The Myth of the Myth of Technological Progress

I was reading an article by Russel Davies where he was considering the lack of visions of the future today, and linked to an article by Scott Locklin on the Myth of Technological Progress. The gist of Locklin's article is that technology progressed rapidly up until the second half of the 20th century, and then dropped off. I found this interesting and started writing out a response. As I read his other responses, it became clear that he's more crotchety than curious, so I thought I'd just dump what I'd written here rather than on his blog.

Take a look at his article and then read on.

A primary issue here is mismatch of the eras under consideration and their product domains. If we take a look at, for example, the Industrial Age, the output of it was things that industry produced: physical products. The understanding of electricity and the ability to work with it, brought forth tremendous improvements in areas where electricity could make a huge difference. The same can be said of materials science, chemistry, and the like.

What differentiates us fundamentally right now is that we live in the Information Era where the output is in the information domain. You have chosen to create what seems like an aesthetic line of demarcation between things that are the products of prior ages and those of the last few decades, but I think it can be hard to argue that modern computers (compared with those in existence in 1959, which is akin to comparing a bicycle with a motorcycle), mobile communications, computer networking, and, resultingly, the public Internet have all had huge impacts on how we live. From there, I’m guessing that things like email, search engines, global auctions, instant messaging (not to mention text messaging), truly portable computing (not to mention the invention of the GUI), and any number of other advances that have taken place in the information domain will hold little appeal to you despite the impact that they are having on how people all over the entire world live.

I think another thing worth noting is that progress is happening so fast on such a huge variety of fronts that things that, had they come out on their own, would have been great wonders in their own right are lost among all of the other things that are happening simultaneously. We’re just used to the progress that we make now, and the fact that it will all be outdated in a couple of years is an indication of just how fast we’re making change, not how irrelevant each change is.

And this says nothing about revolutions in manufacturing in terms of equipment (robotics, for one) and process that are underrepresented in histories of innovation as much as they are now, despite being core aspects of the enabling platform that allows for the emergence of wonders in any era.

Finally, it seems that there’s a fundamental error going on here. You point out fantastic things that have happened in the past, and then ask where is the progress on that same front now. It seems fallacious to point to an existing technology and ask where the major leaps forward are. It’s not clear at all that innovation works that way. A technology emerges, it’s developed, and it’s improvement levels off as it matures. New innovation comes from new places.

That said, it’s difficult to conceive of saying that a car today is not fantastically better than a car in the 1950s. Sure, they have a lot in common, but you can buy a car today with antilock brakes, air bags everywhere, built in GPS navigation, autonomous cruise control, and the ability to detect the specific type of impending crash that’s about to happen and make the appropriate adjustments to your environment to maximize the probability of your survival. It may not be faster or more fuel efficient, but that’s not the current metric of success.

Ultimately it seems that we’ll need to determine some metrics that you would see as representing the impact of a technology for things like the nuclear bomb, and only from there will we be able to compare like for like for technologies from the last few decades.