I remember watching the first few episodes of the documentary series From the Earth to the Moon when I was a middle school student in science class. I've always found it amazing and inspiring that in just over a decade, we've gone from launching satellites into space to landing a man on the moon. A similar feeling was renewed when watching Oppenheimer's film this summer, as the first half of that film focuses on the rapid development of the atomic bomb, taking theoretical quantum mechanics into account, and turning it into the first technology that had the effect of single-mindedly ending wars. There is a wonder and reverence for these periods of history simply because of the sheer ambition and stakes involved in these massive engineering projects. These projects have pushed the boundaries of known science and challenged us to reinterpret realms of possibility.
However, when considering today's technological progress, the progress we have made recently has been more consistent and the boundaries we are building are less inspiring than those we have discovered and conquered in years past. I'm inspired by the past, but I find myself somewhat uninterested in the way things are moving now into the future.
The last time we visited the Moon was at the end of 1972. It's been more than fifty years since we've really pushed the limits of human-based space travel. Physics has also slowed in terms of pushing boundaries – the breakthroughs we made in the post-war era were slowly verified at particle colliders, but the new physics of the 1970s and 1980s – such as string theory – yielded very few results outside of it. Some interesting literary and television concepts.
Our greatest achievements and the boundaries we have crossed over the past 50 years have been in the digital realm rather than the physical realm. We were able to make devices cheap and efficient enough to begin invading our institutions in the 1970s and 1980s, unleashing the Internet in the 1990s. Of the Internet – we build tools to traverse and explore it through the 2000s before spending the last decade redesigning the Internet to take it with us wherever we go. However, our progress in digital is slowing down – much of the innovation in the last 20 years has been reinventions and combinations of concepts that have been around for a while now. It is also not clear whether the increasing prevalence of digital technologies in everyday life is a good thing. We are slowing down and perhaps moving in the wrong direction.
Perhaps AI will provide us with a new burst of energy and hope in re-accelerating development in the digital frontier. Perhaps it could even begin to generate insights and discoveries that could begin to push the boundaries in the physical world where we have been stuck, moving slowly, for decades. I have doubts about how far AI will advance and whether AI will expand the boundaries of our frontiers and the number of exploration frontiers rather than temporarily accelerating current trends in the digital realm. It's not that AI is inherently incapable — it's too early to judge current advances in AI — but rather that many AI applications are limited by the imagination of the engineers who build them. It's not that the promise of AI is entirely new; many of the basic concepts are decades old.
If we had maintained our ambitious trajectory since the end of the Space Race, we might have had a colony on Mars, clean-energy fusion power plants, or fully automated manufacturing pipelines. At best, we have bits and pieces of these futures, and we are still decades away from realizing them. I think engineers and scientists fifty years ago would have thought we would be a little closer to “decades ahead.” This is not to say that we have not made progress – the progress we have made seems stagnant, especially in the material area, compared to the progress we were making in the first half of the twentieth century. The world of the mid-twentieth century looks vastly different stylistically, but functionally similar. The world at the end of the nineteenth century will be completely alien to us.
One might argue against technological stagnation, because we have just prioritized exploration and progress in the digital realm. What about potential meta-verses and other untapped digital spaces? Unfortunately, although these seem nice, most of our major problems are still problems in the material world. Poverty is a problem of the world's material resources and still exists in a large part of the world. Climate change is a physical global problem that has the potential to threaten our current way of life if left unchecked or ignored. Perhaps worse, non-light thinking is being proposed as a solution to some of these problems, perhaps partly due to a lack of faith in the ability of technology to solve these problems or due to the negative consequences of technological industrialization that have turned us into turning a blind eye to the evidence that is beginning to emerge. Instead of ignoring these problems, or blaming progress for causing them, we should view these problems as opportunities to open up our entrepreneurial horizons.
Our infrastructure is deteriorating, our manufacturing capacity has weakened over the past 50 years due to globalization, and we have become a society of takers rather than makers, with more aspects of our lives becoming digital and artificial, disconnected from the physical world. This doesn't mean you shouldn't live in the Matrix, but the machines are nowhere near advanced enough where you can expect to live a sustainable life in your own happiness machine. Rather than judge such a future, I will just say that such a future is unlikely to exist without a major change in mindset – away from the digital and attention-based economies – and back to the physical infrastructure-based economies that we have been ignoring more. And more over the past fifty years or so. This may be a US-centric problem, but it appears to be a problem with other advanced economies and is bound to become a future problem in those economies that are still developing.
One of the reasons we ignore and upgrade our physical infrastructure and the systems we use in the physical world is that building on the digital world is much easier. The world of bits and bytes is easier to deal with than the world of atoms and particles. Data is much easier to measure than physical objects. One can burn a high-resolution digital representation of a home with a few clicks and a few gigabytes of space on a hard drive that is not much larger than a credit card in a few minutes. Try doing this with an actual house or building – we would be much closer to solving the housing problem if we had this ability.
We've taken the easy way out for decades, which has made some aspects of our society more efficient and better. There is no doubt that the ability to teach and educate has become much better in the past 50 years and technological knowledge has improved. However, these tools still appear to be sources of untapped potential. We've been using them mostly to entertain and distract each other rather than turning these developments toward actual problems that we may now be able to solve with this new digital infrastructure.
I think “hard” technology is the future we should be focusing on. Instead of the visions of utopia we might have imagined in the mid-20th century, we should focus on the major infrastructure problems we face today and take everything we've developed since then and imagine how we can scale the physical world in different ways. We have expanded the digital reach. This is sure to be very difficult – especially given how lazy and unambitious we have become when tackling these difficult issues as digital technology becomes more pervasive in our lives.
Instead of a future of apps that focus on marginal productivity gains and apps that destroy those gains by capturing our attention and focus through entertainment, we must build products that automate and scale our supply chains, products that build physical infrastructure, and products that push the boundaries of theoretical and applied science. Forward so that we can build a future that our parents may have dreamed of when they were young, and we can build technology that future generations can look at and be inspired by.
