9 Comments

Great piece. I wonder if the slowing of breakthrough innovation is primarily driven by the raise of safetyism and increased regulation. Imagine trying to develop the automobile industry from scratch today - and convincing regulators that the societal productivity enhancement of the device outweighed the ~40,000 deaths per year, not to mention carbon emission, etc

Expand full comment

My concern isn't whether or not Kurzweil's dreams comes true (though I wish he and others of his Ilk are sorely disappointed). My concern is that the Kurzweils will stop at nothing to convert reality into their dream (and grab any remaining wealth in the process). The hope I have in knowing that this civilization can't be powered by solar panels is far outweighed by my fear that there are those who will cover every last available square inch with solar panels just for us to find out the hard way it couldn't be done (and grab any remaining wealth in the process).

Expand full comment

Indeed, technological progress has slowed down in nearly every aspect. https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-rise-and-stagnation-of-modernity.html

It isn't likely to speed up any time soon in the near or distant future either. https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2015/01/technology-and-progress.html

Expand full comment

Do autonomous robots on wheels, then bipedal, powered by AI qualify for technological advancement? Not 100% here yet but coming within a decade, the most. This one technology is prone to change civilization as we know it.

Expand full comment

Ed Dutton, I think it is, argues that it's not a matter of low hanging fruit. Geniuses see beyond what the rest of us can imagine. There is nothing low hanging about the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics. Sometimes, once something is invented or discovered it can seem "obvious," "easy," low-hanging fruit, to the rest of us, but it wasn't before the discovery. So, the argument goes that institutions have weeded out disagreeable geniuses in favor of agreeable conformists and people are generally dumber thanks to smart educated women failing to have children.

Expand full comment

"Geniuses see beyond what the rest of us can imagine."

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see. - Schopenhauer

Expand full comment

For as long as it persists, dysgenic fertility will presumably tend to retard beneficial technological innovation in the first-world societies where it is firmly entrenched.

Expand full comment

Great article, but referring to Metapedia instead of Wikipedia would give more credibility to the arguments. Wikipedia is illogical. Exemplia gratia, if Germans were failing with the contaminated water, why build a nuclear program to nuke Germany??? There is also a lot of pictures from Chicago, but no one from Germany. All the authors involved in the thread about Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders were jews but no mention about their own self-destructive pursuit of status. The ending about nanoparticles is scientific rabble-rauser.

Expand full comment

This is one of the things that also bugged me about the people making claims about AI. There are several instances where, in order to believe them, you have to be very willing to accept assumptions or claims that make “sense” but also don’t have any good reason to believe they are true. This includes some of the silliest statements imaginable about nanotechnology and what feels like a need to completely ignore the laws of physics. They get away with this for themselves by just saying “we can imagine something so smart that we don’t understand it, that thing can do whatever it wants,” which often just feels like an excuse for them to write science fiction but feel like prophets.

Expand full comment