[mattejade]

As far as I'm concerned, the author of this article has not made a strong enough argument to draw such a bold conclusion.

They point to patent research, showing that innovation in areas outside of computers and electronics has slowed down. Then admits "of course" computers and electronics aren't included in this. But computers and electronics dominate our world. If you exclude them and say "tech progress is slowing down!", you're saying almost nothing at all, because you've excluded the thing that accounts for our currently-alleged rapid rate of technological progress.

He does attempt to cover this point by asserting that increases in processor performance are slowing down. This is enough for him to draw the conclusion of: "for computers [...] the period of rapid exponential growth will soon become history." This is a massive logical leap. Processor performance isn't the only component of technological progress in the wide field of computers and electronics, and that's especially obvious in the current time where rapid progress is occurring in ML algorithms.

I think this subject is a worthy point of inquiry, but it seems to me that the article is simply taking facts and drawing unwarranted conclusions from them.

[dredmorbius]

"The author of this article", Vaclav Smil, has made the argument at rather greater length than this one brief excerpt:

<https://vaclavsmil.com/category/books/>

[m463]

I wonder if there's some other measure that can be made to mark the shift in technology.

For example, the processor transistor count.

Maybe (desktop) systems should be judged by total system transistor count, as GPUs have replaced processors with respect to transistors.

Or possibly, there should be a measure of transistors per person - many many people are carrying around phones with literally billions of dollars of development in them. Phones might arguably be the single most potent expression of technology on the planet. (I was going to say they serve one person, but arguably they might eually serve apple and advertising)

[hulitu]

> For example, the processor transistor count.

AFAIK no processor is hand drawn anymore, even the infividual logic cells. Everything is synthetised. Then the transistor count is useless. Is like counting lines of code to assess productivity.