[jacquesm]

It's the exact same thing with solar panel technologies. But then if you look at the long term, 10 or 20 years, you see that there really is an underlying current (...) of steady improvements that eventually make it to the market or that reduce cost. But the vast majority are hype.

[mark-r]

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." - Bill Gates

[njarboe]

Most humans seem to understand linear growth pretty well. It is hard to get an intuitive feel for exponential growth.

[wickawic]

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”

- Al Bartlett

[lovemenot]

That was a powerful observation in 1999 when he said it: thousands of times more so now.

[marblar]

At this rate, in 2025 it will be at least 10 times more powerful.

[SomeStupidPoint]

It's because we think in 3D, so we only really see three steps of exponential growth.

If we thought in 100D, we might have a better sense for it, because we'd be able to see a hundred of them.

Hypervolume grows exponentially.

One way to get a really rough idea is to try and control each and every joint individually.

Close your eyes and try to imagine that each joint, each muscle is a dimension along which you can move (by moving it), and your posture at any given moment is a point in that space. When you move, you make a line through it. Don't picture it, just feel it.

What is the shape of that space?

You can get an idea of what exponential growth is like by exploring how the shape of that space changes as you add more and more things you're controlling.

[baddox]

Doesn’t hypervolume just grow geometrically as dimension?

[zmgehlke]

Are those not the same thing?

> ... In the case of a discrete domain of definition with equal intervals, it is also called geometric growth or geometric decay, the function values forming a geometric progression. ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth

[flatfilefan]

An interesting way to look at human thinking patterns. Is there any book on it?

I never completely figured out Aikido with it’s joint locks and levers. Maybe talented aikidokas have a grater capacity to visualize/fill this type of activity?

[Pamar]

(Aikido SanDan, ~28 years of practice, still going to the dojo 3 times a week).

Interesting point, but I don’t think Aikidoka have any special talent for that: we use a small number of techniques and what changes is the way you use them in response to different attacks/holds.

Also, you tend to work on your specific Ryu (school) technicsl curriculum and nobody goes around “inventing” new locks.

(Some argue that Aikido is not really adapting to modern world nor cross-pollinating with other martial arts due to -arguably excessive - reverence for tradition).

[SomeStupidPoint]

Honestly, it's just a mash-up of a few Buddhist ideas and a few math ideas:

You can model what you're doing as a phase space, which is the product space of the state of each thing you control. This generally has a lot more dimensions than three. (You see this in robotics; a 5-axis CNC has a 5 dimensional phase space for position (5 axes of motion), plus a few more dimensions for things like speed and coolant flow.)

That mashed up with the meditation idea of starting with your focus on something really small -- the soles of your feet, for instance -- and drawing it up your body until you can feel all of it.

If you do the two, you can slowly draw yourself into awareness of higher and higher dimensional phase spaces, which shows you a curve of exponential growth.

Well, okay -- I also followed Terry Tao's excellent advice on dealing with higher dimensions, to stop trying to picture math and start trying to find systems that expressed it in what they did. You can often get a feel for a system doing something more complex than what you can directly picture.

[philipkglass]

There can also be a very long lag between initial research and industrialization. PERC cell technology for high efficiency solar has been growing rapidly to multiple gigawatts of manufacturing capacity over the past couple of years. It's expected to account for over half of all monocrystalline cell manufacturing within the next few years.

10 years ago PERC cells weren't available on an industrial scale, even though the technological basics were discovered, explored at the lab scale, and published in the 1980s. It took a lot of manufacturing advances and market evolution before PERC technology was both practical and profitable to manufacture for large scale use.

http://www.aleo-solar.com/perc-cell-technology-explained/

Likewise, I expect that some battery ideas that are published and "go nowhere" will eventually reach industrial scale, but only much later.