The rate of technological progress has slowed, broadly speaking since the 1960’s. The most commonly cited example is the speed of flight. The astronauts of Apollo 10 traveled at 25,000 in 1969, the same year the first and only successful supersonic commercial airliner flew. Now we have neither.
Worse there are indications that the basic machinery of science has decayed. In recent years scientists have become aware that a too-large fraction of research studies fail when others attempt to replicate them (see this in the Economist). Confirming the rot are the increasing number of retractions, including some of high-profile papers (see this in the NYT).
These might be symptoms of deeper structural problems in the vast science research apparatus that’s grown in the US since WW2. The best analysis I’ve seen in this from the always-interesting The Baffler. Here is an excerpt; it should be read in full (I recommend subscribing).
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“Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit“
By David Graeber
Prof Anthropology, London School of Economics (Wikipedia bio)
The Baffler, issue #19 (2012)
“The journal that blunts the cutting edge”
Excerpt
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What has changed is the bureaucratic culture. The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led everyone to adopt the language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. Although this might have helped in creating marketable products, since that is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do, in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic.
My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide.
The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.
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As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure.
There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet.
If all this is true in the social sciences, where research is still carried out with minimal overhead largely by individuals, one can imagine how much worse it is for astrophysicists. And, indeed, one astrophysicist, Jonathan Katz {Prof Physics, Washington U at St. Louis}, has recently warned students pondering a career in the sciences. Even if you do emerge from the usual decade-long period languishing as someone else’s flunky, he says, you can expect your best ideas to be stymied at every point:
You will spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors, you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. . . . It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal, because they have not yet been proved to work. {From “Don’t become a scientist“, 13 May 1999}
That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.
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Clashing visions of the future
“Still No Flying Cars? Debating Technology’s Future“, New York Times, 21 September 2014 — “Peter Thiel and David Graeber Debate Technology’s Future”
About The Baffler (from their About page)
The Baffler, est. 1988, is a printed and digital magazine of art and criticism appearing three times annually — spring, summer, and fall. They’re headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts; distributed by MIT Press.
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For More Information
(a) For an alternative scenario see The 3rd Industrial Revolution has begun.
(b) About the slowdown in progress:
- Let us light a candle while we walk, lest we fear what lies ahead, 10 February 2008 — Compare the changes seen by Bat Masterson (1853-1921) with those in our lifetimes.
- Good news: The Singularity is coming (again), 8 December 2007
- The Singularity is in our past, 29 March 2009
- Has America grown old, and can no longer grow? Or are wonders like the singularity in our future?, 28 August 2012
- Why America’s growth is slowing, and a solution, 28 January 2013 — Transport June Cleaver from her 1957 home to today’s equivalent; she’d be astonished at our lack of progress. Look at how we’ve underperformed futurist Herman Kahn’s 1967 expectations for the year 2000.
- Ben Bernanke sees the great slowdown in technological progress, 20 May 2013
- Larry Summers gives us the bad news. Worse, the only solution is more of the same., 20 November 2013
- Looking at America’s future: economic stagnation, or will computers take our jobs?, 7 January 2014
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