The Pace of Change Today
All and all, it’s a very interesting reminder and in contrast to today, where we often take change and progress for granted. I’m reminded how Moore’s law was never really just about computing power, to many it represents the inevitable pace of technology. Ultimately though, I think that people forget that Moore’s law is just an observation, and not a predictor. (Ie. Kurtzweil’s inevitable technological singularity) I believe Moore’s law was just a tangent to a curve at that point in time, and as we go farther away from that time, the less the tangent will fit with observation. Already the pace is slowing from the original double every two years, and any reasonable understanding would tell us that there is a natural limit to the capacity of materials, it cannot double for much longer, in my opinion.
Although progress in many fields continues, I wonder if the current quick pace of scientific and technological progress we felt is actually slowing and stablizing, far from speeding up exponentially. Looking backwards to the prizes awarded for the top discoveries and achievements in Science this past century, it nearly seems like there was this huge rush mid-century, the new foundations of Quantum Physics and new conceptual understandings in biology, medicine etc, that were ripe to be extended and applied along their natural lines. And now that the rush is mostly over, the pace carries on, but slower. Maybe it’s the rising cost of research and the recession. Maybe it’s just the limit of our current understanding and our idealogical foundations need to be shored and improved before we can build bigger and better things on top of them. Maybe the days when we could explore science with half-baked guesses and still garner results is over, and research will need to become more targeted and focused…
Even technology seems to have slowed some what. In the mid-90’s we got the Internet. But yet it changes slower than you’d think an immediately responding, fluid system ought to change: in the recent years has seen the rise of Web 2.0, which offered more user-driven content and in this year was the rise of services like Twitter and Tumblr(xd) that allow the internet to be even more of what it is already: even more immediate and relevant. But compared to the years before, the gains in recent years are only a modest improvement compared to the heady, early days of the internet.
