Exponential Technological Progress

[AWPrime]

Anything involved in the real world is finite; forms of energy, number of substances, efficiency improvements, possible knowledge per person, amount of food grown on land, amount of fresh water even the stability of an civilization is limited.

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As we gain more knowledge we must support that knowledge. And because the human mind can only integrate a part of science, specialization will become necessary. The relevant information will then be more splintered into more fields and therefore harder to use.

Then there are diminishing returns on scientific progress. This means the more complex it gets the more resources it will take to take a similar step forward. So at some point, some experiments will be deemed too expensive and trivial to be performed by anyone.

We can see this happening as professional scientists concern themselves with more and more narrow area of specialist expertise. And your amateur scientist who performs useful science is a rarity nowadays.

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We can always hope for technology to come along and make the technology required for scientific progress less resource-intensive, but since this technology is also subject to fundamental diminishing returns, it is pretty much inevitable that we will come to a point where everything grinds slowly to a halt.

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However you could maybe reset the point of diminishing returns with (new base values); genetic manipulation for higher intelligence and more energy available with fusion energy. But that still leaves limits and I have a feeling that we would waste most of the new resources on trivial matters.

In the end the most realistic scenario would be up and down periods of technological advancement. With a general upward trend so long as nothing truly apocalyptic happens.

 

[drkitten]

Care to back it up?

Already done.

 

[drkitten]

We can always hope for technology to come along and make the technology required for scientific progress less resource-intensive,

Always has so far. Dr. Ehrlich, meet Dr. Simon.

 

[Drooper]

From: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=55386

quote:
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Originally posted by Kevin_Lowe
Technology advances exponentially, so it will be a few centuries at most before the rate of change approaches infinity and we hit whatever physical limits the universe will impose on us.
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That only applies when population and available energy is exponentially as well.

And currect trends are showing that this might not be the case.

Misunderstanding here.

Exponential growth means that the rate of growth will be contstant, not increasing.

Technological progress is the underlying driver of economic growth (adjusted for available labour and capital). It has been remarkable stable over time across countries around the world.

 

[Iconoclast]

Infinity does not exist.

Sure it does, in fact I'm writing a paper on it at the moment, I'm trying to find out if it's as big as everybody says. It's taking forever.

 

[drkitten]

Re: Re: Exponential Technological Progress

Exponential growth means that the rate of growth will be contstant, not increasing.

Rate of growth measured as a percentage will be constant, but not in absolute terms. In absolute terms, exponential growth does in fact mean a continuously increasing rate of growth.

For example, I put a thousand monetary units of your choice in an investment paying ten percent a year compound interest. The rate of growth will be exponential. Today I have a thousand units. Next year I'll have 1100. In seven years, I'll have about 2000. In twenty years, I'll have about 8000.

But if you look at how much money I'm making, I'm getting an income of 100/year next year, but I will be getting an income of 800 units/year in 2025. So in absolute terms, my "rate of growth" has increased eight-fold in twenty years.

In discussing resources and so forth, it's usually the absolute terms that are of interest. For example, the local airport may have 100 flights a day (and be growing at 10%/year). Twenty years from now, it will be taking in 800 flights/day -- which means that someone somewhere will have needed to essentially build seven complete new airports to handle the traffic. At present technology, this might be an unreasonable demand on local resources, money, and labor. This could cause a serious growth bottleneck.

However, if airport-building technologies improve at 20%/year over the same period, it will probably be cheaper and easier to build eight new airports than to maintain the existing one. There will be no bottleneck.

Historically, there has never been a (long-term) bottleneck.

 

[Ziggurat]

I believe current scientific thinking is that your school teacher was wrong (conservation of angular momentum or something -- 99% of the mass of the solar system is in the Sun, but 99% of the angular momentum is in the planets, and that Just Ain't Right.)

This claim (which is sometimes used by creationists) suffers from two fundamental problems, the assumption that there is no mechanism for the sun to lose angular momentum, and the assumption that angular momentum should be evenly distributed to begin with. Both assumptions are wrong, and the reason is magnetic fields.

The sun is constantly ejecting energetic plasma that goes flying off into deep space. As the sun rotates, the magnetic field it creates also rotates, and the charged plasma gets pulled around with this magnetic field. As the plasma moves away from the sun, the magnetic field tries to keep it rotating at the same angular velocity, but as it increases its distance from the sun, this requires that it increase its angular momentum. At large enough distances, the solar wind breaks free from the sun's magnetic field, but in the mean time there's still been a transfer of angular momentum from the sun to the solar wind.

Going back farther to the initial development of the solar system, the effects of magnetic fields on the dynamics of nebular gases can be quite significant, and provide a mechanism for the transfer of angular momentum from one part of the nebula to another. If some of that gas loses angular momentum to other parts of the nebula, that's the gas that's going to collapse into the center first. So we can't assume that there was anything approaching even distribution to begin with.

 

[Drooper]

Re: Re: Re: Exponential Technological Progress

Rate of growth measured as a percentage will be constant, but not in absolute terms. In absolute terms, exponential growth does in fact mean a continuously increasing rate of growth.

For example, I put a thousand monetary units of your choice in an investment paying ten percent a year compound interest. The rate of growth will be exponential. Today I have a thousand units. Next year I'll have 1100. In seven years, I'll have about 2000. In twenty years, I'll have about 8000.

But if you look at how much money I'm making, I'm getting an income of 100/year next year, but I will be getting an income of 800 units/year in 2025. So in absolute terms, my "rate of growth" has increased eight-fold in twenty years.

In discussing resources and so forth, it's usually the absolute terms that are of interest. For example, the local airport may have 100 flights a day (and be growing at 10%/year). Twenty years from now, it will be taking in 800 flights/day -- which means that someone somewhere will have needed to essentially build seven complete new airports to handle the traffic. At present technology, this might be an unreasonable demand on local resources, money, and labor. This could cause a serious growth bottleneck.

However, if airport-building technologies improve at 20%/year over the same period, it will probably be cheaper and easier to build eight new airports than to maintain the existing one. There will be no bottleneck.

Historically, there has never been a (long-term) bottleneck.

Thanks for the remedial maths.

A rate of change is a first derivative, or percentage change in my book.


With regard to your example, you have fallen for the classic Malthusian misconeption. An easy mistake to make.


This is all extremely well trodden territory in economic literature. "Limits to Growth" do not exist (or not in the form that you seem to believe).

 

[Drooper]

Re: Re: Re: Exponential Technological Progress

Rate of growth measured as a percentage will be constant, but not in absolute terms. In absolute terms, exponential growth does in fact mean a continuously increasing rate of growth.

For example, I put a thousand monetary units of your choice in an investment paying ten percent a year compound interest. The rate of growth will be exponential. Today I have a thousand units. Next year I'll have 1100. In seven years, I'll have about 2000. In twenty years, I'll have about 8000.

But if you look at how much money I'm making, I'm getting an income of 100/year next year, but I will be getting an income of 800 units/year in 2025. So in absolute terms, my "rate of growth" has increased eight-fold in twenty years.

In discussing resources and so forth, it's usually the absolute terms that are of interest. For example, the local airport may have 100 flights a day (and be growing at 10%/year). Twenty years from now, it will be taking in 800 flights/day -- which means that someone somewhere will have needed to essentially build seven complete new airports to handle the traffic. At present technology, this might be an unreasonable demand on local resources, money, and labor. This could cause a serious growth bottleneck.

However, if airport-building technologies improve at 20%/year over the same period, it will probably be cheaper and easier to build eight new airports than to maintain the existing one. There will be no bottleneck.

Historically, there has never been a (long-term) bottleneck.

Thanks for the remedial maths.

A rate of change is a first derivative, or percentage change in my book.


With regard to your example, you have fallen for the classic Malthusian misconeption. An easy mistake to make.

In economics (which is the area of discussion here) it is all about rates of growth. Economies tend to gravitate to dynamic, rather than static, steady states for specific reasons.


This is all extremely well trodden territory in economic literature. "Limits to Growth" do not exist (or at last in the form implied in this thread).

 

[AWPrime]

Re: Re: Exponential Technological Progress

Technological progress is the underlying driver of economic growth (adjusted for available labour and capital). It has been remarkable stable over time across countries around the world.

That is an illusion. Because it has been more or less like this in the last 100 years, doesn't mean that it always use to be so.

If you look in the distant past you would see that my scenario fits reality better.

In the end the most realistic scenario would be up and down periods of technological advancement. With a general upward trend so long as nothing truly apocalyptic happens.

 

[drkitten]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Exponential Technological Progress

Thanks for the remedial maths.

I'm sorry you need it.

A rate of change is a first derivative, or percentage change in my book.

Then you need a new book. For example, "velocity" (or more generally "speed") is often defined as the "rate of change" of position (or as the first derivative of position), but the usual units by which velocity is measured are absolute -- kilometers per hours, meters per second, light seconds per century. Look at the problems given here Or, for that matter, type "first derivative" and "rate of change" into your favorite web search engine and see if the word "percentage" appears anywhere.

A ten-percent increase in my speed if I'm moving at 10m/sec would be a 1m/sec increase. A ten-percent increase if I'm moving at 100m/sec would be 10 m/sec. At least in my book, 10m/sec is clearly greater than 1m/sec (by 9 m/sec).

With regard to your example, you have fallen for the classic Malthusian misconeption. An easy mistake to make.

I have not. Re-read what I wrote.

 

[AWPrime]

Already done.

Still not seeing anything.

Maybe becasue you wishfull thinking and you argument of 'because I say so', isn't worth much.

 

[drkitten]

Re: Re: Re: Exponential Technological Progress

That is an illusion. Because it has been more or less like this in the last 100 years, doesn't mean that it always use to be so.

If you look in the distant past you would see that my scenario fits reality better.

What scenario? Large-scale economic growth has really only existed in the past hundred years or so. In the more distant past, periods of relatively stagnant economic growth were also marked by relatively stagnant technological growth (and vice versa). The most marked improvement in the economic situation in the past two thousand years or so started in the Rennaissance, when technology also started to improve. Prior to that Europe had a thousand year dark age when both technology and economics were largely at a standstill, after the fall of Rome, which resulted in a net loss overall, which in turn followed the Golden Age which was a time of both technical progress and economic improvement.

How far back do you want me to go?

 

[drkitten]

Still not seeing anything.

Maybe becasue you wishfull thinking and you argument of 'because I say so', isn't worth much.

You're right. "Because I say so" isn't worth much.

But "Because Dr. Simon says so, and demonstrated it conclusively it in an experiment jointly with Dr. Ehrlich" is worth substantially more.

Can you name a single instance in the past two thousand years of history where a resource has run out without technology providing an acceptable substitute?

 

[AWPrime]

Sure the Viking colony in Greenland.

Fertile land eroded away and they starved. I guess technology didn't save them.

 

[AWPrime]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Exponential Technological Progress

Large-scale economic growth has really only existed in the past hundred years or so. In the more distant past, periods of relatively stagnant economic growth were also marked by relatively stagnant technological growth (and vice versa). The most marked improvement in the economic situation in the past two thousand years or so started in the Rennaissance, when technology also started to improve. Prior to that Europe had a thousand year dark age when both technology and economics were largely at a standstill, after the fall of Rome, which resulted in a net loss overall, which in turn followed the Golden Age which was a time of both technical progress and economic improvement.

Now can you imagen that I object to your claim: that the trend of technological advancement will continue forever, if it has only been around for such a short periode?

 

[CBL4]

This is one of the sillier threads I have read.

First of all, what does "exponential growth in technology" mean? Do we have a measure a measure of growth I am unfamilar with? How many technos is the invention of the airplane worth? Is this more or less technos than the invention of the microprocessor?

As far as limited resources, why are we assuming the sun is some limitation? We can we get energy from Alpha Centauri when we get there?

The biggest resource needed for technology growth is the human brain. I could make the argument that this resource is going to top out somewhere around 10 billion. This will be a limitting factor in technological advances - at lease until we colonize Mars and Alpha Centauri III. Then brain growth will increase again.

CBL

 

[pauldmin]

Exponential growth in technology, population, whatever will simply not happen unless resources are infinite.

Things like population follow a 'logistic' curve. i.e. An initial exponential growth is following by a slowing down, then an approach to a fixed level. ( Either approaching it gradually or oscillating )

This suggests that technology will have a limit where no further progress can be made without some fundamental shift in the conditions. Even if some new breakthrough pushes the boundary further, a new steady state limit will occur sooner or later.

e.g. Moores Law has still remained true, but we are now reaching the limit of silicon's capability and without any new form of technology, the law will start to follow the logistic model.

 

[Jyera]

From: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=55386
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Kevin_Lowe
Technology advances exponentially, so it will be a few centuries at most before the rate of change approaches infinity and we hit whatever physical limits the universe will impose on us.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That only applies when population and available energy is exponentially as well.

And currect trends are showing that this might not be the case.

Firstly, we need to know the unit of measure.
Unless a unit of measure is given to "Technology" (what ever it means here), it cannot be measured. It is then meaningless to talk about any measure of advance. We cannot even show that it advanced linearly.

Secondly, there is more than one possible "unit of measure".
Simply changing the unit of measure changes the relevance and perspective. If the unit of measure of time is aeon, the technological advancement would be very slow and flat.
(A unit of duration equal to 1E9 YEAR. )

 

[AWPrime]

To bad we can't define technical knowledge in bites.