@crumbleneedy They thought that about combustion engines, atomic power, computers and smart-phones.

Now we know better and the world is fucked. It's not the invention that's the problem; its the fame-hungry scientists and the too wealthy sponsers that fund them.

#ScienceAhead #FutureIsHere #climatechange #technologicalprogress

It's important for us to stay informed of the impact of artificial intelligence on various industries. From cybersecurity to executive strategies, AI has the potential to bring significant changes. However, we must remain vigilant of the pitfalls AI raises. We must also encourage steady progress, carefully considering ethical implications. #AI #advancedAI #cybersecurity #technologicalprogress

Living without a 30 second skip button for the first time in a quarter century totally sucks the unwiped taint, and is far from an #Optimum Cable TV experience.
#TechnologicalProgress

Our World Is Changing Ever Faster: What This Means For Our Survival
#Science #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #ChatGPT3 #Change #ClimateChange #EV #Finance #Banking #OnlineLearning #PersonalHealth #Robots #Survival #TechnologicalProgress #Survival
https://the-14.com/our-world-is-changing-ever-faster-what-this-means-for-our-survival/

For nearly a quarter of a century I have been studying Earth's #climate history, hoping that providing natural records to contrast with abrupt #AnthropogenicClimateChange would cause action. It hasn't. Nothing has. During this quarter century, the work of me and many, many others has largely been ignored because we didn't want to change the way we live. We live on the crest of a wave of #TechnologicalProgress, and we just can't fathom living in harmony with our planet.
https://journa.host/@therockyfiles/109525894829623553

Just to call out a couple of examples above: the Hyperloop and Airships.

The Hyperloop is based on vacuum-train designs dating to the nineteenth century. There was actually a pretty big engineering proposal in the 1970s. It largely concluded that costs, risks, and engineering challenges would be really high.

Airships are another concept that gets trotted out every decade or so --- I've seen four or five revivals of interest. And there's been some real progress ---- we're no longer literally sewing together gasbags from oxgut (as was the case with the Zeppelins). We've got modern synthetics which are extremely thin, strong, and nonpermeable. Better living through plastics ...

But ...

... airships have other tremendous challenges:

• Rather than floating on a fluid, as with marine ships, or generating dynamic lift as with airplanes, airships are suspended in a fluid like a submarine. And it turns out that that neutral bouyancy is difficult to maintain and tends to compound on itself. A ship, as it settles deeper in the water wants to rise more. An airship as it sinks or climbs, wants to sink or climb more.

• Unloading cargo must be balanced by either loading ballast or veniting lifting gas. Depending on your lifting gas that's expensive dangerous or both.

• Airships fly low and slow. They're most efficient within only a few thousand feet of the ground, which is where most weather and turbulence are. Jet airliners are popular, amongst other reasons because they fly above the weather, most of the time.

• Airship's structures must be extremely light but face tremendous forces. They're far more susceptible to high winds than rigid airplace fuselage and wing assemblies are.

• Neal Stephonson "Diamond Age" vacuum airships ... simply are not possible with any known structures we have. So hydrogen and helium are the best lifting gasses we'll get, and those are barely sufficient for even noncommercial applications.

TL;DR: airships are hard, and face tremendous challenges. The oportunities for advance are ... fairly slim. Better approaches exist for most transport cases (trains, marine cargo), and in the few cases airships might offer some benefits ... those are still fairly slight.

So again, see the questions in the prior toot and keep them in mind.

#TechnologicalProgress #Breakthroughs #Realism #CurbYourEnthusiasm

4/end/

Basically, when you see a novel concept publicised, ask:

• Is this really new?
• Has it been tried before?
• If so why wasn't it adopted then?
• Have those blockers been removed, or ...
• Has some new benefit / capability been introduced?

If there has been some remarkable breakthrough or progress then the concept might have legs. Often, though, there hasn't and it doesn't. It turns out that real progress is hard. Not impossible, but much of the easy stuff has already been tried.

3/

#TechnologicalProgress #Breakthroughs #Realism #CurbYourEnthusiasm

Back to Urshel's wall-builder: if we've had 3-D structural extrusion construction techniques for nearly a century ... what's kept it from being adopted?

Circular buildings aren't all that practical.

The concretes formed aren't especially strong. Note that the structure is not reinforced.

Building systems still need to be incorporated: plumbing, wastewater, electrical, gas, HVAC, and these days, comms. Two hundred years ago, in many places even less than a century ago, static structures without any services were possible. Today for the most part they're not. (Those services also tend to reduce the lifespan of structures, though they make them far more useful.) Modular and component construction is still flexible, inexpensive and useful. It also generally results in designs which can be further adapted and modified.

2/

#TechnologicalProgress #Breakthroughs #Realism #CurbYourEnthusiasm

The related concept here is that when people tout some "new" breakthrough especially in energy systems, but also in transport (airships <cough> hyperloop <cough>), a lot of materials stuff, a fair bit of medicine, most everything in nanotech, etc., I have to reluctantly point out that *much of this has already been significantly tried.

That's not to say that there aren't areas of tremendous progress, though much of that is in silicon. I've been looking somewhat casually at Nobel awards in chemistry, physics, and medicine, and noticing some patterns. Physics, for example, sees far less particle awards (as was the case from say, 1920--1970, excepting the Higgs Boson in 2013), and far more in various sorts of detectors and sensors --- we're getting a lot better at observing hard-to-detect things: very far, very faint, very small, or different modalities (e.g., gravity waves). Medicine is far less about procedures (e.g., organ transplants) and far more about how body systems work, with a lot of work on endocrine and neurotransmitters, as well as some genetics and viral diseases.

And there can be cumulative advances in multiple fields which bring about threshold breakthroughs. EV's are a case in point: battery, battery management, motors, materials (especially rare earth magnets in motors, but also structural members), precision machining ... all come together to make possible what wasn't previously. Reusable rockets are another example of multiple technologies coming together to make possible what was previously only a dream. AI would be a third case: faster machines, larger memories, absolute gobs of data.

Though you've also got to ask yourself "to what end".

1/

#TechnologicalProgress #Breakthroughs #Realism #CurbYourEnthusiasm

Some inconvenient questions. Open letter to the politicians responsible for the Ecological Transition, in Spain and in Europe https://www.15-15-15.org/webzine/2021/07/23/some-inconvenient-questions-open-letter-to-the-politicians-responsible-for-the-ecological-transition-in-spain-and-in-europe/ #non-electricrenewableenergies #intermittencyofrenewables #limitsofrenewableenergies #massiveelectrification #technologicalprogress #ecologicaltransition #politicalstrategies #supplyinterruptions #Analysis

#DeanBaker : « The fact that #BillGates and many others have gotten hugely rich as a result of [#copyright and #patent] protections is a result of #GovernmentPolicy, not an inevitable outcome of #TechnologicalProgress.
[…]
It is understandable that the people who have gotten rich from our #policies on #patent and #copyrights would not want to see them at the center of #PublicDebate. But what is the excuse for everyone else who is not talking about them? »
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-rich-would-bill-gates-be-without-his-copyright_us_59642f89e4b0deab7c646b4d