Thread: We are witnessing a new scientific 'Golden Age'

Originally Posted by oldjar07

Bull(*)(*)(*)(*), how come people are paying more in real money for gas and energy than they were 20 years ago then?

And food also; you forgot that.

Anyways, the answer to your question is simple: Malthus' Law.

But of course a lot of braindead people will deny that Malthus' Law is obviously true.

Originally Posted by robot

How do you measure how much we know?

I can't remember the exact statistic, but I think more human life has occured since the beggining of the twentiethy century than the entirety before it. So it's easily arguable that in the last 100 years we've more than doubled our knowledge.

Originally Posted by jhffmn

I can't remember the exact statistic, but I think more human life has occured since the beggining of the twentiethy century than the entirety before it. So it's easily arguable that in the last 100 years we've more than doubled our knowledge.

Who's "we"? Most people don't know jack (*)(*)(*)(*) about anything other than pop music and pop culture and video games and (*)(*)(*)(*)ty (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)bag movies like "Fast and Furious" and what's going on in their corner of Facebook.

Originally Posted by jhffmn

I can't remember the exact statistic, but I think more human life has occured since the beggining of the twentiethy century than the entirety before it. So it's easily arguable that in the last 100 years we've more than doubled our knowledge.

Nah, that's made up. It's thought that between 60 billion and 110 billion people have ever lived.

Originally Posted by Someone

Yes. The technological singularity proposal seems closer than ever. There's some potentially revolutionary technologies in computing that are going to hit in the relatively near future. This will have trickle-down effects in the rest of the sciences, greatly expanding the pace of new research.

Computers have been advancing at about the same rate for 60 years. What makes this point in time so special? Yes, I believe there will be a technological singularity, but I don't think that will happen for at least another 30 years. Of course there will be trickle down effects as computers get more powerful, but I haven't seen much progress yet that resulted from computers.

Originally Posted by Someone

Turns out that people work better when they enjoy what they do and have copious free time. Productivity peaks at roughly 35 work-hours a week.



Not even remotely true.

A lot of people spend half their time at work checking their phone or messing around on the internet. We wouldn't have to work 40 or even 35 hours a week if there was more productivity.

Originally Posted by Someone

So-called "big data" is changing the way the world looks at... just about everything. Computing is moving from a set of technologies that serve as tools to a set of technologies that serve as intelligence enhancement. Up until now, computers have mainly just enabled human thinkers to perform work more quickly; this latest wave of computing technologies will enhance the user's ability to think about problems. It's a fundamental change of perspective. Large data sets are becoming increasingly less difficult to work with, expanding the scope of research dramatically.



Not even close. The 21st century has so far definitely been a scientific golden age. The pace of new developments and research is dramatically higher today than it was in, say, the 1980s, which was itself much faster than the 1940s. To use the futurist concept, we are quickly approaching a technological singularity. The next wave of technologies will be oriented in the direction of improving human intelligence and decision-making--the core foundation of a push towards posthuman intelligence (though I think it is very likely that it would be an organizational sort of intelligence, not some all-knowing AI sort of situation).



We've had more medical progress in the last 10 years than in the fifty years before it. Medicine today is radically different from medicine fifty years ago, to say nothing of a century ago. Stem cells and genetic therapy have completely changed the game. No one fifty years ago would have even thought of attempting something like a skin gun, or actually growing new body parts to replace damaged organs... as we can do today for an increasingly wide array of organs.

Certainly, there were a great many megaprojects in the 20th century... but today that has been replaced by a more quiet and distributed sort of research. Rather than focusing immense effort into a handful of projects, we as a society devote far more resources to ubiquitous research. Revolutionary technologies are pretty commonplace these days. Radical concepts that would have been science fiction in the 1990s are reality today--especially in medicine, computing, and material science.



No way. This is definitely a scientific high point. It may not be directed at huge national megaprojects, but it's certainly far more ubiquitous and effective today.

Actually, medical progress is happening too fast if we don't have a dramatically better energy source to sustain a growing population. I don't care that much about the progress of medicine unless it actually makes health care cheaper. Every new advance with medicine just seems to push the price of health care up. Computing has advanced at the same rate for 60 years, so what makes this point in time so special? AI won't be widespread until about 2030-2040, and we have been working on AI since as long as we have had computers and we will continue to have to research a lot of stuff until that happens, so again what makes this point in time so special? I think computers are pretty worthless without AI, so I'd maybe call the 2030's a scientific golden age. Materials science is an important area, but is it really progressing any faster than it has in the past? Nanotechnology hasn't had much of an effect yet, so I would say nanotechnology's golden age will probably be in the 2020's and extend much further than that.

Originally Posted by DeathStar

And food also; you forgot that.

Anyways, the answer to your question is simple: Malthus' Law.

But of course a lot of braindead people will deny that Malthus' Law is obviously true.

Energy is food. If energy is cheaper food is cheaper, and it can be grown in more areas. Materials science will also improve food production. If we can make a strong, light, cheap material, then we can make vertical farming cheap. Artificial intelligence can work on these farms as well making labor cheaper, and genetic engineering will help crops grow better. I don't see a problem with population growth as long as technology keeps improving.

Originally Posted by DeathStar

Who's "we"? Most people don't know jack (*)(*)(*)(*) about anything other than pop music and pop culture and video games and (*)(*)(*)(*)ty (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)bag movies like "Fast and Furious" and what's going on in their corner of Facebook.

That's true, and one of the reasons why I don't necessarily call computers so far progress.

Originally Posted by DeathStar

And food also; you forgot that.

Anyways, the answer to your question is simple: Malthus' Law.

But of course a lot of braindead people will deny that Malthus' Law is obviously true.

If Malthus was correct, we wouldn't have the population we have now.