Comment by cookingmyserver
7 days ago
As an aside, I've always thought of this when listening to discussions of technological advancement. I often hear the argument that in the early 20th century many people thought we were near the apex of technology. That often gets brought up when people claim the same today. I don't think we are quite there, but I get a feeling that the limit we are approaching is more a limit, not of knowledge, but of resources and engineering.
We have literal alchemy, but we don't have the capability to make useful amounts of gold. It is not that we don't know how to, but that it is not practical. How much more will material science, chemistry, and maybe even physics give us in practical (technology-wise) knowledge? Plenty for sure, but I don't think our rate of technological advancement will continue in these fields. That said, we have so much to learn even if it is not immediately applicable to technology.
Where I think there is an absolute abundance of applicable and practical knowledge to be collected is in the fields of biochemistry and biology. We haven't even scratched the surface there. We may never find a way to travel faster than light but if we can adapt our bodies to last for hundreds or thousands of years in stasis it may not matter. To me, being able to easily manipulate biology is so much more dangerous than nuclear proliferation. Anyways, not an expert of any of these fields.
> How much more will material science, chemistry, and maybe even physics give us in practical (technology-wise) knowledge? Plenty for sure, but I don't think our rate of technological advancement will continue in these fields.
Strong disagree. We have only scratched the surface of material science and chemistry; we are typically working with the bulk properties of relativity simple materials.
There’s a very wide design space of metamaterials and molecular machines that we have not explored.
Material science is still largely an art consisting of educated guesses, formulation followed by exhaustive (and exhausting) testing of very tiny variations in composition and process. This is mainly because while we have good theoretical frameworks, mathematical techniques and computation capabilities that works angstrom scale downwards (kinda... I think first principles computation of properties of collections of atoms beyond a few light ones is still difficult) or milli scale upwards (think FEM and similar used in mechanical engineering), nano to micro scale where all material properties arise is basically un-computable. Not being someone gifted with intuition of advanced math & calculus that could tackle inventing such, the nature of graduate work in the field did not appeal to me personally. You can see how Semiconductor Fabs & catalyst labs for instance have nevertheless successfully used the systematic exhaustive iterative experimentation approach to deliver massive progress.
Solving for computability of the nano-to-micro scale will absolutely drive a massive transformation in the world much like the industrial and information technology revolutions. Biological revolution i believe requies basically the simila computability to manipulate proteins though there seem to be shortcuts leveraging bacteria. In recent years that I occasionally have seen papers that hint at progress on math and computability at a nano to micro scale. So I'm quite hopeful we'll have massive progress technologically
> approaching is more a limit... of resources and engineering
Pah. The singularity is scheduled for around next Tuesday and we haven't even made a Dyson sphere yet.
I agree that there's an interesting question how far we can lean into this space of applying the knowledge and technology capability we have, because for however far ahead of the outer limits of our capabilities get in the outer limits of our understanding from that matter, there's a frontier of applicability that also has to advance in the wake of those. It's interesting to consider if there's any principle that articulates the relationship between that frontier and the frontier of discovery.
In some senses, I've thought we'd hit a wall in part just because of the highly visible challenges to democracy, the wall on processing power of computers, how enshittification has caught up services and taken them down from the inside, not being able to pull off things like high-speed rail, the halting progress of self-driving vehicles, or just realizing that the buildings that exist in cities are going to stay there for a long time and not be subject to any overnight cyberpunk makeover.
But I think if our era was not known for the threats to democracy, pandemics, and war, we might have otherwise have had enough breathing space to remember this historical era as one of true, truly major advances in the frontiers of science. There's plenty on that front that would have been "enough" to mark this historical era as a distinct one. CRISPR and AI, by themselves, are enough to be the signature achievements of an era. And so far as it relates back to your point, I suppose on balance I would say I feel that the advances we have made don't yet testify to an imminent slowdown in our ability to translate from a frontier of our knowledge into applicability. So I suppose I understand your idea but feel a little bit more optimistic.