 knew vastly more about (for example) basic science and technology than someone in 1848. Newspapers and magazines reflected this high level of avarage knowledge (not just of a few specialists – but of the general population).
The average person now? After many years of compulsory schooling?
They know next to nothing.
And not just about science and technology. The average person knows little about history or many other subjects – indeed can barely read or write (functional illiteracy is almost the norm – I know, I personally am a victim of modern “education”).
None of this was “inevitable” – any more than most people getting fat and dressing badly was “inevtable”.
The cultural decline did not have to happen – it was made to happen.
The West is not dying a natural death – Western Civilization is being murdered.
The degeneracy (not too strong a word) that came out into the open (on a mass scale) in the 1960s did not come from nowhere – it was a development that had been growing for a very long time (in everything from the idea that government is there to provide all “basic needs” to the idea that there is no such thing as “objective truth” and that feelings are more important than physical reality).
Such ideas were already present in 1948 – indeed way back in the 19th century.
What has changed is that such ideas have become DOMINANT.
Not only is government (even in peacetime) now vast and bloated (and largely free from any real control – especially since Jack Kennedy helped brought the unions, and union rules, into government), but cultural institutions are now mostly actively hostile to the principles that built the West.
The mass media are openly hostile. I doubt anyone would claim that Hollywood or the television networks have anything but hostiility and contempt for business (ironic considering they are business enterprises themsleves). The businessman or even the nonbusiness pro smaller government person is always the bad guy in the television shows (and in pop music and in ……) with very few exceptions.
The schools and the universities are the same, indeed they are the reason the media, including the entertainment media, are as they are.
But they do not “just” have contempt for business – they also have contempt for real science and technolgy.
People who tend to concentrate their conversation with engineers (as Dale most likely does) miss this.
The people who actually control the schools (in which the young children are educated) and the universities, are not engineers (of even theoretical scientists).
They are from the humanities and social sciences – both the main teachers, and the administrators.
And they hate everything you stand for Dale.
They hate even the idea of objective truth – whilst (paradoxically) being totally dogmatic about their own political and social opinions.
“But I know many young people and they…..”
And they are TOTALLY ATYPICAL – not representative of the majority at all.
Back when (for example) James McCosh was President of Princeton sience and technolgy was repected by people on the humanities side. And so was business enterprise – it was seen as an important way to live an honourable life.
But that was long ago (McCosh died in 1894 – and guess who replaced him at Princeton when he retired a few years before), it takes a long time for the corruption of the cultural elite to corrupt mass society.
In 1948 a “handful of pinko pointy heads” at a few universities still had not shaped society in their image.
But, from the 1960s onwards, they started to.
Sure (certainly) the world is still not the Hell-on-Earth they crave (the mixture of Marxism and Greenism – and whatever), but they have done vast damage.
And pretending that everything is, basically, O.K. and still progressing nicely….. – well this is the path of destruction.
Only by openly admitting the damage they have done (and continue to do) and DRIVING THEM OUT of their positions of power (by such things as taking taxpayer money away from education – including supposedly “private” universities, and by ending the regulations that give a de facto monopoly of fictional shows to a handful of television and Hollywood executives) is there any real hope.
Not hope for a soft landing (it is too late for that – the present system is going to go de facto bankrupt, no way round that now).
But hope of building something worthwhile from the rubble (the post bankruptcy rubble).
Rather than collapsing into a new Dark Age.
The fact of the matter is that we do not know what is required in order to unearth hitherto undiscovered technologies.
Simply looking at the pace of change within established areas of science and engineering will not do, except perhaps in the short term.
Part of the idea of the singularity is that something happens – the advent of AI – which allows us to build computers of ever increasing intelligence to solve our problems for us. While I do not have a technological background it does not seem to me like super computers with behaviour like AI are that far off.
That said, It is impossible to predict (as opposed to guess) radical technological change (as opposed to refinement of existing technologies).
I’m a pace of change agnostic.
“But these things are continuing: materials science, for example, which is an area that is not very “sexy””
haha thanks alot! without us there would be no latex suspenders!!
No user serviceable parts inside
With “special” security fasteners to “enforce” that claim.
Gee, I most be reading different sociological SF folk, that absolutely predicted polit-bureau folk “legislating” their exclusive (mis)use of “new and improved”.
Not to mention (SOMEONE has to) Atlas Shrugged.
“Get out of my way…”
Does anyone remember that famous final scene of
“Raiders of the Lost Ark?
While there WAS that silly “Everything useful has already been invented” approach to the utility of the patent office a few moons ago, I believe that self-assesed “intellectuals” (including aspiring politicos) poaching and penning technology patents with technically, on-paper, “other peoples” beads of wampum, rather than oh…say…their own beads of sweat, leads to idle expectations of “someone else will do it”, rather than exploring the potential, and unrealized application of existing stuff.
Wasn’t the very first Diesel engine run on renewable”bio-fuel”? (peanut oil) I seem to remember that carborundum was that icky stuff that had to be “dealt with” to get at the good stuff. I seem to remember that Howard Hughes got stupid-rich by selling “previously determined inferior” materials for (freakin’ expensive) oil well drill bit bearings.
Wow! My kids can use that double secret military enemy airplane detector system to make (innovative packaging) popcorn? Can I use that (now mandatory) foreign made GPS locator hardware in ALL cell phones to re-discover where I misplaced those “gun-runner” firearms, the history of their proximity to
“official” (cell phone lugging) gub’mint agents, or my OWN usually “off” cell phone, THIS time?
I’d like this…
“…the low-hanging fruit have been plucked.”
… and this…
“The cultural decline did not have to happen – it was made to happen.”
… in my take-away, please.
The West is working on harder problems whilst becoming more stupid.
One big invention still to come, IF it’s not a hoax: Rossi’s ‘cold fusion’ e-catalyser (AKA “e-cat”), due to be demonstrated tomorrow , October 6th, in Italy. It has the potential not only to free up money now needed to pay for energy, but also to make practical a host of gadgets (like flying cars!) that are too energy hungry to be practical today. This is an invention on the ‘fire’ and ‘wheel’ level.
Thiel’s thesis has merit. But this is now a globalized world of invention and innovation, and good things are being hatched worldwide, not only in the USA. Several amazing technologies are being developed by a tiny company in Gibraltar, for example, including chips that convert heat directly into electricity (see http://www.borealis.gi). The potential benefits of cold fusion, noted in the post above, are huge; cold fusion (or Low-Energy Nuclear Reactor, the newer term) may produce heat efficiently; Borealis’s Power Chips will convert such heat, also with very high efficiency, directly into electricity, making low-cost, portable power available anywhere (such as cars). Many more such advances are in the works; they have been hidden by the world’s decade-long obsession with dot-coms and inane websites and its consequent neglect of substantive and economically transformative innovations that are underway in many other fields.
I tend to be empirical and I don’t know whether the arguments of Thiel and Cowen are accurate or not, and I don’t know how we tell until we greatly reduce all the tax and regulatory impediments to innovation that we (I write from the US but don’t see it any different in Europe) have larded on over the last 40 years or so. Do that and then let’s assess whether we have a structural problem based on what actually happens.
Until then, I see no reason to give up hope.
I wonder if demographics has something to do with this stagnation. Increasing life expectancy combined with a declining birth rate leads to a society dominated by old people and their aversion to risk. Young men make high-risk bets because they have more energy to realize a big payoff (e.g. a billion-dollar IPO), and more time to enjoy their winnings afterwards. Old men care more about protecting their assets, or at least minimizing losses. So they write laws like Sarbanes-Oxley, which killed the IPO.
That’s why Japan in the 2000s is not like Japan in the 1970s. Today’s young Japanese men (aka “grass-eaters”) are lazy and hedonistic because, as a powerless minority, they know that any wealth they do create will be taxed away to pay pensions to their elders.
Women are naturally more risk-averse than men, so a transfer of power from men to women also makes a society more likely to stagnate.
There is no remedy for this malaise that any democratic polity would accept. Thus I expect a period of further stagnation, followed by a sudden and total collapse. A new civilization might appear in a few years, or it might take centuries, like after the Fall of Rome.
I think it’s simply a question of the simple things have been done and anything beyond that either A) is insanely expensive B) regulated to death C) simply haven’t been thought of or D) some combination of the above.
I also wonder how many of the people bemoaning this “technological stagnation” and criticising the inventors are actually involved in the invention and development process or are just loud members of the peanut gallery who are bitter about not having flying cars and moon bases. I know I’m bitter about it.
We used to dream of going to the stars, and now we worry about lightbulbs.
We gave ourselves the means to access all knowledge, but prefer to use it for gossip and announcing our moods.
We shrank the world to bring people together, but the lunatics when they saw what was possible merely screamed that they had to destroy our part of it.
We thought we would debate change, but our academics bickered instead over how much we should stay with a failed communist doctrine.
On balance, there is progress, but not as we imagined it would be.
The big problem now is we have 2 huge sectors in our economy that have seen almost no productivity gains for years, education and government. Until those 2 sectors find a way to deliver equivalent or better service for less money, like most other economic sectors do, we are headed for trouble, because they will continue to drag down productivity for the rest of the economy. By cooincidence those sectors are also monopolies with little to no competition, are dominated by leftists who hate the free market, and constantly demand a greater and greater share of our GDP while producing ever more dismal results.
Johnathan,
I often like what you write, but think you’re quite wrong about the innovation thing. I heard yesterday somebody got monkeys to operate artificial limbs using only nerve signals from their brains. Why monkeys and not people I’ve no idea, but robochimp here we come.
And have you read a book or watched a film from the mid nineties lately? It’s like the middle ages for god’s sake… hardly any internet, mobile phones the size of bricks etc. The faster than light thing at CERN might well be something big. It’s true that whatever develops will probably be manufactured in Asia, but that’s another matter.
Another huge one: Case Western Reserve is making progress on use of a persons who stem cells to regenerate myelin. This could eventually lead to a cure for MS and other similar diseases, and even has an anti-aging usage in that it would restore slowed cognition and memory loss in the elderly. That is really big for life extension.
If you do not believe that huge advances are coming, go sift through this:
http://www.foresight.org/publications/weekly.html
I agree with the pessimism in the article. Viewing scientists as a whole, many collectivist and corporatist in mindset, often simply chasing the next research grant. They are in a professional system that is conservative in view and crushes dissenting voices that threaten the status quo. And you wonder about the causes of lack of progress?
One weird thing is how little even weapons technolgy (in which so much “government money” has been thrown) has advanced.
What was the main enemy weapon 60 years ago?
The AK47 rifle (itself mostly a copy and development of German developments from during and before World War II).
What is the main enemy weapon now?
The AK47 rifle.
And what other period since the industrial revolution has the same basic infantry weapon been in service for over 60 years?
And on our side….
If anything the FN FAL (the main weapon of Western forces back in the 1950s) is a more deadly weapon than the M16s and so on used now.
It is a more robust rifle and its bullets cause more damage ……
It is not just a matter of us not going about in flying cars, and going in nuclear powered space ships to the Moon and Mars…
It is a matter of even the area where the governments of the world have concentrated (with all the resources they have taken by force) there has been little real progress.