What do you dislike most about sf/f?

[Justin Swanton]

I'm not sure I buy the above. I'd be willing to bet that there are great innovations happening, but they are happening much more in the biological fields than in the field of physics. We are only just beginning to touch what CRISPR means to human health and flourishing. The incredible speed of developing the MRNA vaccines hints at what might be coming.

--- Now that I've re-read your post a few times. I wonder if you were pointing to biological sciences as "soft" tech verse "hard" tech of physics and structural engineering. So maybe I do agree. On that side, I'm waiting for a big step in rocket propulsion.

Medical science continues to advance, granted, but I wonder (not having stats) to what extent the current breakthroughs save lives today compared to the lives they saved in the past. I mean, it seems to be a rule in any specific field of research that the initial discoveries have a much greater practical effect than the discoveries that come afterwards. Is there any drug developed today that has a comparable effect penicillin did when it first came out?

Re mRNA technology I have always been very anxious about any form of genetic engineering. Read Dr Robert Malone on the application of mRNA technology (which he developed) to the covid vaccines. In general terms the problem with genetic engineering is that we are tinkering with inconceivably complex biological mechanisms that we didn't design and we don't begin to understand the impact of any changes we implement.

There's a parallel with programming: it takes about twice as long to remove the bugs from a programme as it takes to create that programme in the first place. In programming it doesn't take long to spot that there is a bug: you run the programme and see very quickly where it goes wrong. With genetic engineering you are changing the programming of living organisms and it can takes months or years before harmful side effects appear. This is true of any new medical drug which is why the testing period is normally years long.

The mRNA vaccines are not actually vaccines but a reprogramming of the human cells to produce the virus's spike proteins, the idea being that the body will identify these spikes as foreign objects and manufacture antibodies for them. Problem is that the spikes, which were assumed to be harmless, are not. They are biologically active, not only damaging the cells that produce them, but also attaching themselves to the surface of other cells once they are released, adversely affecting the behaviour of those cells in ways that have been only partially documented, like micro blood clotting. It will be years before we know just what all the long-term side effects are.

So no, I don't think tinkering with DNA, especially human DNA, has a glorious future. It's more like a minefield.

Re rocket propulsion there hasn't been any real breakthrough for decades. The SABRE engine for the proposed Skylon spaceplane is interesting in that it can act as a jet or rocket engine, but nothing suggests it can make getting into orbit any cheaper. The SSTO (single stage to orbit) which is what the Skylon is supposed to be, is a fundamentally flawed concept that cannot be made to work as well as a multiple stage rocket. I'm not aware of anything else in the pipeline.

 

[Parson]

I'm sure I don't have as pessimistic view here as you. Certainly, to use your metaphor, there are mines out there. But every technological breakthrough seems to have almost equal possibilities for good or evil. I wouldn't want to live in a world where there was no progress. The brutish hunter/gather life that would seem to be most sustainable has no attraction for me. Careful research is mandatory, but when you are dealing with humans you will always find some people who want to push the boundaries, that's just who we are.

But this discussion is almost beside the point. The original post viewed that progress has slowed, and I remarked that it depended on what you are looking at.

 

[Justin Swanton]

I'm sure I don't have as pessimistic view here as you. Certainly, to use your metaphor, there are mines out there. But every technological breakthrough seems to have almost equal possibilities for good or evil. I wouldn't want to live in a world where there was no progress. The brutish hunter/gather life that would seem to be most sustainable has no attraction for me. Careful research is mandatory, but when you are dealing with humans you will always find some people who want to push the boundaries, that's just who we are.

But this discussion is almost beside the point. The original post viewed that progress has slowed, and I remarked that it depended on what you are looking at.

Interesting post. Human civilisation has existed for thousands of years at the level at least of the city state, in which agriculture and animal husbandry sustained human communities that allowed for specialised skills, like carpentry and clothmaking, and for luxury pursuits like architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, music, philosophy, etc. In its fundamentals it hasn't changed much from the Sumerians until the dawn of the industrial age. There was no preoccupation with Progress as we understand it, priorities were very different then. I wonder if what we achieve now can really be considered superior to what they achieved then. Contemporary society is incapable of creating pyramids, or the Pantheon, or the Sistine Chapel, or any of the artistic achievements of the past. Physically it could, sure, we have the techniques. But its own priorities have killed any motivation to do so. Our strengths are all directed at creating and refining physical comforts and conveniences. That's how we understand Progress. I'm not convinced.

 

[Parson]

Interesting post. Human civilisation has existed for thousands of years at the level at least of the city state, in which agriculture and animal husbandry sustained human communities that allowed for specialised skills, like carpentry and clothmaking, and for luxury pursuits like architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, music, philosophy, etc. In its fundamentals it hasn't changed much from the Sumerians until the dawn of the industrial age. There was no preoccupation with Progress as we understand it, priorities were very different then. I wonder if what we achieve now can really be considered superior to what they achieved then. Contemporary society is incapable of creating pyramids, or the Pantheon, or the Sistine Chapel, or any of the artistic achievements of the past. Physically it could, sure, we have the techniques. But its own priorities have killed any motivation to do so. Our strengths are all directed at creating and refining physical comforts and conveniences. That's how we understand Progress. I'm not convinced.

So, what changed? I doubt we can ascertain the answer to that question with certainty at this distance. But I have no doubt that some people in every society, as much as they could, given their knowledge and their "extra" time, tried to make life better by finding new and better ways of doing things whether it was making bread, building a house, digging a canal, or the like. We can see this clearly in the archeological record. And then, something would happen (war, plague, famine, etc.) and the progress in that society would be largely wiped out. But some gains were not lost and the next group that fortune favored would appropriate the wisdom of the past and some of its people would try to build on it. As I said earlier, some humans are always pushing the limits and looking for a "better" way. I suspect that the industrial revolution had it's flame lit by education. As more and more people had access to the successes of the past, more and more innovation became possible. More and more people lived, and more of them lived longer, allowing them more time to learn and pass on their learning. As the ability to read became more and more widespread, the speed and breadth of knowledge grew with it. All of this is to say that I don't think that there was ever a time that humans were not innovating and that its march is inexorable. It may go backwards for a time, but as long as we survive it will move forward in the ways that it can.

 

[Wayne Mack]

The last big technological revolution was in computers, back in the 80s and 90s, that made the home PC a reality. That in turn pushed the development of communication tech, the Web, smartphones and all the rest. But as regards hard tech like power, transport and home conveniences nothing significant has happened since the 60s.

I would say that a slightly more recent development has been in communications technology. Although, this relies on stripped down versions of computers, there is a lot of technical prowess that has been implemented on top of the platform. I find it near incredible that people in isolated areas, where they may not even have access to running water, may still have cell phone. That someone can dial my phone number and, without regard to where I am on the planet, the call can be completed. That I can be riding down the highway at speed and have a phone conversation passed seamlessly from cell tower to cell tower.

There are also polymer technologies that allow large scale wind turbines to be built. Solar cell technology that is driving down the costs of alternative energy. Three-D printing has the potential to be both a boon and an ill. In the realm of computer technology, there is the adoption of machine learning, where no programmer specifies a decision making algorithm. Rather, the computer program is trained on a large number of pass-fail attempts and determines its own algorithm. This has already led to some amazing results as well as some extremely troubling failures. And we don't even know how to evaluate how well the learned algorithm does at its job.

There are a lot of truly amazing things happening in today's world and we often forget (or don't even realize) how incredible they are. And none of them come from a single root cause.