Report Card for Donald Trump

[pbrower2a]

(01-12-2017, 01:57 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: All of this shit assumes a monotonic "improvement function" or "progress curve."

Then there is the black swan.

Something that rhymes with the Age of Migrations.

Automation?

Hell ... not if but when we hit the inevitable mother-of-all-curve-balls (or rather, it hits us), you'll be lucky to have running water, sewage / trash removal, electricity, gas, etc.

Economic progress looks like a titration curve. 



To describe it -- the technology of George Washington's time was more like that of the time of Tutankhamen than that of the time of John F. Kennedy. The world changed that slowly. Man could adapt even genetically to technological change. Whatever change happened, practically anyone could understand.  Not until the mid-nineteenth century (the railroads, steamboats, and the reaping machine -- the latter still pulled by horses) did technological change become sharp.

Railroads, reapers, electricity, steamboats, and the telegraph may demonstrate the early hastening of technological change. In the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, the  remarkable inventions of Thomas Alva Edison introduced many objects that we would now consider basic. That's before I discuss such inventions as the telegraph, automobile, and wireless telegraphy associated with a 'one-trick-pony' inventor like Bell or Marconi, or some collaboration of inventors.  There may still be low-tech trades like barbering and house-painting, but in general nobody could confuse the world of 2017 with that of 1917.

For the last century or so we have expected technology to supply an easy fix to numerous personal and economic problems. We may be approaching the end of such a possibility. The basic technologies are likely all done, and technological advances are largely adaptations of existing technologies. Technologies have gone from potential discovery through tinkering (as Edison came up with his now-basic inventions) to requiring the collaboration of multitudes of engineers and scientists. One is not going to make a basic innovation in a garage anymore.

We may have begun to pass the vertical stage of progress through technological innovation. Further refinements of technology are becoming intellectually difficult, and may be running into physical reality at the scale of sub-atomic particles, and obvious limit to technological power. Technology too complicated for customer use will not enjoy mass use and will be difficult to market.

Hereon we may have to solve our new problems the hard way -- with solutions that have nothing to do with technology but may need to be addressed in institutional choices that can be no better than the moral choices of those who run the institutions.