| I don't think it's clear that the options are either that we continue to progress exponentially or stagnate. Both of those seem like possibilities in the medium-term, but I wouldn't rule out the possibilities of decline (in the worst case) or cyclical re-development of the same ideas. Technological discovery doesn't just happen in a vacuum. There needs to be a societal production of potential new inventors and scientists. Where their interests lie is to some extent influenced by the culture they grow up in, and which research interests will receive funding (or societal status) is also dependent on culture, etc. Worse, if a problem has been widely solved using a bad solution, there is no real desire for a good one. Take electrical engineering and circuit design as an example. I would make the case that despite the immense and obvious success of computers, our society is in some significant way worse off than it was 50 years ago if you were to measure our collective ability to solve new problems using electrical engineering. Fewer and fewer electrical engineers are being educated, while the competency threshold of the field is rising. As that threshold rises, our education system shifts from teaching people to invent things to teaching them about practical skills like how to work all the menus in [some modeling tool], and how to generate report templates for MS Word. Software is so new that we've barely exceeded a single human lifespan (hardly enough time for information to get lost is it?), but how many times have you seen companies with a code base that was written by some greybeard in the 80's, which is critical to the success of the company but nobody understands? When the company realised that, did they try to address the root of the problem, or did they decide to keep piling shit on top of what they already had? It may be that software itself is the problem. Software allows you to snapshot your current problem solving capacity and continue delivering it long after the problem solvers themselves are gone. Maybe if we're lucky, the current generation of AI researchers will get us to something that approaches human level intelligence before these problems become intractable. |