Travis Ekbom  💣

The world has seen absolutely no meaningful technological progress in my lifetime - all we've had are faster and smaller computers, bigger networks, slightly more efficient machines and medicines. No true breakthroughs, no world-changing discoveries.

It raises the question - are the barriers to advancement intrinsic or extrinsic? Is it something we are doing wrong as a society, or have we simply plucked all the low-hanging fruit available to us? Have we hit a natural or artificial plateau?

The sciences have certainly become highly moribund, but its very hard to demonstrate causation - if we HAD hit an inherent barrier to further advancement, it would make sense that resources would end up going to making small evolutionary improvements to existing frameworks.

A number of people have made this point, but I think they're missing the fact that there's a difference between building on previous achievements and living off them. Stagnation often looks like continued success on the surface. https://twitter.com/FakeMontanan/status/1264682615413637129?s=20 …

Lots of people have also listed inventions that they tell me will change the world within my lifetime. That may be true, but if I'm right I would expect such advances to go un- or under-utilised. I suspect we may see the usual over-promising and under-delivering.