Edit: Obligatory "I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by advertising KPIs" reference

I do not think that is an objective statement at all. I think one could just as readily make a highly data-supported argument that never in history have we been more factionalized or inundated with low-quality media than in the current moment.

Edit:. Appreciate you for putting your opinions out in open air.

I see simply no other way out of very deeply the status/hierarchy thing that's so deeply ingrained into our species.

The system design of power/hierarchy makes sense in a partitioned world of limited resources. If we expect any continuous level of progress in our problem-domains (for example fresh water), its just a matter of time until culture eradicates certain inequalities. As of now, there is an active demand for inequality. People want to be wealthy, and as it is, that requires others to be poor and do the shit jobs. One part of this equation will continue to change in our favor - maybe forever.

I don't think this is "so deeply ingrained into our species", I think its nothing but culture, or maybe some middle ground, in which case culture will be the dominant factor over the long run.

It will lead to physical elimination of that 50%, and probably more.

>I don't think this is "so deeply ingrained into our species", I think its nothing but culture, or maybe some middle ground, in which case culture will be the dominant factor over the long run.

Monkeys, from which we split off millions of years ago, have very strong hierarchies. It's great to believe we can fix everything with culture, but biology exists.

>The system design of power/hierarchy makes sense in a partitioned world of limited resources.

Resources will always be limited. Our wants, collectively, are infinite.

Just think about "thought influencers". It's nothing but status games, and that will not go away even if every single physical need has been taken care of. Why? Because the top influencer can program brains of millions, and some - even of BILLIONS of other humans.

How do you fix that with more resources, the competition over who gets to influence and brainwash everyone else?

Eventually the ads have to be for something.

>... all the questions of the 90s are now solved.

This is exceedingly hyperbolic and I can't imagine you actually think this is true.

>Ad tech? Check.

Ah, yes! Advertising technology! I think we're all delighted, as a species, that we've innovated so hard in this realm. Invasive, targeted advertising is the bee's knees and will really propel us forward as a civilization.

you're right to step over this, my point was directed at broad intellectual progress rather than Einsteins. That's because there is no such thing as Einsteins. We only had one. And then we had Ramanujan, and Turing, and von Neumann [...].

Point being: you can only find out about general and special relativity once. After that, every following genius would have to make a dent of the same proportions relative to the now-already-made discoveries. We're just too far down the line to detect that level of genius. I'm 100% convinced that there are at least 20 people on the planet right now who have the same intellectual depth and potential for breakthroughs as Einstein (or any of the above, honestly) did. We just won't be able to contrast them to the rest of the population as we used to be able to, simply because almost everyone who works for Google is ridiculously intelligent and educated.

>This is exceedingly hyperbolic and I can't imagine you actually think this is true.

Yes, it was hyperbole, to illustrate that of the things that we really put resources into, everything was solved or we at least made significant progress. Excuse the wording.

>Ah, yes! Advertising technology!

Wether you like it or not, it's a significant step. Modulating content to maximize the attention-reach of your audience is scientifically significant. Again, that we use this for bullshit is a side-effect of your broken and time-local culture, it doesn't invalidate the progress we made along the way.

>Wether you like it or not, it's a significant step. Modulating content to maximize the attention-reach of your audience is scientifically significant. Again, that we use this for bullshit is a side-effect of your broken and time-local culture, it doesn't invalidate the progress we made along the way.

One of the most significant applications of Einstein's work was to vaporize hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.

Whereas science used to be done in a relatively small number of labs, with little communication between countries - there are now thousands of universities and commercial labs in every developed country doing research. And that research uses machines that measure thousands of variables at high speed.

And yet - we still lack the ability to put all this data together. Even the volume of scientific papers published is greater than any individual could keep up with. Their finding are often extracted into databases - for instance in biology a new enzyme would end up in the Uniprot database. But getting from this newly discovered enzyme to a genetically engineered bacteria that makes gasoline is a journey of hops between fields that it rarely happens. Yet.

What I suppose I'm saying is - the progress you talk about in AI and computation has been amazing, but it has much more to give. The next 50 years, should we survive that long, will be another tidal wave of innovation.

And the median value of that reasearch is zero.

There is literally too much research being done. Because of perverse incentives (in both academia and industry) there are a fair number of results that are not useful along with some which are simply wrong. I believe we could easily cut off the bottom half of the research being done and the appreciable impact would be to increase the sum total of knowledge of the species.

It is very hard to say with basic research, what is pointless. For instance, there is little application for bozons and yet we paid a lot of money for CERN. On the other hand, they say all that RNA vaccine research looked kind of pointless till recently. What if the data about subatomc particles at cern lets us build quantum computers or fusion power - we wouldn't know until much later. So hard to value.

But it doesn't change the multiplier effect of figuring out how to synthesise all this stuff. Some of this stuff only becomes valuable once we can do that.

First, the notion that "wrong" research is bad. We have to remember that literally the best results science have to offer are in fact wrong today, and have been more wrong in the past. What science produces are models of reality, and while they may be highly accurate at predicting reality they are not in fact reality. They are wrong in some way. So we can't just throw out all of the wrong results because then we would have to throw out all of the results. Instead of going down this path, we can instead be content that some research is wrong, because the scientific process is one of continually refining those results. Also, we note that despite everything literally being wrong, society, technology, and engineering still make progress. Being wrong does not mean being useless.

Second, the notion that "useless" research is bad. The thing about usefulness is that it's hard to quantify, and it's also not a static property. Sometimes research that is useful in one era is completely useless in another. For example, deep learning wasn't very useful until the era of big data and limitless compute. Before then, people could make guesses as to the usefulness of this research, but no one really knew for sure how useful it would be when it was brand new. Should that research not have been done until it was more useful? I don't think anyone would argue that. How then, are we able to determine ahead of time how useful a research project will be? If we knew how to do that, then it wouldn't be research, would it?

So really, if you aim to cut off the bottom half of research with the intent that it would increase the sum total knowledge of humanity, you have to show how you:

1) identify the bottom half of research before it's conducted

2) quantify the "useful" research potential of a project, and how do you intended to squelch useless research while allowing useful research to persist unimpeded

3) intend to separate "wrong" research from "right" research

4) fund useful research while passing over useless research

I think the answer to those questions would basically involve re-inventing the scientific process.

I mean, just think of it this way: research that may turn out to be useless at least has the positive value of showing how something isn't to be done. This has the positive result of allowing someone else to try a different method, which may be equally useless, or may be the key to unlocking new knowledge. I think it's impossible to get the latter without the former.

I understand what you're trying to say -- yes Newton was wrong and now we have refined Newton with Einstein. But Ptolemy was wrong, and we have not refined Ptolemy with Gallileo, we threw Ptolemy out.

As an example, the original power pose study has never been replicated. The idea that posing in a specific way led to a neuro-endocrine response was simply wrong. And yet it got cited many times. One of the the original authors disavowed it, the other continued promoting it, but now with a much weaker claim. Is it science? Or is it a waste of resources?

I think much of the research I'm deriding is actually pretty good thinking. Published as essays or thought experiments I think a lot of it would have value. But because of a perverse demand for publications, any good idea has to have prior work, p-values and if you can get a grant and fMRI slapped onto it.

For damn sure "smarter" by any definition of education and intelligent that I could come up with. Sure, maybe not Americans/Western Europeans. Sure. But _globally_ has our education system gotten better and people gotten "smarter"? I think so!

Happier? Oh hell no, I don't think we're _happier_ now.

> b) will continue to bloom for the foreseeable future

I don't think this will be the case. True, it was/is a golden age, but I don't see how this demonstrably unsustainable machine can go on fore the "foreseeable future". Unless we get a huge breakthrough on the order of fusion, I don't see this golden age going on more than 50 or so more years.

But I don't see us stopping to make progress any time soon, far from it, and the network-effects of the various things to come will change the face of the earth to a completely unpredictable degree - every couple decades. 2060 is absolutely unpredictable, letalone 2080 or 2100. Rising sea levels notwithstanding.

Then there are many political reasons; the internal politics of many western countries are kind of in a stalemate, and have been for quite some time. It all keeps working for the time being, but it seems to me that there's a very plausible chance a crisis is looming on this front as well. The geopolitical situation I'm a bit less worried about by the way, in spite of Ukraine and China's chest-beating about Taiwan.

Once this kind of infrastructure for progress gets compromised then things will become very hard. I dare not make any predictions: it can go both ways, but I'm a lot less confident things will work out as easily as you say.

I think of it differently: it already did. The old world is already dead. It will just take a couple of generations until that realization kicks in, or until the consequences of that realization are implemented in our cultures and systems. The political incentives in western democracies are not aligned with the interests of the following generations. The opposite is the case, current politicians simply sell the future of their constituents. I'm well aware that lots of things will have to collapse. But I'm coming to a different conclusion than you: I think exactly that's what is conductive for progress.

Unconductive to progress is friction, and social friction is essentially the product of people who hold on to concepts of the world that have already lost their meaning. Very, very few people born before 1990 are worth listening to outside of their exact levels of expertise. But at the same time, almost anyone in power was a) born before 1990 and b) represents the interests of almost exclusively people born before 1990. The number is arbitrary, I just try to illustrate the point.

Thank you for your comments.

What better motivation for a scientist to innovate than the threat of starvation and violence?

Innovation is not the same as genius. Innovation generally occurs as a linear function from point a to b, whereas genius operates as a step function. Geniuses are the people who make that mental leap of progress in t=1 instead of t=sqrt(2), and they sit up there waving their hands saying "Hey guys! Look what I found up here!", and we all say "How the hell did you get up there so fast? What the heck are you talking about?" until we start catching up and go "Oh yeah... that makes sense".

Genius is so widespread these days that it's almost pedestrian. It's just way less concentrated and elite than it used to be - which makes its findings harder to disseminate.

There is another argument to be made, though, that goes something like this: a lot of what people are pointing to are basically engineering achievements rather than anything else. Most of what we know of as modern computing was essentially in place by the early 1980s, and alot of what's happened since is just refinements of that. So, being able to casually videochat on your phone is kind of like living in the future, but it's something that basically just took a ton of engineering refinements to get to.

That might be fine enough on its own, but there has been a ton of money thrown into things at the same time, far more than in the past. So we go from a desktop PC in 1985 to your smartphone today? It's pretty remarkable, the miniturization involved, but how much money has been thrown at that?

I don't want to sound too critical, as I'm basically on board with you and I think the OP is sort of off the mark in a number of ways, but I do think it's coming from a kernel of truth at some level.

Let me put it a different way: the idea that there would be no progress in anything over the last 50 years seems like a strawman. It's not really what these pieces are arguing. What they're arguing is basically that the years from say, 1915-1975 or so, especially 1940-1975 or so, were really remarkable scientifically speaking, and we're kind of in a period of just engineering the hell out of those advancements since then.

Of course I admit this could all be nonsense; I wish these sorts of papers and essay had more empirical backing behind their basic arguments but with a couple of exceptions I don't see it.

1. Even if everything now is mostly engineering rather than science, the difficulty in such feats has to be taken into consideration. Anything from a nuclear bomb to the Moon landing was much more interesting from an engineering rather than a scientific perspective. So, perhaps we have directed our geniuses to implementing change in the world, rather than writing essays or doing other abstract work.

2. To go from 1985 desktop computers to modern phones, a lot of scientific work had to be done. To pick one example, the AI research we are developing in order to perform face recognition, semantic search, translation, and so on is simply revolutionary. Just because we cannot pinpoint a single genius behind any of these achievements, we should not underestimate how significant they were.

We live in a similar (or even higher) acceleration now, with a lot of us born during floppy disks, magnetic tapes and punch cards and we're witnessing having the entirety of world knowledge in our pockets, anywhere in the world, for free!

I've been here (old enough to at least meaningfully spectate) for almost all of the Internet revolution and for all of the Web's history, and that what's available online is still really far from "the entirety of world knowledge", most of the parts that matter aren't free, and that what is there is horribly poorly-organized and poorly-presented, is part of why I'm pessimistic on the whole technological-progress-as-meaningful-progress thing.

A huge proportion of the intellectual value of the free (as in beer) Internet is tied up in a single book and academic paper piracy website. A half-decent academic library still crushes the Web, and it's not even a close contest, if you only count legally-distributed free (to the user) material. This should not be the case, but it is.

We've seen about three decades of the Web's promise squandered by broken social structures, laws, and economic incentives. Web-native material remains anemic and largely secondary. The Web's promise as a repository of knowledge and computers in general's utility as teaching tools remain, as far as I can tell, badly under-explored, without much sign of improving soon.

We should have an entire, hard-to-beat-by-any-means edutainment-heavy curricula (plural) by now, so engaging it's hard to get kids to stop learning and go ride a bike. Instead, that space has been, at best, treading water since back when I was its target audience. We have institutions that could push these uses, open interoperability between platforms, free interactive materials organized in a useful way, et c., and which have the money to at least make a good attempt at it, but they mostly rest on their laurels and collect pay checks (Wikimedia Foundation, Firefox, that kind of thing) or are just bizarrely uninterested (governments—gee, wouldn't any amount of serious work on that front have been hugely helpful in the last couple years?). The best we have is something like Khan Academy, a better-than-nothing but still sadly-limited marriage of video lectures and multiple choice tests. There's Youtube, but little of even the best material there's good for actual learning versus the illusion of having learned, and some of the best of it's just recorded lectures (Strang, say) which are great and all, but... is that all we've got? All we've done with the capability we have now?

"VR's coming and that'll change everything", says someone, I'm sure. Nah, it'll be more of the same. Why would we use that to anything resembling its real potential when we haven't with gestures about this?

> that I’m typing while my girlfriend lies in my arm in our bed, should be mind blowing

We still don't have space stations that can accommodate more than a half dozen people (spoiler: I want to live on Cloud City). We don't have Moon colonies. We don't have 3D holograms (not the ones that rely on spinning a stick really fast and using a projector). We still don't have a cure for any type of cancer. No warp drives. No anti-grav. No 200 year life expectancy. No human cloning. No $25 000 flying cars. No mass produced technology or consumer products using graphene.

We make smaller chips, miniaturized computers, made fancier looking user interfaces, made rocket boosters reusable, and video game graphics are approaching photorealism. Great.

That's fairly recent, and pretty damned significant. How often are you expecting such society-changing innovations to occur?

Your list of things we don't have that you want is kinda odd. Is there a need for cloned humans? What huge societal improvements do holograms permit? Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small, powerful batteries not?

Cloned militaries. Eliminating birth defects. Relieving women from the pain of childbirth.

Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his businesses after him.

> What huge societal improvements do holograms permit?

Look man, the Jedi didn't use Slack, did they?

> Why is a consumer product with graphene meaningful but the massive innovation in small, powerful batteries not?

Life is graphene. It's fantastic.

It's not like star wars, human clones would still be human.

So... are these clones slaves that are forced to join the army?

> Also to solve the problem of low birth rates, and allow people to perpetuate themselves. Elon Musk could clone himself and raise his copy to eventually take over his businesses after him.

He could also do this with his children?

The smartphone was 15 years ago but we act like it was yesterday.

1900-1910ish we got air conditioning, plastics, airplanes, motion pictures, the Theory of Relativity..

We are just so clueless now. Even the smart people are clueless.

And 15 years ago is not that big of a timeframe, it was ~50 years between first powered flight and men stepping on the moon. The kids born with cheap access to all the worlds information are going to do things with their minds that you and I cannot imagine yet. They're going to organize in novel ways and nobody can stop them.

There's very little that isn't.

Moon rockets are a refinement of thousand year old technology, fireworks. Steam engines are a refinement of little toys from ancient Greece. Guns are a refinement of throwing things.

Any definition of innovation that doesn't include smartphones is a silly one, in my book. It's quite clear they were novel and massively impactful on society.

No mention of CRISPR-Cas9, the explosion of deep learning and "AI," the James Webb Space Telescope, detection of gravitational waves...?

My god. Are people really that myopically spellbound by computing these days?

Indeed, already 15 years ago. Hurry up slackers, I want an innovation that literally changes our whole lives every decade please

Damn.. I'm not sure what more you are wanting given the amount of time that has passed? You wanted humanity to go from its first flight and engine-powered vehicle to warp drives, cured cancer and Moon colonies in less than 200 years?

All of these statements apply to Einstein's era as well.

We do, however, as of the past ten years or so have reuseable rockets (non trivial), inexpensive virtual reality goggles, mRNA vaccines, bioreactor grown meat, on demand access to an enormous quantity of humanity's artistic creations at any time, nearly-out-of uncanny valley digital human replicas, self driving cars with a low probability of killing you getting from point A to point B, and, yes, some really cool video games.

we do have physics of warp-drives somewhat figured out, but engineering remains a challenge. there are some warp fields experiments going on. if were to apply your metric, GPS was invented in 1915, by Einstein.

Not to mention that the government and the military have all but scrapped their research programs - a lot of the progress of the last decades has fundamental roots there (most notably the Internet). Instead, we let private companies like SpaceX and the whims of billionaires decide on where and how to progress.

This is wrong on so many levels. We need to tax billionaires of everything above 10 billion dollars, and use the seized money to improve the lives of everyone.

>we could be doing so much better as a species

...relative to your expectations. If your model of the world (from which these expectations arise) was accurate, it would predict the world as it is, opposed to an ought. Things are not good or bad. They just are. And how we react to this status quo then can be evaluated as good or bad subjectively, and the closer you look at the metrics you use for the evaluation, the more of it will be culture, local, and meaningless in the greater scheme.

If you don't like how individuals allocate their resources, give them a reason to do it differently. Just being sad because in a theoretical instance of our world things could be better, won't close the delta between our is and your ought.

>We need to tax billionaires of everything above 10 billion dollars

this, for example, is based on the assumption that our core problems are derived from an unfair distribution of resources. While you can certainly make that argument, I would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats truly the root of our problems - it's not. Try to understand us as a collective organism of nodes that exchange information. Try to understand the underlying systems that drive our behavior. Go deeper. Understand for the sake of understanding. The more you judge with your heart, the more blind your brain becomes, and that won't get us anywhere. Cheers!

Yes-ish. Since we could theoretically just culturally change how we look at wealth, the current distribution of resources is a symptom of our cultural and societal systems design. People don't know how to have conversations, which leads to isolation, which leads to dispair. If we'd fix the root cause (teach them how to have conversations, i.e. finally fix the education systems), leading to an open and actually progressive culture, we'd realize that at least in the rich countries, we have more than enough resources to be able to afford a couple super rich people that just go wild. Lets say you'd take all the money from the US's billionaires and give it to the US government. Are you truly convinced that the world would be a better place? 10 years later? 20? Who is to be truly trusted with the distribution? How?

The resource-distribution problem is only the core problem when the majority of people actually lack resources. My impression is a different one - everyone wants more, regardless of if they have enough. That, according to my model of the world, is our core problem. We're building a culture of material greed and constant comparisons with peers, thus we are breeding insecurity, fear, hate, etc. - its much easier to just point at billionaires and claim that they are the root problem.

Don't get me wrong, hoarding wealth out of greed is disgusting and I have zero sympathy for these people. But I don't see how someone being able to fund a space company (which simply would never happen otherwise) is the problem when the vast majority of people have food on their plates and a roof over the head but fail to be happy with just that. And, if we learned the latter, maybe the super-rich wouldn't be as shit as they largely are, either.

So what does create real progress to the masses?

Taxing billionaires will not solve anything. It is just a shoe in the door for more taxes for you. No matter what the government gets in taxes it will never be enough to satiate the desire to spend other people's money. Just remember, anything that is applied to billionaires also will be applied to you. After all, we are all equals.

Peter Thiel would say you're describing innovation in bits as opposed to atoms.

it seems to be we are stuck, we are improving current technology, but we have not created new technology in a long time, Sure computers got smaller and more powerful but that is just iteration of the same design..

We need another major shift in technology, not just iterations / improvements on the same old, same old

PS I only used Thomas Jefferson because I recently read Undaunted Courage that talked about Jefferson's lamentations of slow progress.

PPS Computer aided design could be seen as the last great technology boom. It has allowed us to build more efficient and lighter machines that were not possible before.

The "innovation" that pervades through our current times is shallow and false. The only substantive innovations we've had in the last couple of decades has been the internet -- and unfortunately its applications have been a net harm on society. I will also say, despite how disagreeable it is, you are part of the problem vis-a-vis "Why we stopped making Einsteins": because your perception of things is not rooted in anything more than self-service and how it affects you -- and not the world at large.

If one were to look at the fruits of academia without any self-deception, it's mostly "scientists" making careers for themselves, and constantly engaging in long-cons, grifting for grant money. And if we include the amount of useless (or even out-right damaging) research that has been published (because, once again the incentives for most science is not love of truth, discovery, or practical application -- but self-service) it will seem like it has done more harm to the human soul than organized religion has in the past.

Millions of people are able to code, and where has that got us?

The questions of the 90s -- how many of them were actually useful, and not simply a distraction from reality?

Ad tech? Search? Phones in your pockets with the ability to magnify and create a hyper-reality better than could possibly ever be experienced in real life? Yes, the list goes on, but I don't consider any of these things to be good. What have they done for the human condition besides atomize and intensify certain things -- while neglecting the rest?

Machines beating people at Go? We've created automatons that can best us at what should be leisurely activities and hobbies -- to what end?

We don't have Einsteins anymore because our culture would not be able to recognize an Einstein until decades past his innovations -- when all the hype and hoopla as died down, and we can look at them detached, and with a cool head and ask ourselves "how much impact has this really made?" (For Einstein, it has been quite large. But I'm certain in 100 years, if we ever wisen, that we'll look back at the things you've listed as appalling detriments, and wonder how could we have been so foolish).

It's not pessimism -- it's just looking at the world without painting one's emotional state over it.