Have we reached a technological plateau?

Submitted by CleaverIam t3_xzh807 in singularity

We have reached a technological plateau or at least a very shallow rise and there is no clear way out of it. I am sure I am not the first to make this statement. If you disagree with this statement then I welcome anyone to try and change my mind. There has been no significant technological breakthroughs in the last decade. Perhaps the cost smartphones and DNA sequencing went down significantly, and maybe there have been some painfully slow advancements in bionics but that is pretty much it.

-AI is as useless to the end user as it has been a decade ago. I still can't ask my computer to do anything in free form unless it has been specifically programmed to do it: "find the fastest public transport route from place A to place B, but disregard all busses unless they cut down the transit time by more then 20 minutes".

-No self driving cars. No matter how much various vaperware salesmen try to convince us otherwise.

-Commercial nuclear fusion is still "several decades away" as it has been for the last several decades.

-Space travel (do I even need to explain this one?)

-Android robots are a joke.

-We aren't even close to self-replicators

If I am missing any useful technology that has been developed since 2010 then please point it out to me. I have seen similar posts from a decade ago and nothing seems to have changed. I bet that is 10 even 20 years non of these "promises" would be fulfilled unless we would experience an unexpected quantum leap in science.

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TopicRepulsive7936 t1_irognus wrote

Oh jebus are we going to see these posts again. People who don't care about tech at all coming here knowing everything.

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CleaverIam OP t1_irskhfk wrote

I am an electrochemical engineer so I know something about tech. If you are so knowledgable, please, enlighten me. This is exactly why I came here.

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Wassux t1_iroeo47 wrote

How can you be so pessimisticly blind? AI is useless to the end user? What about midjourney? Or alphafold already solving diseases?

There's self driving cars are here, wayme is deploying them as self driving Taxis as we speak, regulations just need to catch up.

Nuclear fusion is here already. Spark will be done in 2025. Generation might take a little longer because people need to be trained to build them.

Spacex has finally mastered saving the burner stages and a moonbase is planned before the end of the decade. And as a normal person for the first time you can buy a ticket to space.

Android robots are amazing, have you seen boston dynamics? Or what musk did in 8 months? All they're missing is AI, which will be ready before the end of the decade.

You gotta be kidding.

Also quantum leap? So a leap so small you can't even see it with your microscope?

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CleaverIam OP t1_irsllx0 wrote

>Nuclear fusion is here already. Spark will be done in 2025

So, is it here or will be done in 2025? And what do you mean by "done"? First plasma? That is not a practical application. It would be decades before it becomes commercially available. I doubt we would have a single real thermonuclear power plant operating in 2040.

>There's self driving cars are here

Self-driving car means you can sleep in the back seat while the car takes you to your destination. If it requires any driver's input during the ride it isn't a self driving car.

I don't take Elon Musk seriously do I am not commenting it.

>Android robots are amazing, have you seen boston dynamics?

Not outside youtube videos of them doing stunts I haven't. I haven't seen an android doing anything useful. I have never seen one used for anything other than as a gimick. Tell me this: where are they currently used commercially?

>Also quantum leap? So a leap so small you can't even see it with your microscope?

Yeah, very funny.

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Wassux t1_irv77ba wrote

By done I mean 10x the energy out than in. So ready to be deployed. And yes it will still take time to become commercial, but the tech has been invented, the rest is logistics.

Yes waymo has 0 human input, no driver whatsoever. Google it.

If you don't take Elon serious you're shooting yourself in the foot.

Haven't seen an android do anything useful? Nearly every car in the world is produced by robots. Tesla's are completely made by robots. How is that not useful?

To me it seems like you just want to be pessimistic.

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CleaverIam OP t1_irw1s8e wrote

Production lines are great but they have been here for years. And they are not androids. Android is by definition a human-like robot. I am not pessimistic. I am simply not seeing the rate of progress we had in the 20th century. I think that all the low hanging fruits are plucked and now we will experience a much slower rate of change. Elon Musk is a vaperware salesman. Most of his ideas are idiotic. The hyperloop, passenger ICBM, the tunnel, the dancing android costume. "Yes waymo has 0 human input, no driver whatsoever. Google it." Interesting. Does it drive along normal highways together with ordinary traffic? If so then this is big.

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Wassux t1_irw27zo wrote

So just because they don't look like humans they don't count? How narcissistic of you. Robots will never look humans because it would be stupid design.

You're just hellbent on being pessimistic.

Again google it, I'm done talking to you because you won't listen anyway.

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CleaverIam OP t1_irw2od9 wrote

They don't count because we had them long ago and they are not general purpose. If I am wrong about that then please tell me.

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TFenrir t1_is5nno3 wrote

So literally self-driving cars that you describe exist - level 4 autonomous vehicles that you can pay for, get in the back seat, with no driver and get taken places.

To the rest of your points, it's fundamentally illogical. A plateau implies an inability to continue to climb, but we can list hundreds of advancements that have happened. That you dismiss them does not mean that we have plateau'd.

Like, watching the advancements of Boston Dynamics robots shows a clear improvement. Watching, but the fact that you are even looking at humanoid robots to be out of the lab, ignores all the other actual practical advancements we've made in automation in warehouses and factories with robotics.

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CleaverIam OP t1_isa2ahc wrote

By plateau I don't mean an inability to make advancements. I mean advancements at a much lower rate them we got used to

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TFenrir t1_isab99m wrote

When did we get used to a faster pace? We have bio science literally creating new mechanisms that we are using now to cure genetic disease, and to create mrna treatments. That would have been science fiction a decade ago.

Boring material science improvements have allowed for rechargable batteries that are now not only in all our phones, and electric cars, but in a quickly growing industry of electric bikes or even vehicles that just didn't exist a decade ago. I see them every day.

We just created a replacement to the Hubble telescope, have internet slowly being made available via satellite everywhere, and knocked a meteor off track by shooting a rocket at it.

Our internet speeds and advancements in software and hardware allow for things like music and video streaming everywhere, where a decade ago we consumed all our content via disks or downloads. We have AR/VR rapidly making it into normal every day use society. We have smart homes where I literally shout to the ether to control my home or ask where my phone is.

I haven't even touched AI advancements since 2012. Or 2017. Both large milestones. We're now creating AI that I use every day at work, that people are making brand new kinds of applications with, that are generating text, code, and images - and we are on the cusp of AI that can control apps on your computer just by talking to it - don't believe me? Look into Adept and their action transformer.

I actually could go on and on. Almost every single company today has to be a tech company first. Why do you think that is, if tech advancements are slowing down?

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Adventurous-Fall-585 t1_irq99zx wrote

self-driving cars only make sense in first world conditions , they still cant drive in third world conditions and conditions like heavy snowfall. fusion aint here yet. buying a ticket to space doesnt mean anything.

tech has plateaud OP, but it will speed up like a rocket beginning next year.

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Wassux t1_irqwaet wrote

Computers only make sense in companies, they're way to big to have at home.

Ofcourse a new technology isn't instantly perfect, it takes time. Over the next 5 to 10 years it will be able to drive anywhere.

Tech has not plateaud, unless you don't understand how tech works.

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CleaverIam OP t1_irslwg9 wrote

"Tech has not plateaud, unless you don't understand how tech works."

No-one needed to understand how tech worked to see that it hadn't plateaued in the 20th century. We went from a metal ball in space to men on the moon in just over a decade. Now we need esoteric knowledge to see how it works.

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IronJackk t1_irojei1 wrote

Hang on let me grab some popcorn for this one. Anyone want some?

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AsthmaBeyondBorders t1_iromrj9 wrote

Google translate is AI. Text-to-speech and vice versa just got a lot better with AI. Text-to-image and text-to-3d object are here. Face and voice recognition only got 99.9% accurate because of AI. AI to music and AI to video is the incoming tech that will probably be at useful levels early next year. AlphaFold solved protein folding (many many people spent 4 years getting a PhD where their dissertations was solving one single protein folding which AlphaFold can now do in minutes). Just this week AI was one the front cover of Nature for improving 10 to 20% processing speed of matrix multiplications (aka the building blocks of computer graphics, physics simulations and AI itself) which wasn't improved on for 50 years.

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CleaverIam OP t1_irsmcuz wrote

Fine, AI is improving. I will grant you that. Nothing revolutionary in the last decade though

>Just this week AI was one the front cover of Nature for improving 10 to 20% processing speed of matrix multiplications (aka the building blocks of computer graphics, physics simulations and AI itself) which wasn't improved on for 50 years.

How would it effect the end user though? It might be a scientific breakthrough for all I know but there is nothing in it for me.

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AsthmaBeyondBorders t1_irsnllg wrote

Just from the top of my mind videogames can add 10 to 20% more matrix multiplications without losing performance which may mean more objects per scene, more realistic physics simulations, more vertex and pixel shader calculations (more realistic lighting and textures).

If you call AlphaFold not revolutionary you don't understand what it means for a software to be able to do what would take an entire PhD dissertation in just some minutes. Protein folding is one of the most important bottlenecks in drug development for any disease

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CleaverIam OP t1_irsonbd wrote

A minor improvement on an existing technology but nothing revolutionary yet. Slightly better graphics aren't going to change my life in the slightest.

>If you call AlphaFold not revolutionary you don't understand what it means

I have not heard of this one. This one might actually be useful. But as an end user, I need the drugs, not the tools that make them. If it actually helps create new drugs then those drugs would be a big thing.

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AsthmaBeyondBorders t1_irspp4r wrote

Do you want people to be your personal guides? Pay me 20 an hour and I will google stuff for your lazy ass

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beachmike t1_irq1xvp wrote

We are not even close to reaching a tech plateau, and never will unless we somehow destroy ourselves. Tech advancements are often unpredictable and come out of left field, or they are hiding in plain sight until mass adoption makes them hard not to see. Overall, technological advancement is relentless and accelerating. As the sci-fi author William Gibson has stated, "The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed."

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CleaverIam OP t1_irsm12d wrote

So what major technology has come to common use in the last decade?

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beachmike t1_irv101p wrote

LED lighting

Smartphones

4K TV

Narrow AIs with pattern recognition ability superior to human, e.g., facial recognition

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CleaverIam OP t1_irv2w3g wrote

4k TV is not much more practical then normal tv. A slight improvement that changes nothing in practice. We had smartphone in 2009. I said they got significantly cheaper which IS a major improvement, but that has already happened by 2016. Smartphones haven't changed in a meaningful way since.

I am not familiar enough with AI. That does sound like a major improvement, I will give you that

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beachmike t1_isx4t8p wrote

Now you're making little value judgments as to which advancement YOU deem worthy. Nevertheless, they are technological advancements that have become widespread over the last decade. It doesn't matter if they didn't happen EXACTLY within the last decade. Bottom line, we are no where near a tech "plateau." Advancements are unpredictable, and often happen in fits and starts.

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CleaverIam OP t1_it2vhre wrote

I agree with your last sentence. But from my perspective, we are at an end of a fit with mo start on sight...

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Grouchy_Band_3869 t1_iroxd91 wrote

yea, we're definitely in a plateau.. lol

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CleaverIam OP t1_irsmduh wrote

Prove me wrong

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Grouchy_Band_3869 t1_irsodx1 wrote

how about

Protein folding problem solved

Self attention

Stable diffusion

Recent advances toward proto agi like language models being self improving

AlphaTensor

should I go on?

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CleaverIam OP t1_irsoycf wrote

So, where do I buy any of the things that didn't exist without these technologies?

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Ortus12 t1_irphcc4 wrote

Ai came up the vaccine that saved millions of lives. That's a big impact to the end consumer. It also helped convince governments to open back up, and restart the economy which benefited all of us.

The content that gets recommended to you online is recommended by an Ai. Also a benefit to the end consumer.

Ai is almost certainly used by artists in the concept art and brainstorming stage of creation now, which means better looking TV shows, video games, and movies produced at a lower cost (more of them), which is a benefit to the end consumer.

Ai that's continually getting better is used for your netflix recommendations. And not only that it's used to determine which cover photo netflix displays for each movie you see. Again, for the end consumer.

Ai is used in spam and virus detection. All of the spam and viruses you don't get, you have Ai to thank much of the time.

Ai is used by the police to know where to patrol and when. Didn't get stabbed to death last night? Thanks to ever advancing Ai.

Ai is heavily used in Amazon, so all the cheap products you buy from there is thanks to Ai. The costs would be higher without Ai, and ever advancing robots in amazon facilities.

Walmart uses cameras and Ai to increase shelf stocking efficiency. By 90% in recent years in the meat isle. Your local grocery isn't out of whatever it is you were trying to buy, there's a chance you have Ai to thank for that.

Ai is embedded into every sector of the economy from business to supply chain optimization. Not starving to death today? Good chance you have Ai to thank for that.

Ai has been used to design T-Shirt images, Clothing designs, logo-designs, and even computer chips. The graphics capabilities of the latest video game you're playing, that's thanks to the Ai that designed the computer chips, As well as all of the Ai used to render the image. The latest game engines are using Ai in real time to render more detail with a higher accuracy.

Swiping through tinder to find a date? There's a good chance a large amount of the pictures you see were enhanced with Ai tools to make people look prettier and more handsome.

But that's just current benefits to the end consumer. Ai is being used in all sectors of the economy to improve and advance science, art, technology, and writing.

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CleaverIam OP t1_irsmixc wrote

Ok, AI has improved from useless to less useless. Is AI the only thing that has been developing in the last decade?

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Ortus12 t1_irt8z2b wrote

Weather "Technology" is improving fast or slow is a matter of perspective. I could point to tons of advances in science, biology, and other technologies, but you could just as easily say the first synthetic life, gene editing of human embryos, the solving of the protein folding problem, or tons of other discoveries, advancements, and life saving treatments, being figured out every single day, are not significant. It's all a matter of perspective.

But as far as self driving cars, and Ai doctors. These have been promised to be 5-10 years away for 70 years. Humans have vastly underestimated the complexity of human intelligence and problem solving, over and over throughout history.

But technology is moving in that direction. More and more powerful super computers, and better and better intelligence algorithms exist every year. It's like a train moving towards it's destination, and when human level AGI is created it will be super-human because computers are already superior in many ways to humans. Self driving cars and ai doctors will be solved along with the automation of nearly every other job in existence.

Ai scientists will be advancing technology and science faster than humans ever could. Shorty after that is when you get self replicators and commercial travel to terraformed mars. That's when technology and resources scale exponentially because intelligence itself is in a feedbackloop of growth.

I can't say when this future will occur, but it is what many call the singularity and it's why so many companies around the world have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into the problem, which has been measurable moving us closer and closer to that goal.

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CleaverIam OP t1_iruvjl9 wrote

I am not saying that we will not have another burst of exponential growth, or that we never had it. I am saying that consumer technology has improved little in the last decade or so. Much less than it had in the 60 and 70s. Right now, we don't have AGI, and all the things you listed are not happening right now.

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TheHamsterSandwich t1_irp4gna wrote

Come back here in ten years, man. Maybe sooner.

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AsuhoChinami t1_irsb1kf wrote

More like this year. What a mind-bogglingly stupid thread.

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CleaverIam OP t1_irsmzmc wrote

What technology do I have access to that I didn't already have in 2010?

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AsuhoChinami t1_irsogqe wrote

Plenty of them. I'm not humoring you.

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CleaverIam OP t1_irsoqus wrote

Care to enlighten me?

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AsuhoChinami t1_irss2lf wrote

Maybe later, but tbh I don't usually engage much with people I disagree with anymore since people usually have their minds made up beforehand.

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CleaverIam OP t1_iruvwfr wrote

You seem to be one of those people yourself

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DrinkDazzling8030 t1_irv8wfp wrote

smartwatches, true wireless earbuds, quicker DNA seqvencing, better smartphones apps, faster net, boston dynamics Spot, image generate AIs, robotaxis in same cities, 200M protein structure from Deepmind

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CleaverIam OP t1_irw2hw2 wrote

Where are Boston dynamics robots commercially used?

The protein thing is interesting. It has been mentioned a couple of times and it seems useful.

I mentioned quicker DNA sequencing and I believe it is indeed BIG.

Faster net? Does this increase in speed actually allow qualative changes to the way we use the internet or is is just a minor improvement on an existing technology?

Better apps? I wouldn't really count it as a breakthrough. More like streamlining what we had already.

I forgot about smartwatches and earbuds. Perhaps because I don't use either. Probably a good point though.

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DrinkDazzling8030 t1_irw4cti wrote

Where are Boston dynamics robots commercially used?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iubgWPHsuWM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NYJ_9FIHZA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F843AqfNsaA

Faster net? Does this increase in speed actually allow qualative changes to the way we use the internet or is is just a minor improvement on an existing technology?

Better apps? I wouldn't really count it as a breakthrough. More like streamlining what we had already.

Altogether combine i think it is huge breakthrough in field communication and social media

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CleaverIam OP t1_irsmof0 wrote

I will. What do you expect to change in the next decade? Except for better AI I doubt we would get anything. And even then, we still wouldn't have self driving cars I bet.

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TheHamsterSandwich t1_irsnbvi wrote

Ray Kurzweil predicts AGI by 2029. He's held that prediction for the longest time, and he hasn't changed it. I'm feeling confident about his prediction since he's betting money on it as well.

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CleaverIam OP t1_irso27b wrote

I am not sure who that is but I will surely come back to this in 7 years and I am sure we will not see it. Meanwhile, while we are waiting, we are technically "stagnating". Waiting for an advancement is not the same as seeing it come.

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TheHamsterSandwich t1_irsp56u wrote

I'd be shocked if it hadn't been achieved by that point. He recently said that we'll probably have AGI before 2029.

Ray Kurzweil is an optimist, but he has a track record of accurate predictions.

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CleaverIam OP t1_irspopk wrote

I like your optimism but I believe you are in for a shock. At best we might have something that vaguely resembles AGI very slowly running on the fastest supercomputer that would be specifically designed to run it. Not something a average person would have a use for.

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Lawjarp2 t1_irqugdh wrote

Tech has not plateaued or rather it has but not because of what most assume. A better way to put it is that we have plateaued biologically. It's not that we can't build faster planes, travel to space etc. It's that we never bothered improving our own bodies and are becoming a bottleneck.

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chimgchomg t1_irsamid wrote

>I still can't ask my computer to do anything in free form unless it has been specifically programmed to do it: "find the fastest public transport route from place A to place B, but disregard all busses unless they cut down the transit time by more then 20 minutes".

This feels a bit like goalpost moving as the basic feature did become popularized in the past 10 years, but the complexity is limited. You can certainly ask most smart devices for the fastest route from A to B and get it. Most people use digital assistants that take plain-text voice queries, like Alexa or Google. At my home we use it often to set timers or ask questions when cooking, like "what temperature should ground beef be cooked to" or others and it usually just works.

It's also somewhat more difficult to use AI for consumer-focused products compared to industry-focused products. AI systems like AlphaFold are currently in the background creating significant speedups in biological research and development. It is also known that multiple large hardware companies are also using AI to accelerate computer chip design.

>Space travel (do I even need to explain this one?)

The first successful Falcon 9 landing was at the end of 2015. Since then there have been individual Falcon 9 boosters which have been reused 14 times. Space tourism is slowly becoming a thing with Blue Origin's New Shephard having completed six crewed flights, the first one being in July 2021.

Talking about things like self-driving, nuclear fusion and androids is sort of a red herring. Just because a given task is more difficult than expected, is not evidence that we've reached a plateau. It just means the thing was harder than originally thought. There are various futuristic technologies which have come to market and started to mature. Electric vehicles being a big and obvious one, now with every major automaker producing at least one mainstream EV and having concrete plans to do many more (and in some cases convert their entire fleets to electric).

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CleaverIam OP t1_irska4k wrote

>You can certainly ask most smart devices for the fastest route from A to B and get it.

I certainly can but what if I want to ask it to move all my word documents that are currently in my Downloads and Documents folder into a new folder on my desktop that is called "Word" instead? That is a task a 7 year old could do. You certainly could program a computer to do it, but it has to be specifically programmed to do this task. For AI to be truly useful to the end user it should be able to perform any task you can ask it to do.

We had shuttles decades ago. Reusing a rocket is pointless in and of itself.

>Space tourism is slowly becoming

Slowly is the key word. By plateau I don't mean 0 rate of progress, I mean very slow rate of progress. We went from sending a satellite into space, to sending a dog into space to sending a human into space to going to the moon in just over a decade. We still don't have a moon base or have been to Mars, nor can we reasonably expect it to happen in the next couple of decades.

>Electric vehicles being a big and obvious one

No it isn't. It absolutely changes nothing about how a car works for the end user. I don't care if my car is powered by petrol, or batteries, or hydrogen or unicorn dust. All I care is how safe it is and how fast I can fuel my car. You may count it as a minor improvement on an already existing technology but it is not a game changer that would effect how we use cars.

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