[ExI] Is future progress moving to virtual reality?

Ben Zaiboc bbenzai at yahoo.com
Sat Mar 9 15:59:04 UTC 2013


BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> We have discussed a few times whether scientific progress is
> slowing
> down. Comparing the huge leap in inventions between 1940 and
> 1980 with
> the Facebook and iPhone inventions of 1980 to 2013.


I'm at a loss to understand the idea that scientific progress is slowing down.  There's a difference between new ideas, and actually making progress.  Maybe there are less "Gee-Whiz" ideas being generated than there used to be, but this in no way detracts from the immense amount of scientific progress being made, daily, these days.

As more and more areas become 'uploaded' into the domain of digital data, they become able to take advantage of Moore's law, and the increase in the amount of information about How The World Works accelerates accordingly.  This represents a mounting head of water, being held back only by human institutions, politics, ancient ideas about how things should be done.  That dam will burst before too long, I feel.  Things like the Open Source movement, Pirate Parties, Maker communities, Hackerspaces, etc., are the cracks in the dam.

Maybe progress is subject to something like 'punctuated equilibrium', but it's definitely not slowing down.

Ben Zaiboc




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