And technical innovation has been stagnant ever since. Keeping most people, some of whom could be coming up with new ideas if they had time and resources to explore their passions, working dead end service jobs and exhausting themselves just to make ends meet so 12 people can have all the money is more important.
Yes I know the phone in my pocket is more powerful than the Apollo guidance computer by many orders of magnitude, but that’s just iterating on an old concept. To me, innovation is jet engines for airplanes, or rockets capable of escaping earth orbit when nothing like it existed before.
mRNA vaccines. Net positive power output from fusion. Off the top of my head.
I agree with your concept of capitalism killing innovation and forcing people into dead-end jobs. But that doesn’t mean technical innovation is dead. Just means it’s not progressing optimally and not benefiting the right people.
Generative AI too. It might be hammered into everything to the point of being tiresome, but it is technologically impressive that you can have a computer just synthesise a photo/video/music.
Compare to 20 years ago. Being able to just go “Computer, create for me an original landscape painting”, and have it make one would be something that you’d only find on television/in movies.
What we’re really fucking up is the ramp from fossil to advanced energy sources that could enable massive outward expansion into the solar system. The billionaires are forgetting that a larger piece of a smaller pie is still less pie.
In 2025, most everyone in the world can translate foreign languages at the press of a button. I dislike Gwern since he’s a bigot, but I like his article, “My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s.”
Google translate isn’t much better than it was in 2010, but LLMs do a much better job. Admittedly, Google Translate is what most people use. It works well enough though.
And technical innovation has been stagnant ever since. Keeping most people, some of whom could be coming up with new ideas if they had time and resources to explore their passions, working dead end service jobs and exhausting themselves just to make ends meet so 12 people can have all the money is more important.
Yes I know the phone in my pocket is more powerful than the Apollo guidance computer by many orders of magnitude, but that’s just iterating on an old concept. To me, innovation is jet engines for airplanes, or rockets capable of escaping earth orbit when nothing like it existed before.
mRNA vaccines. Net positive power output from fusion. Off the top of my head.
I agree with your concept of capitalism killing innovation and forcing people into dead-end jobs. But that doesn’t mean technical innovation is dead. Just means it’s not progressing optimally and not benefiting the right people.
isn’t that goochie goo autism old guy halting mRNA research?
Not in any civilized country, no.
I mean for the US. Which is like what, less than 5% of the world population? And now maybe much less??
Generative AI too. It might be hammered into everything to the point of being tiresome, but it is technologically impressive that you can have a computer just synthesise a photo/video/music.
Compare to 20 years ago. Being able to just go “Computer, create for me an original landscape painting”, and have it make one would be something that you’d only find on television/in movies.
What we’re really fucking up is the ramp from fossil to advanced energy sources that could enable massive outward expansion into the solar system. The billionaires are forgetting that a larger piece of a smaller pie is still less pie.
In 2025, most everyone in the world can translate foreign languages at the press of a button. I dislike Gwern since he’s a bigot, but I like his article, “My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s.”
We could do that in 2010, which is about where it stagnated.
Google translate isn’t much better than it was in 2010, but LLMs do a much better job. Admittedly, Google Translate is what most people use. It works well enough though.
Yeah. Last tine we gor any positive modal shift was smart phones. That was 17 years ago.
A lot of people mark that as the downfall of the internet.
The phones weren’t the problem.
Well, they fucked uo design a lot, but tgey didn’t ruin everything.