[therzathegza]

I think the article unfairly bashes rail transport by singling out coal. If you read Warren Buffett's writings, his investment in rail was mostly due to being able to move something 500 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel. Regardless of what is being carried, there are very few things that efficient. Coal sucks, but but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater there.

As for the science section, claiming that productivity per scientist is <1% of what it was in 1920s is absolutely laughable. Look at some of the really large projects humanity pulled off like sequencing the human genome for good examples.

Interesting article, but seems to be a pretty pessimistic outlook.

[zenogais]

I think looking at it as pessimistic is simply wrong. The point is not to be optimistic but to look around and explain the major challenges that seem to be impeding rapid advancement.

The biggest problem I see in science seems to be the incentive structure (publish or perish). This overwhelmingly biases against large scale breakthroughs and towards minor amendments and advances. I remember when I first started doing research around 2011 I was extremely disappointed by the low quality and shallow vision of a lot of research being produced today (this was in AI). The volume was incredibly but the content was anemic. So I don't think the <1% figure is totally wrong-headed - we're in an age of 9-5 scientists whose desires to create long-term breakthroughs are often met with negative incentives while bulk publishing low-quality content is considered productive and desirable.

[therzathegza]

I thought the 1% figure as encompassing all science. As far as CS is concerned, I don't really know. As far as bioscience, leaps and bounds are made all the time. Electronic technology is a feedback loop that for every innovation you get there, you reap several in a diverse field such as biology. Live cell imaging by itself was revolutionized by discovery of fluorescent molecules in jellyfish. Nevermind the offshoots as mentioned, sequencing tech, PCR discovery. Just so many. I think 9-5 scientists is a very VERY pessimistic look on how science is run.

Did we mention lasers?! Lasers!

The publish or perish model is certainly a thing, but the peer review system as it exists does in fact notice if all you publish is crappy review papers. This depends a lot more on the community of researchers in that field. The more recent argument in many labs is "Can't it be both?". A longer term project run in parallel with smaller discoveries or even reviews of things in the field. Don't underestimate the utility of a good review paper either. Many people don't understand how science at the bench is done, and it gets reduced to these sorts of apocalyptic cliches. Fields come and go, that's how the sausage gets made.

[tokai]

Actually there have never been so many publications per scientist as there is now. Nearly every metric that is measurable, have been growing exponentially for the last century (no. of scientists, publications, research institutions etc.). There are some indications that we are nearing the top of the s-curve however.

Which begs the question: why is all that research not resulting in equal exponential innovation in our society?

[kazagistar]

Cause all the important research is already done.

Seriously. Why do we assume the difficulty of making meaningful progress to be linear? It seems reasonable that each new discovery becomes harder then the previous one, at a rate equal to or faster then the rate at which we speed up science.

[copperx]

Because that research is mostly done to stay employed. There are no incentives to do breakthroughs.

[barney54]

I'm not sure what is so bad about coal. It powered the industrial revolution and more importantly today, it can keep servers running when wind and Oskar can't (unless you only want to serve pages when the wind blows and the sun shines). Besides being dependable, it us also affordable and with today's technology emits very little pollution.