That science will progress and create new discoveries and new technologies. False, most discoveries have been made and applied, there will be very little real progress in the future, most will just be gadgets and variations on a theme, like an LCD TV instead of a flat screen. For example, throw away cameras were the most advanced and cost effective way to make pictures, digital cameras force you to use computers, printers etc.
Given that science and technology have mostly finished delivering, they will force upon us worse and worse products, worse and worse arrangements. They will be forced to make life harder in order for them to then try to simplify what they made harder, and make life even harder, and then try to simplify even more in an endless loop of negative progress. Aside for the fact that the real risk is science and technology GONE AMUCK creating HORROR SCIENCE FICTION SCENARIOS like infinitely complex financial - economic - legal - technological systems that no one knows how to operate anymore.
An example is cell phones, blackberries, the 24 hour office, availability etc. What this creates is a bunch of useless work that serves only to create more useless work in an endless loop of greater time spent on activites that DO NOT PRODUCE ANYTHING AT ALL, BUT MOSTLY PRODUCE MORE DAMAGE (like the financial “industry’s” subprime loan mess and the health care labirynth). This effectively is creating NEGATIVE GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT IN THE SENSE OF USING UP RESOURCES FOR AN ACTIVITY THAT DOESN’T IMPROVE SOCIETY’S CONDITION but just makes a few rich and most poorer.
Real progress of a society is based on many simple but fundamental public goods: WATER AVAILABILITY, INDOOR PLUBMING IN HOMES, SIMPLE BASIC HOUSING, HEATING AND COOLING OF HOMES, ELECTRICITY, BASIC FOOD, BASIC HEALTH CARE, BASIC POLICE AND FIRE DEPT. etc.
Real wealth is having cheap, optimized and well funded PUBLIC GOODS AND INFRASTRUCTURE.
Ultimately, socialism is inevitable, because with the excuse of "new products, “new startups” and new “skills” to justify the "meritocracy and “competitve system”, we are fooling people into thinking some DESERVE MORE THAN OTHERS. THIS IS FALSE, Most people are average and just need their basic goods, very few have anything that distinguishes them from the millions of other average people, BUT A PRIMITIVE ECONOMIC SYSTEM DENIES THIS SIMPLE TRUTH TRYING TO SHOVE DOWN THE THROAT OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE THIS SICK IDEA THAT YOU ARE SOMEHOW “BETTER” THAN THE OTHER, that you somehow “deserve” more. This may be why the emphasis has always been on science and mathematics as only the brightest and most skilled can achieve in these fields, effectively filtering out many millions of average people. But most of these skills are not very useful and productive in the end, are not that important, most mathematical skills resemble those of a chess player, good at manipulating symbols and rules, but doesn’t necessarily produce much of an economic output. As an example Russia has had good mathematicians but has always been very poor. Why ?
Every household will be paid at least 2,000 dollars a month for the basics, THIS MONEY WILL BE SIMPLY GIVEN OUT BY THE CENTRAL SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT.
This leaves the problem of what to do with millions of people that are a form of EXCESS CAPCITY, like all the EXCESS CAPACITY our economies have already generated, millions of computers, cell phones, tvs, products, consumption etc.
Presently all this excess capacity in terms of people creates increasing complexity in all endeavors, legal, financial, political etc. This complexity creates higher and higher instabilities and chaos risks.
They will have to learn to take it easy, the workday MUST BE REDUCED TO NO MORE THAN 2 TO 3 HOURS A DAY AT MOST, Technology has optimized and automated most work, THE REMAINING HEAVY AND FACTORY LABOR must be COMPLETELY AUTOMATED WITH ROBOTS, AND IN THIS FIELD THERE WILL STILL BE A GOOD DEAL OF RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY, BUT MOSTLY ONLY IN THIS FIELD.
No matter how hard you try THERE ARE ONLY SO MANY POSSIBLE INNOVATIONS AND INVENTIONS. You can’t create more than what we already have, you can change the configuration and produce alot of information, like all the artists on myspace, but fundamentally, 90 % OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION HAS BEEN ACHIEVED AND CREATED. What is left are the breadcrums.
So the mythology of having more researchers and science, more startups, more “new products” that has been the fundamental ideology of the advanced western economies has been exposed in all its hype and fakeness. More research will not bring anything more at the table, there are no further “new products”, possible.
The future will be in INSTANT SINGULARITIES, minds self manipulating and creating new internal universes, even thought itself is a form of neural circuit manipulation, so it can also be ACHIEVED WITHOUT ANY TECHNOLOGY BUT JUST PHILOSOPHY - MEDITATION.
The excess capacity in terms of people can be used in wars and conflict, as usual.
Russia didn’t have capitalism to use their technology, but many went to the USA and have gotten rich by US companies using capitalism to put their technical knowledge into products.
People are not equal, they are all different and in capitalism the best reach the top, because of their technical skills like BILL GATES. That is the way is should be.
Socialsm has always failed and will always fail, there are trillions of new products, discoveries, markets, and jobs out there that must be done and will be done, but not under any socialist system, and in fact all those things will be done only in the USA as all the rest of the world is mostly a failed socialist state. The ones who succeed the most and become rich will be the mathematicians and scientists as they have skills that the average people can never have.
If global famine is one bad crop away, then surely there is an investment angle. On dips, the companies to focus on are mostly the same as I described in my year-opening column, "10 market predictions for a glum '08 …
Just one question, if there is a crisis in food, would any “investment angle” still make any sense ?
All these doom and gloom theories are hype, are fake and false, starting from global warming and ending with peak oil.
The USA is and will remain for decades the only real consumer market in the world, that means that all the EXCESS CAPACITY of the world has no place to discharge all that capacity but the USA. All the productive forces of JAPAN, KOREA and CHINA only really have the USA market to go. So they will keep on producing and dumping everything in the USA, no doubt about it. The USA will pay less and less all the goods those mostly third world countries produce and will become RICHER AND RICHER. It will take decades for China and India to even reach an internal consumer market like the EU had in the 60s. In fact the next closest market is the EU, but they consume less than 1/3 the US consumes having almost double population! The EU is an old retiring house destined to become irrelevant in the near future.
Oil can go even up to 1,000 dollars a barrel the US will continue and increase their use of cars, McMansions, and they will be even bigger and suck up even more gas. The EU pays gas 3 times more than the USA and they have been having a boom of SUVs, so just imagine how the USA will grow in the next decade, beyond your wildest dreams.
Science and Technology, which is only done in the USA, all the other countries mostly suck at it, will progress towards resolving all the environmental problems, and will allow the USA structure to expand outside the USA. Science and Technology haven’t even begun to operate at full throttle, in a few years they will produce all kinds of goods and achievments beyond your wildest dreams.
The USA itself will have to completely americanize the world given the huge excess capacity that even it can no longer support, after being saturated with wealth, mega cars, McMansions and riches beyond anything, it will have to create the same all over China, Brazil, Siberia, there will be thousands of superhighways across the world, millions of airports, millions of atomic energy plants. etc.
All thse doom and gloomers are losers, they haven’t a clue of what is in store, there will be such a huge growth of consumption, cars, goods, all the resources will be depleted in a few years, but science and technology will promptly substitute them, YOU GUYS HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA.
Let’s see how the USA economy grows 5 to 6 % in 2010 , etc. then I want to hear all the Dommers and Gloomers…
Hahaha. Good joke! I find it hilarious that you give a percentage for how much technological innovation we have achieved - as if we can know that technology has limits! For me to believe you, I would have to know the limits of technological innovation. And right now, it doesn’t seem likely that there are any limits. to know that you’re approaching a limit, you must know the limit.
Sure, I agree that there are a lot of crap or useless gadgets and devices, but how do you get that they will be forced on us, and how do you get that technology has come to an end. We make progress all the time. How about medical technology? How about video game technology? Want to travel to other parts of the galaxy? the universe? I believe that it will be possible someday. How about space in general? How about genetics? How about computers! Programming?
nameta - one would almost think you had read an economics book or two. Or maybe the New york Times Buisness section. You are correct, of course. But it takes actual facts to be correct. Which is, evidently, not much fun.
Me, I just bought a brand new car, and I wait tables for a living.
Which I thought was fun.
Cause it was cheap. So is the gas I put in it.
It’s a Ford-Mitsubishi. The US has already started to “expand”. There is almost no such thing as a “foreign” or a “domestic” car in this market. This car is several orders of magnitude better than the cars my father bouight when he was my age. And, in constant dollars, much cheaper.
There are no Medical Innovations anymore, there are just more and more drugs that make you sicker and sicker and make the Insurance companies richer and richer. MEDICINE IS TOTALLY OVER, is in reverse progress mode, is making people sicker and sicker, aside from the fact that Medicine no longer even exists, IT HAS BECOME SIMPLY AN INSURANCE AGENCY AND A BUNCH OF CROOKS ROBBING THE POOR.
Science and Technology are finished and have been finished for years now. There is nothing left anymore. IT IS TOTALLY OVER. What is left is the Instant Singularity, minds that have new neural circuits, that have a new design, that are wired in very different and intricate ways. In this field, even thought by itself, that what was once called philosophy or some kind of bizarre meditation are actually an equivalent mathematical form of direct material neural circuit manipulation, so with these internal thought systems you will reach the Technological Singularity as in entering new worlds and universes with new laws of physics, new emotion systems, timeless structures etc. These things have been done, this form of Technological Singularity has already been achieved.
So as we enter the STONE AGE, we will be inside Technological Singularities that don’t depend on any technology or any civilization, a new A SOLID STATE CIVILIZATION.
I think it is quite interesting to note that the OP was generated on a computer connected to the internet infrastructure, and delivered here in a few seconds.
Is this thread an activity that does not produce anything at all? hmmmm. perhaps you shouldn’t answer that.
nameta9,
I agree that resources will eventually be depleted, and I agree that I have “absolutely no idea.” So by all means, do share with us what science and technology will use to substitute for those depleted resources. I really need to have an idea of what that would be.
Public transporation, buses, luxury buses, working from home through computers, virtual realities etc . Electric cars that have new powerful capacitors that can store electrical energy etc. Solar and Wind energy, much shorter work day, more sleeping maybe.
And science will solve all the problems in a jiffy, and the US and the world will be infinitely rich because we live in an infinite resource society.
An example of what nameta and I are saying is “peak oil”. This figure, this date, has consistently moved forward. The world’s oil supply changes, not because new oil is produced, but because new oil is discovered - partly through better technology, and partly because what is usable oil changes. New methods of detection and recovery make more of the extant oil available. We have been “running out” of oil almost since it was discovered. We have also been “discovering” “new” oil consistently during that time.
Whale oil would have been depleted if petroleum hadn’t taken its place. Petroleum will never be depleted, because technology and price will dictate that a different source of energy will be put to use before all the oil is gone.
Heck, we might have run out of stone if iron hadn’t been developed.
In fact he was right, electricity can be discovered only once and so the structure of the atom. Once that science is done, it is done for good, it is over, there is none left. So electricity has been discovered for many years now, so science has been over for more than a century basically. We are in reverse progress now, we are forgetting science and technology, we can’t remember how to go to the moon, we can’t pull it off anymore, we are going backwards all the time, we are heading straight to the STONE AGE.
Only a few thousand people still know of how some of our science and technology really works, the rest just use it like black boxes, those that know it are 50 years old or older and have been laid off and have all forgotten almost everything anyways, so the new generation doesn’t know anything about science and technology. In 20 years they will have all forgotten everything anyways, the Internet killed what was left of science since it is just an entertainment vehicle, a kind of sophisticated TV set, IT IS ALL OVER NOW, WE ARE IN FAST REVERSE PROGRESS MODE.
What has killed science is also the huge amount of information all these fake scientists generate, they are just papers for the sake of it, to get money and financing, it is not science, it is really all over now.
What is even more frightening is that with computers and Operating Systems having millions of instructions and chips having millions of trnsistors, not even GOD knows how they all work anymore. We are really all clueless at this point. Intel engineers and CISCO network scientists don’t know how all their chips and firmware - software work anymore, they are at this point totally lost because they are so complex, obscure, it is virtually impossible to know what is going on anymore. What are all those million of transistors doing in that special CISCO router chip anyway ? Who will ever know anymore ?
Everything will fall apart, and we will all be left in the dark, searching for WATER, WE WON’T HAVE WATER ANYMORE, WATER WILL BE OUR GOAL IN THE FUTURE, JUST LIKE IN THE THIRD WORLD, JUST TO DRINK WILL MEAN TO HAVE SUCCESSFULLY LIVED ONE EXTRA HOUR.
fruitcake, fruitcake on the net who is the gloomiest of them all ? Just because your are clueless doesn’t mean the whole world is. There are many scientists who at this very moment are making trillions of breakthroughs, you have no idea, you need to drink some water and get a grip.
I know, this has no real barring on the thread as whole, but this caught me.
They were not the most cost effective or most advanced method, because the cost of disposing of them is high over all. The QUALITY of the pictures was also horrible. It was the cheapest way to get cheap, nasty pictures. Plus, for 5 bucks, you get 24 pictures, which you have to pay to get developed. A digital camera costs 100-200 dollars now a day, from which you can get an unlimited amount of GOOD pictures that you do not have to pay to get developed. The total cost of camera, computer, and printer would be much lower than constantly buying disposable cameras.
Yah, you’re probably right…it’s probably impossible to find knowledge in books, or in the many minds responsible for creating the technology in the first place.
You aren’t making a lot of sense. But then again neither does the universe…yet. That’s why we continue to experiment with quantum physics and our brains and each other…to make more sense of things. Look how far we’ve come technologically! At what point would you say we finished - at what point would you say we advanced as far as we could?
How do you define technological innovation? And why do you say we’re done? All you keep saying is that we’re done, but you cannot support your claims. Nobody can support your claims because they are very weak. In fact, there’s a lot of support to the contrary claim - that a lot more innovation is still to come.
400 years ago the catholic church decided that everything was known and there was no new knowledge to discover. They were wrong.
200 years ago it was also decided that everything was known. Those people were wrong.
The law of conservation of knowledge states that the amount of knowledge a mind has is constant and cannot be created or destroyed, increased or diminished. So the amount of knowledge we have has always been constant and cannot increase, it is the same amount of knowledge we had in the STONE AGE. Only the configuration or the shape and design of that knowledge changes, in fact we have the same amount of knowledge that an electron or a universe has. Knowledge is information is energy is only an arbitrary invention of minds which are an arbitrary configuration of mass-energy (energy talks to itself and thinks it is saying something) …
This leaves the problem of what to do with millions of people that are a form of EXCESS CAPCITY, like all the EXCESS CAPACITY our economies have already generated, millions of computers, cell phones, tvs, products, consumption etc.