I'd like to offer one more partial cause. It is certainly incomplete and possibly simplistic, but let's put it out there:
Big-idea technological innovation has been led for years by the US, and for some time by the USSR as well. But the Soviet Union is gone, and there may be a cultural shift in America: going at it alone and distrust of government. The libertarian streak that has long been present in American culture seems to be taking hold of more and more people. Even Democrats seem to have a distrust of government, and some even partially accept right-wing axioms about the benefits of small government and spending cuts. But some undertakings are simply too big for private corporations, and require government funding and control. Only Americans increasingly distrust the gov't.
This sentiment is not bad necessarily, but it's becoming pervasive and might be spreading beyond just distrust of government. Americans (or, rather, well-to-do Americans, or those born to the right parents in the right neighborhoods) don't want to be a small cog in a big machine. They prefer going at it alone, or in a small team and encourage individual expression.
So this is not wrong, and it certainly doesn't apply to everyone everywhere, but it might just be one more reason in the decline of huge undertakings, that might require collaboration on a national or international scale, where talented people must be content to contribute their small part to a very large and non-individual expression.
I don't think this is right. We have a bigger government than we did historically, and the past few years have led to massive increases in the size of the government.
Rather, there seems to be a change in the role of the government. At one point we wanted the government to engage in big projects. Now we just want the government to redistribute wealth and engage in irrelevant expressive acts (yay/nay gay marriage, faith based blah blah, forcing christian hospitals to pay for birth control).
But this tends to mirror changes in the private sector as well, so I imagine it's just a cultural shift rather than something government related.
> Now we just want the government to redistribute wealth and engage in irrelevant expressive acts
Whether or not these things are irrelevant is a personal political judgement, right? And what is "distribution of wealth" for one might be an investment in society or demand-side economics for another.
But your comment precisely demonstrates this lack of trust in government, or, the way you put it, in your fellow citizens.
It's true that the states chose to spend on the money increasing worker pay (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECIGVTWAG) rather than hiring more workers, but that's a separate issue. (Call it anti-Keynesian spending during a recession.)
Historically we did things like hiring a bunch of unemployed people and having them build stuff (trails in national parks, fancy downtown landscaping, transit projects, etc). In the most recent recession, all we did was give the unemployed 99 weeks of free money.
I also think it's a political issue, but not specifically because of lack of trust of the government.
I think it's lack of competition for the US as a whole. For the first time in the history of the US, the primary international problems for the US aren't developed nations that are as technologically advanced(or even more advanced). Even the biggest current competitor(China) is so beholden to US interests that they can't afford to do anything to destabilize the US economy, and they're still behind on innovation by a tremendous amount.
Also, the current military challenges that the US faces aren't things that can be solved strictly through technological innovation. It's asymmetric warfare, so there's very little incentive for the US to invest heavily into new tech.
Compare to the international problems the US faced in the 20th century. The first half was dominated by competition and warfare with the developed nations in Europe. WWI and WWII forced the US to invest heavily into new tech. The second half was dominated by the cold war, which, again, forced the US to invest resources to keep up with the USSR.
Also, the current military challenges that the US faces aren't things that can be solved strictly through technological innovation. It's asymmetric warfare, so there's very little incentive for the US to invest heavily into new tech.
So remotely piloted drones, small weaponized robots, and ever more precisely targeted guided munitions don't count as "new tech"?
To the best of my knowledge, R&D funding for new technology that might have military applications has, if anything, increased over the last 10 years or so.
But America faces plenty of challenges that technology can help with, especially around health and food issues. Just because we don't face significant challenges due to military technologies doesn't mean that technology can't be useful in other ways.
But some undertakings are simply too big for private corporations, and require government funding and control.
I don't think it's the size of the undertakings as much as their time horizon. Corporate time horizons just aren't long enough to comprehend investing now in, say, a manned Mars mission in 2030. Even at a pretty low discount rate, the net present value in 2012 of resources mined from Mars in the 2030's is effectively zero to a corporate bean counter.
The problem is that government time horizons are even shorter. The TR article talks about NASA having the technical knowledge to send men to Mars; but we had that technical knowledge in the 1970's. The problem is that, since the Apollo program (which was, I think, an outlier in this respect), the US government simply hasn't had enough consistency of purpose to reliably fund ventures that last beyond a change in the party that controls the White House and/or Congress.
I agree the time horizon is different in other cultures. France took 20 years to get its economy running on 75% nuclear power. China has embarked on long-term infrastructure projects.
However, having a longer time horizon is not entirely a good thing either. It's a benefit if the long-term project you pick and commit resources to is a good idea; but it's much worse than the short time horizon case if the long-term project you pick is a bad idea. (Some posters in this thread have argued that the Apollo project itself is an example of the latter.)
So, your theory is that after decades of massive federal government expansion, an important reason today's much larger federal bureaucracy is unable to accomplish what the much smaller government of fifty years ago accomplished is those darned libertarian "right-wing axioms about the benefits of small government"? Our big government can't do what it did when it was smaller because of people who think there are benefits to smaller government.
And the reason the Europeans haven't shown us how to do it, is that the fault of all those small-government ideologues who dominate political thought in Europe?
That is absolutely not what I'm suggesting at all.
I'm not talking about the size of the government, but about the attitude towards it and other large organizations, and to one's role in society.
I'm also not blaming "darned libertarians" (I do have a lot to say about "them", but HN isn't quite the place for such discussion) for anything. I'm simply saying that some axioms of the libertarian ideology have permeated throughout American society. This leads to a changing culture, and different cultures have different accomplishments.
Which type of accomplishment is "better" or more "important" is, again, subject to personal preference, and I'm not going to debate that. All I was suggesting is that the US hasn't accomplished recently the same kind of things it had accomplished in the past, may be in part due to a shift in attitude.
Well you made a great original comment, but unfortunately, some of the replies want to politicize your observation trying to assign a "side" to it. It's a very social sciences observation so it's hard to prove and for some probably even accept.
I'd add as further proof to your observation was look at how even government organizations position themselves in the last decades. Remember the army of one commercials that were meant to appeal to that very individualism attitude. Military in the US is the antithesis of individualism. If you join the military you are told when to wake up, how to dress, what to do, when you'll do it, and how you'll feel about it while doing it. Chain of command is rule number one in the military. It even has processes so that individuals can't be completely responsible. It's too dangerous. But, here we have a campaign to tell you that's not true, and in fact you have autonomy because that's what our society assigns value to now.
You are not judging it just stating an observation. There is no wrong or right to it.
I find this very insightful so we're talking about a modern day tower of babel. But, instead of a destruction of a common language it's a destruction of a common set of values. We stopped believing in government due to a difference in values we saw. That gave rise to a change in values of individual expression over collective work. And now we can't collectively agree so the problems we can solve are smaller because we create smaller and smaller pockets that agree.
Let's not forget that many of our parents and gradparents "regretted" working for the man and never following their dreams. That's a huge part of why I'm not interested in working at a large corporation.
I'm not saying these last 40 years haven't had merit. The recession of 1982 probably was probably the symbol that put the nail in the collective view to problem solving. When Reagan turned that recession around i think the country started to believe individuals could solve these problems over government. You listen to people who were in the work force and they remember the change. My father references that in shaping his political views and he's not the only person I've heard say that. It was an important milestone and shortly after we saw the rise of me generation which evolved into personal liberty movement. And an emphasis on individual expression and thinking in our schools. And this is how we viewed problem solving required. But it also shaped us in what problems we wanted to solve because if we had a problem that didn't lend itself to this approach we didn't solve it. Questioned if it was even a problem (global warming fits this as others).
I think these are two strategies you can take. One isn't more dominant than the other. But each has their place along with pros and cons, and you have to use both over time . It just depends on the problems you face which strategy you should employ.
That's a large part of it. We have a harder and harder time solving Big Problems because all truly Big problems are partly or largely social as well as technical. The more we refuse to act together or insist on purely technological "solutions", the less actually solvable our Big Problems get.
all truly Big problems are partly or largely social as well as technical
Very true, and the TR article makes this point. However, the article doesn't even talk about how to solve the social aspects of the problems. For example, when talking about how famines are the result of political problems, not technical ones, it dismisses the political part with this comment: "famines will still occur because there will always be bad governments." What a cop out. MIT has whole departments devoted to economics and political science because it understands that intellectual tools need to be developed and applied in those disciplines just as much as in physics or engineering; why can't its magazine recognize that?
(Full disclosure: TR seemed to me to be a much better magazine when I was at MIT, so I tend to rant when I see evidence of its decline.)
>But some undertakings are simply too big for private corporations, and require government funding and control.
Not only. The government is (at least supposed too) work for the benefit of society. You can expect the government to allocate billions for a project like the LHC if the science committee foresees that it's a viable scientific undertaking. You can't expect the same of corporations. Corporations are there to make increasing profits for their shareholders, period.
This is the reason why some people were upset with the vision of private enterprises replacing NASA. Sure private enterprises will bring competition, but only where private enterprises can make profit.
"Corporations are there to make increasing profits for their shareholders, period."
This is an overly-simplistic and ultimately quite wrong view of corporations.
Corporations exist to achieve the goals their shareholders set for them, which may include increasing profits, but it may not. That's certainly not the only goal the shareholders may set.
How did you manage to be pedantic on me? You are right. However I don't agree that it's "overly-simplistic" but I don't have statistics to back up my impression.
Also I think you are wrong when it comes to the US. In the US, corporations are legally obligated to maximize profits.
No, though that's a very common belief. The reality is more complicated.
The directors of a for-profit corporation have to make decisions that they in good faith believe will lead to shareholder value, and there is considerable leeway in determining what that means. It does not always mean maximizing profit, and the timeframe for the increased value can be very long.
In addition, there are a number of other forms of corporations (non-profits, Low-Profit, Benefit, etc) that can expressly put a public good ahead of profits.
I disagree that leaving funding in the hands of a single bureaucracy will lead to the outcomes you hope.
Funding for the super-conducting super-collider set in Waxahachie, Texas was cut as a direct result of the 1992 US Presidential election. The scientific community was in agreement on its advantages, but political retribution won out.
That the LHC survived was due in large part by the desire of European agencies to bring science back to Europe. That the US had failed to complete construction of their beam operations gave them an opening and and opportunity. This is the motiviation more so, I would say, than it was any desire to fund basic research in HE physics.
As an amateur space historian, I view that the Apollo project is widely misunderstood by most people.
It was basically a stunt: create something as quickly as possible with money as no object. It is extremely obvious in hindsight that the capabilities and solutions it created were not directly sustainable or efficient in the long term.
We should not clamor for some similar projects or similar technical solutions, just "because Apollo did it".
Instead we should objectively strive for reliable, flexible and affordable spacefaring.
Some of the project practices and technologies that Apollo used might be good for spacefaring unchanged as they were, some might serve as basis that needs development and others are negative examples.
We just shouldn't say "look they went to the moon with solution X" as the only justification for solution X.
Solution X could be for example building a single huge rocket.
In many ways this article is just pining for other big hard made up problem for us to solve. Apollo was and is still a huge achievement, but it sure wasn't a practical solution to any real problem we faced. As much as you can say how amazing it was there are plenty of things you can say how wasteful it was too. In a lot of ways you can say the same thing about the internet.
I wonder if the big problems we know we have ever really get solved or we just distract ourselves by solving made up problems. Funny thing is life seems to get better when we solve the made up problems because we solve things we didn't know we had.
Oh that probably doesn't bode well for Global Warming and Cancer.
But they did it, and guess what- 4 decades later no one gives a damn about the money spent because adjusted to inflation and comparative to other pointless spending(wars) its the cost of chicken feed.
The whole point is stunt or other wise they achieved something through brute force. The point is we aren't even attempting a brute force solution.
But why should we try brute force solutions? I have much bigger dreams than 12 guys walking on the moon.
Routine daily commercial flights to orbit with reusable vehicles that fly many times in one week, NEO exploration, in situ resource usage. One day many of the people who comment on Hacker news can have visited space, some may even live and work there.
That requires longer and more many sided and organic development than a brute force government crash program. That just would not be good resource usage.
> "if we once did big things but do so no longer, then what changed?"
Our definition of "big", I think. I can't be sure because the article leaves it so loosely defined that one could cherry pick data to suit their mood.
Is no space project acceptably "big" simply because it doesn't include humans or habitats? We've been to Mars a few times lately, by robot. We're going to earth orbit far more efficiently these days. We're launching satellites at a furious clip. And for this, even though poor nations languish without proper electricity, they do have cell phones. Not to downplay the problems that remain, but that one seems "big" to me; at least worth mentioning.
To say nothing of computer vision. Processing power advancements have turned this long-suffering field into something of a white-hot ball of promise lately. The applications being developed will be at least as transformative as anything the automobile delivered.
Is this not "big" because the applications will first be delivered to wealthy nations, because some of them look like "toys", or because it lacks the old-school wonder of a big-ass rocket launch? I have no idea from the article; I can only infer the author disqualifies it by its complete omission.
And the author is similarly imprecise on who "we" even are. After identifying many of the problems they consider "big" as primarily international political problems, in many cases a result of international poverty, they then point fingers at the US political situation [1] when looking for answers.
Is it reasonable to expect that the national feeling that fed support for a US-centric space program is lacking because there isn't similar contemporary support for solving problems overseas? Not that the US couldn't do more on some of those problems [2]. But aside from the military removal of despots, the US has no real history of possessing the national will -- or even the capability -- to solve political and poverty problems overseas.
Even if we had that Cold War-era national spirit today, I'm not sure it logically follows that it would unite behind e.g. a massive political/research/development effort to light Africa.
[1] A mess no doubt. And one doing grievous harm to our national R&D.
[2] We could even "do more" by doing less in some cases: stopping support for programs that aren't helping, but are instead warping markets and political structures.
> Our definition of "big", I think. I can't be sure because the article leaves it so loosely defined
The article doesn't define big explicitly, but given the context and examples provided, the author's intent seems clear. It's revolutionary vs. evolutionary, audaciously ambitious in terms of timetable and scope, and dependent on focused, cohesive effort that draws deeply from our pool of talent and expertise. A Herculean task for a nation.
This isn't precise, but it's not unclear.
Is shooting yet another Mars rover or satellite into space a difficult and impressive engineering marvel? Sure, but at this point, these events are not revolutionary. Cell phones have proliferated, but not due to any planned or concerted national effort. Same with computer vision, progress is humming along, thanks to (evolutionary) processing power advancements and the work of academic or industrial researchers working largely independently of one another.
I see pushes from government -- clean energy/arpa-e, cybersecurity, etc., but nothing "big," nothing the public has rallied behind (or is even aware of). In some cases, the momentum for these thrusts is slowed by questions of utility and practicality -- is global warming an actual thing? Sure, the U.S. has been spending money as if it's pursuing something grand, but everyone's just focused on keeping their heads above water.
When draining swamps qualifies but cell phone coverage doesn't, I argue that it is still unclear.
> "A Herculean task for a nation."
So the internet is not big because it wasn't created under the direction of a single authority? It's upending education, journalism, commerce and control over the exchange of information. Even at the most generous, the trickle-down impact of the Space Program doesn't match that level of societal change.
But this isn't "big" just because Peter Thiel once dismissed it?
> "Is shooting yet another Mars rover or satellite into space a difficult and impressive engineering marvel? Sure, but at this point, these events are not revolutionary. "
And how does that act of adding a life support system and a passenger qualify as more than evolutionary? If going to Mars is evolutionary because its been done, it would seem that sending meat to mars is also evolutionary.
> When draining swamps qualifies but cell phone coverage doesn't, I argue that it is still unclear.
Yes, you're right. There's seemingly another element to the author's designation of "big" that I neglected: people working toward a common goal with no obvious or immediate commercial benefit. Cell phone coverage was a natural outgrowth of competition between cell phone companies and a desire to claim more customers and provide more competitive service.
> So the internet is not big
The author didn't say this, Thiel did, and the context in which he said it is not all that clear. Seemingly, given the context of the article, it's a reaction to the current state of Silicon Valley backed ventures, which Thiel (perhaps rightly) claims are not providing technological breakthroughs. If Thiel is suggesting that the Internet, in a larger context, is not a breakthough innovation in itself, I can't agree with that.
> And how does that act of adding a life support system and a passenger qualify as more than evolutionary?
Personally, I don't think it does. Then again, there may be huge technological hurdles above and beyond those that enabled the moon landing or the mars rovers that I'm not aware of. The average person probably isn't aware of them either, and whether or not it's justified, "putting a person on mars" will probably never seem as ambitious as "putting a man on the moon" had seemed at the time.
There are undoubtedly huge technological hurdles involved in adding a life support system and a passenger. However, whether or not those hurdles get crossed is largely meaningless as long as the goal is a stunt: "putting a person on mars".
Without trying to sound snarky, i find that definition of 'big' to be small. 'Big' is about leaps to new things that we don't even have words to describe. Rockets are 60s science, computer vision is an 80s problem and both are advancing at incremental pace mostly because advances in hardware make it easier. Plus i think it has more to do pushing the frontiers of what is possible forward rather than bringing the whole planet up to speed with the developed world.
There are plenty of ways to define 'big', I'm just saying it's worth defining more clearly before you make a sweeping judgement that it isn't being done.
I'm not trying to posit a 'good' definition. I'm just pointing out that the one on offer is a bit hand-wavey for use in judging society.
I once attended a university lecture on entrepreneurship. In it, the lecturer moaned that the pace of technological change has slowed and big things weren't happening anymore. It turned out he was an aeronautics person, and there was no concorde replacement, the 747 was 30 years old, no more moon rockets, etc.
I didn't interject but I thought - how can you live in a world upended by the internet and say no big changes are going on? The answer is that it all depends on your focus.
Self-operating vehicles have a huge potential to upset travel and shipping and blur the distinction between transit and last-mile.
To say nothing of the generic bipedal utility robot.
CV is the big roadblock there. [1]
No, these things aren't going to happen tomorrow. But they have a fair chance of being delivered before we could actually put a human on Mars or eradicate poverty in Africa, even if massive societal projects were undertaken with those goals in mind.
And, conveniently, CV won't require those massive societal projects. It'll get them, eventually. To enable the really cool stuff. [2] Sort of like cars changed everything even before we had a massive highway system that unleashed further potential.
[1] Though power density is a big challenge, I don't think anyone's going to mind if version 1 of their autonomous maid/handyman only works in one-hour bursts. Not so long as it can actually do the housework. If someone's keeping up with things day-in, day-out, it's rare that more than an hour or two's-worth of work needs to be done in a day.
[2] e.g. Going from self-driving cars and trucks to self-driving transport pods that autonomously link to tracks and ad-hoc caravans for long-distance high-speed travel, then de-link and queue for self-operating cranes to be load them onto self-piloting ships to deliver them to foreign ports where they operate the same dance in reverse.
Self-operating vehicles will be the biggest disruption of the next decade. This is an area where the government will need to get involved (since so much regulation will need to change), and they now have an opportunity to move things forward tremendously or hold progress back. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.
We already have "self-driving cars", as well as "self-driving transport pods" that can do all of the things that you describe. Assuming, that is, that you widen the definition of "self-driving" to include having a human being at the steering wheel.
Self-driving cars would make my commute wonderful, but won't be materially different than having a good bus route. The only real difference I can see autonomous vehicles making is to remove a certain class of jobs and creating another class of jobs.
Likewise, you could hire a "generic bipedal utility robot" pretty easily today. It's expensive, but that's mostly a political problem. (For the humor-impaired, that last clause was a joke.)
> "Self-driving cars ... won't be materially different than having a good bus route."
By this definition a cell phone is not materially different than having a personal land-line available regardless of where you live, work, eat, play, etc. That seems like a fairly silly thing to say when you compare the two. One because it points out the absurdity of the notion of perfect coverage/perfect availability of a 'good bus route' and two because there's obviously much more you can do with a cell phone because it's everywhere, that not even a wired phone at every destination could achieve. (e.g. the entirety of pocket computing)
Similarly, you see no societal advance in bringing something only the very wealthy can afford (personal servants) to the middle class? (initially, and then trending down with commoditization)
That's nearly the definition of massive social change: making the quality of life of royalty affordable to the middle class.
What do you mean by that. If you mean progress, then that has occurred this year, basically the object recognition problem looks like it can be solved by neural nets (google brain cat detector and the latest imagenet challenge in pascal voc).
If applications, then they are literally immense. Robots that can perform any manual labor, thus increase in mnaufacturing ability (plus ability to conduct scientific experiments) by an immense amount. Marshall Brain has good articles about what computer vision technology can enable, including the short story Manna. Computer Vision is easily the most disruptive technology since the invention of the steam engine (it multiplies the work capacity of humanity by that much). It's a new gold rush bigger than the internet (robocars and humanoid robots including Baxter from Rethink Robotics are signs of that beginning). Startups should be all over it, web 2.0 and social networking are miniscule in comparison.
Where I come from 16% accuracy does not mean the problem is solved. Yeah, its a big step up from where we were, but the cat detector neural nets by no means solved the object recognition problem.
It was 85% accuracy on imagenet of pascal voc, using just a couple of computers with nnets vs 1000 for that google brain. And both of these were just experiments run by grad students, a proper industrial effort would solve it.
Or say, take something like the Linux kernel -- that is something very big, very complex, that contains input and work from many contributors. Then take Android an OS, with a VM, with applications running on it all on top of a Linux kernel. If looking at it from bottom up (from hardware up to the highest level application code), that's a lot of system, and subsystems, APIs, ideas and protocols working together. It is a very complex machine it is just not physical and tangible but that doesn't mean it is less complex.
Big problems - sometimes before even to be formulated and asked - require big fundamental and applicative science research programmes and the respective advancement.
These are not something to be expected from venture capital. They are something resulting from deliberate state scientific and industrial policy, longterm goals, and adequate funding.
Examples from 1950s-1970s: DARPA/USA, and the resp. space and rocketry programmes in the former USSR.
Private capital - be it venture or not - comes later (and this is not a bad thing) when the new technologies are relatively well understood , "tameable", and can be applied to mass human consumers' or corporate needs (perceived or not, new or old) yet to be satisfied.
Private capital doesn't like fundamental scientific research risks - even in the pharmacy industry. It tries to bear mostly the market-related and implementational risks.
A thought experiment: Think on what funds and in what conditions happened the development of packet switching, TCP/IP protocols suite, HTTP, (examples of fundamental breakthrough). Then think the same about Facebook, for example.
My point summarized => States/Governments shouldn't worry about entrepreneurship programmes, clusters, tech-business climat, etc.
If adequate funding is provided for breakthrough scientific research and to the universities in general (so there are also the high-quality scientists to do it), breakthrough technology business solving big problems will happen inevitably.
On the pharmaceutical industry: part of the problem is the government and the enormous number of regulations and necessary steps to bring a drug (which still could harm people regardless of how many trials are done) to market. As such, while someone may want to research some new but unproven idea, the time and cost and risk involved would be far too great as a result of regulations.
I do agree with your point though. The government should invest in research, not companies.
[…] On a larger scale, the Council inaugurated a set of projects ambitious both in scope and name, intended to be Manhattan Projects for a new age: Project Eden sought clinical immortality, Project Janus sought FTL travel, and Project Icarus sought to use solar satellites to harvest the light of the sun, making energy not just cheap, but free. With these accomplishments, the Council sought to win eternal loyalty from its citizenry.
Now we're talking grandiose programs that could very well have the support of the population. (Even project Eden: give people actual hope of escaping Death, and most will cease to object.) If a governance actually successfully triggers such accomplishments, I'm sure going to like it more.
Now if we stay down to earth, Friendly AI is probably the best bet: it looks less impossible, and would have much more impact.
Going to Mars is currently not a good use of resources. It's like spending billions to travel to the middle of the Sahara. Sure, there will be technologies invented as a side effect, but that will also be the case if we spend those resources on something that's also directly useful (like solving the energy problem, quantum computing, self sufficient robots, AI, etc.). Arguably, going to the moon wasn't a good use of resources either.
Sure it is, but going to Mars at this point in time is not the best option. How are we going to have a self sufficient colony on Mars without having a viable energy source, for example? We aren't realistically going to set up a Mars colony without first sending lots of robots to prepare for our weak bodies. Bringing each one from Earth is not feasibly either, so you'd want to have a self sufficient (and replicating) robot colony on Mars first. Once we have these and more issues sorted out, it will be worth investing significantly in actually getting the stuff to Mars, but doing it at this point we'd be investing a of of effort in getting there without actually being able to accomplish something once we're there.
The same applies to the moon: what have we done on the moon? Not much. What have we gained out of the moon missions? Plenty of stuff like better rocket engines, heat shields, etc. Was it the technology project that would have gotten us the best return on investment? I don't think so. Was it better than spending the money on e.g fighter planes? Yes (the cost of the JSF project is $1.1 trillion [1], the cost of the Apollo program is about $0.13 trillion in today's dollars [2] [3]).
I did, see two levels up. Note that if your sole goal is to remove Earth as the single point of failure for humans, Mars is probably a good choice. All I'm saying is that at this point doing a mission similar to Apollo, namely flying humans to Mars and back, is not a smart investment (even if your sole goal is to establish a Mars colony, but certainly if you also like to improve conditions on Earth).
It's not a single point. We could alternatively synthesize humans or modify humans to survive apocalyptic conditions. Or build sustainable low orbit colonies. Or transfer our knowledge to artificial intelligent agents. Or simply fix the planet so it doesn't become a point of failure.
He is referring to the inevitable extinction event that will cause humans to be wiped out. The history of the planet suggests that it periodically wipes the slate nearly clean. And while there are human reasons we might get wiped out (war, warming, techno catastrophe) even being ideal stewards will eventually result in the loss of the human race. The only survival option is to not be on planet when the 'bad thing' (what ever it happens to be) happens.
If the extinction event is caused by asteroids, that's not the only option. That doesn't mean that the alternatives wouldn't need spacial technology anyway.
I tend to agree -- there's no compelling need to get to Mars. But there are many large problems that would be worth working on. Food supplies and distribution, renewable energy, poverty, basic education, civic engagement, etcetera. Self-sufficient robots might be nice-to-have too, but I'm less convinced about the social utility. That just sounds to me like either teleconferencing robots[1] or UAVs for war.
The concern is that we've given up on trying to mobilize during peacetime. That collective amnesia has lulled us to complacency based on large, flat-screen TVs and high-speed internet, forgetting that fiber networks and LCD technology took decades of concerted effort, institutional-scale labs, and principled scientific methods.
Those sound like deep political nightmares. I can see why they would want to steer clear.
Just the other day I heard someone complaining about the use of mined fertilizers in agriculture. Farmers used to have a renewable resource for fertilizer in grasses, but the market for cattle fell out because raising them was unsatisfactory to the population, so there is relatively little need to grow those grasses anymore.
Renewable energy is an even bigger minefield right now. Neighbours who were once great friends are now mortal enemies just because one party decided to erect a wind turbine. The rallies against them are growing stronger by the day, and wouldn't be surprised to hear about violence as a result of them soon.
I'm not suggesting the above are the right solutions, just examples of resistance at every turn in our attempts to find the right solution. The perfect solution doesn't arrive overnight, and even if it were to, I'm not certain half the population would even accept it. Even it would come with some drawback that someone doesn't like, making it seem like the of the world if you try to implement it.
Much sits in the way between invention and nirvana. We have to face the fact that earth is over-crowded with global infrastructure, rules, economic barriers, borders, financial systems, controlled by a small number of distant, territorial governments. This prevents us from moving forward in some of the areas most critical to human civilization, such as transportation and energy.
What I would really like to see is a revolution in governance. There is a tremendous mistake in current thinking that global problems require global solutions. As a result, government and economic power is moving in the wrong direction. Today's global problems were caused locally, by every car, every meter of asphalt, every gram of sugar, every cheap t-shirt, every plastic bag, every poor mortgage, etc. These problems require local solutions.
National borders are enormous societal barriers. If one country has better governance than another, only a small percentage of people will consider moving, if even allowed. As a result, better national policy is slow to attract, slow to spread, slow to evolve, and limited in its effectiveness.
Instead of empowering national or supra-national governments in a quest for global solutions, we should face global problems at their root and empower the central pillar of human civilization in the 21st century: the city.
The human economy has the remarkable characteristic that greater population density and better lives can go hand in hand. If great technologists, artists, teachers, scientists, merchants, politicians, industrialists, and laborers come together, that's when great things happen. That's when ideas start to take root and become reality.
National governance and poor economic policy is squeezing the city into a menial role. They do not have the economic power or independence to make different rules or undertake great projects. The benefits of the existing population density is the only thing that still makes cities like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles attractive. A trip to Dubai, Singapore, Macau, or Hong Kong will give you a glimpse of what cities can do once empowered, even when relatively isolated. Imagine a nation of cities trying to out-class each other and trying to attract and keep their citizens.
We no longer have leaders with the vision to collaborate on a level large enough to impress scientists today.
Going to the moon - everyone can see the moon, it's a very achievable goal, we put a person on that big rock up there. It's easy to understand, but challenging enough that we still marvel at it. This was fueled by a desire to win against our competitors. The competition against another superpower created the desire to win. Net benefit to humanity: A cool line to write on a resume.
Nuclear fusion (not the best example, as we have stuff like NREL, but it will work) - a little bit more challenging. Closest example: We made a sun right here! It's much more difficult to get people to understand the impact that nuclear fusion would have. And, it has the 'nuclear' word attached to it. Politicians don't understand it (and wouldn't get any money from it). The general population doesn't care about it, because to them, the outlet will always be magical. Net benefit to humanity: The possibility to reverse global warming, unlimited clean water, free power, and solving a 'real' problem.
This makes me think of the superconducting super collider[1]. I know we still do amazing science and amazing things, but we choose to do them in the military, behind closed doors for the benefit of ourselves, rather than the benefit of humanity.
The 'golden ages' of history have generally occurred when society turned towards mathematicians, engineers, and scientists and basically said 'we don't know what you're doing, but we know it's important'. The trouble today is that everyone has an equal say on all issues (by having one vote, you are mapping a column of varying stances into one single value), regardless of how much they understand what they're talking about.
It makes me kind of wonder why an angel wouldn't come in and just fund some of the projects the government should be funding.
Going to the moon was not a "big problem". It was an admirable goal, and it captured the imagination of the world, but having not visited the moon wasn't a "problem" for the U.S. or any other country.
No, but it was a proxy to something that was a "big problem": having an enemy that had (or was very near to having) the ability to insert dirigible, manned weapons (think about the era) into essential indefensible areas. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo may have had a feel-good element and some incidental scientific co-projects, but they were as much about military deterrence and public confidence as anything else. (Do you remember nuclear raid drills? I do.)
To solve larger problems, you need to strategize over longer periods of time. As our attention spans are getting shorter, so is our longer term corporate focus. Look at Intel as an example of an established corporate player of over 40 years -- probably amongst the oldest in the high tech industry. Most of their energy right now is consumed in defining a strategy for supplying chips to the mobile sector. This, when they are the established leader on PC chips. If such a large and old corporation is not impervious to market pressures, where's all the industry's momentum going?
I think the government needs to start creating fiefdoms that implement redundant services, a la Amazon. I think that is an amazing policy for large organizations when predicting future technological improvements is out of consideration. Use whatever technology you want and any architecture as long as you follow blah basic tenets.
No bureaucracy, a simple API to be responsible for, and the ability to subsume any patented/copyrighted material ;)
Can someone clue me in. "They brought back little—841 pounds of old rocks, Aldrin's smuggled aesthetic bliss". What is meant by "aesthetic bliss"? Is that a reference to something?
Thank you. So during that long pause Aldrin was soaking up the scenery and thereby gaining "aesthetic bliss"? If that is the case, "smuggled" just seems a strange word choice. If that's not it, I guess I'm just being dense because I don't get it.
I really just meant: that aesthetic bliss was a fairly unlikely emotion for an Air Force pilot and MIT-trained PhD in astronautics to bring aboard the Lunar Module and bring out on the surface of the Moon. Hence, "smuggled".
I would love to see more government funded research. There are so many problems that, if tackled via the unregulated private sector, have misaligned incentives.
We still do, but we're no longer in an existential war with a major world power so we tend to avoid blank-check crash-development programs.
Let me take a moment here to debunk the concept that the Apollo program was such a good thing. I love the Apollo program, I think it was a marvelous thing and a remarkable achievement. It remains deeply inspirational. But it was flawed. Deeply, deeply flawed. It was a war-time stunt more than anything. It expended vast amounts of resources for very little practical benefit, even on a basic "blue sky" research level. At the end of Apollo we had spent somewhere around a hundred billion dollars (in today's money) and yet we were little closer to the moon than before. It still cost us a tremendous billion dollars a passenger or more to put a man on the moon for at most a few days. Because Apollo was a race. We didn't build infrastructure, we didn't build systems that made spaceflight easier. And then afterward when we attempted to build infrastructure with the Shuttle and the ISS we screwed up so badly that it ended up being even more expensive to get to LEO than it had been to get to the Moon with Apollo. We spent a quarter of a trillion dollars building the ISS and it hasn't provided as much benefit toward exploring or colonizing the solar system as you'd expect spending that much money should.
The idea that we need big government projects to solve "big" problems is part of the problem. What we need is merely basic research and sound engineering.
As it turns out, we are starting to solve big problems. It's happening right under our noses. In space exploration SpaceX is rapidly leading the way to a new renaissance of commercial spaceflight and exploration (both manned and unmanned). They have already built the most cost effective launch vehicle in existence and are in the midst of building a reusable launch vehicle, a heavy lift launcher, and a super heavy lift launcher that will dwarf the Saturn V. All of which should facilitate the creation of a great deal of industrial infrastructure in Earth orbit which will reduce the barrier to exploration of the solar system.
Let's look at other projects which could be considered "big problems" or engineering marvels. In many cases it's been a matter of engineering marvels becoming commonplace. Enormous bridges, tunnels, transoceanic cables, etc. all of these things are no longer marvels they are just ordinary engineering. The channel tunnel was a tremendous engineering marvel, but today it has become just an accepted matter of engineering, and many similarly audacious tunnel projects have been completed since, to relatively minor fanfare. The same goes for bridges. And today there is always at least one transoceanic fiber optical cable in the midst of being laid down.
Meanwhile, let's look at the big problems of our age, such as cancer, disease, poverty. In the last half century several countries have pulled themselves out of poverty and become developed countries (South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) And several other countries are on the same path. A smaller percentage of the world is in poverty today than throughout history. Several types of cancer today have 80-90% or higher average survival rates. Major diseases (smallpox, rinderpest) have been eradicated. And major advances against diseases such as malaria and AIDS are being made by the day. In some cases due to extensive amounts of resources being brought to bear and in other cases merely due to the ordinary workings of trade and industry.
There are many big problems that remain unsolved, of course, but we should not wallow in the mistaken notion that we are any less capable of tackling such problems or that we need to mobilize heaven and Earth in order to make progress.
>we tend to avoid blank-check crash-development programs.
If only this were true. The blank-check programs are still with us. Iraq, Afghanistan, the security-military-industrial complex. Wall Street bail outs.
Corporations are great for some things but they are just one kind of social tool and they solve one kind of social problem. There are many different ways to organize society.
Arg this article is infuriating. His conclusion is that only government taking the initiative will fix things: "political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem".
He mentions SpaceX, but only in the context that its founder is one of the members of Founders Fund. Not a word about SpaceX building ships to go to Mars. Because that doesn't fit the narrative that only government can solve problems.
A big problem now is energy. The solution is nuclear. Right now in the US government and the public's main role in nuclear is to ban the solution, which is what has created the problem. In France though the public and government didn't ban the solution to the problem and so 78.8% of their electricity comes from nuclear, without any disasters in over 30 years of operation, and a nationwide system of incredibly cheap high speed electric trains powered by this network.
His conclusion is that only government taking the initiative will fix things: "political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem".
But generally, only the governments of first world nation states can operate on that sort of level. They have the resources and are not accountable to voters the same way corporations are accountable to shareholders. Even the most impressive company couldn't have undertaken the Manhattan Project.
SpaceX doesn't really build rockets to go to Mars... It might, one day, but it's a provider of rockets, not a private space exploration venture. Someone's going to need to buy that Mars launch off of them for that to happen.
Not really, they just need to keep selling satellite launches around Earth to help pay for the eventual Mars shot. Sometimes companies do stuff because they or their founders just want to. Musk has made no secret that he plans to walk on Mars.
The author isn't concluding that only the government will fix things. He's concluding that, in the past, the government has used its vast influence and resources to successfully identify and tackle huge technological challenges. And the government has not done that lately.
Secondarily, he's pointing out that, a great deal of private capital is being funneled into trivial endeavors. The VCs themselves recognize this; many made their money by hitting the software start-up lottery, but now they want to "change the world" by funding something "big." But what do they find? Apps are still selling, apps are easy, apps are cheap. Science, on the other hand, is hard and risky. What to do?
"He mentions SpaceX, but only in the context that its founder is one of the members of Founders Fund. Not a word about SpaceX building ships to go to Mars."
I have a suspicion that SpaceX going to Mars does not scale. It has the same problem as NASA sending men to the moon: If SpaceX goes to Mars, it'll be because Elon wants to. When the trip to Mars is over, or if Elon gets bored or dies, the game is over. (Unless, of course, I'm wrong and there is some commodity available from there that would make the trip worthwhile.)
I'm generally pro-nuclear, but a geoligist friend of mine who worked at Yucca mountain (where the government wants to sequester waste) said there was no way they could guarantee long term safety.
I don't know what the exact risk is, but when you're working on ten-thousand-year timescales it's worth being a little cautious.
The solution to nuclear waste is burning it up in breeder reactors. Who don't have to store the stuff for aeons if we risk producing weapons grade material in between.
Big problems are quite easily solvable if more X prize and darpa challenges were promoted.
Some big problems easily solvable today
- Create artificial general intelligence
- Create an immortal mice using focused ultrasound technologies (non-invasive surgery and localized drug delivery)
- flying cars (drones) including air traffic control for everyone on earth (+ cargo drones, so 1 trillion air vehicles or more)
(That's in addition to the important prizes already like x tricorder and darpa humanoid)
Up the prize money to $1 billion each (that's nothing compared to the bailouts) and you'll see all of the above done within 1 year, they really aren't difficult if you put a little thought to it. There's more than enough money and the technological pieces are in place. It just requires some bold thinking.
No one holds people to account for opportunity costs. The robocar challenge showed that robocars were possible. Governments and car companies should be held to account to account (sued in court) for not working on it sooner. That delay is millions of deaths. The same is true for other techs as mentioned above. Some economic indicators need to be put in place for tech development that isn't being done (opportunity cost accounting).
I don't think I'd regard "artifical general intelligence" as "easily solvable" - unless I've missed some developments in the field I don't think we are much closer to understanding how to engineer a general human-level intelligence than we were 20 or 30 years ago.
Machine learning has cracked any problem put in it's path. AI hasn't been done yet because no one's actually tried. There's the Loebner Prize but it's too easy (needs to be multi-month and with difficult challenges like write an essay or computer program) and there's no heavyweight turing tests with heavyweight teams (in the ballpark "heavweightness" are search engines and ibm watson).
"AI hasn't been done yet because no one's actually tried."
Researchers have been trying to create some kind of framework for general intelligence since the 1950s with multiple governments (notably the US, EU and Japanese) throwing billions at it, with relatively little results - resulting in things like the great AI Winter.
We have lots of clever focused systems now that are made feasible by the enormous capacity of modern hardware, but I'm not convinced that we have made much fundamental progress on real human level general intelligence.
Note that I do think that general AI is possible - it's what motivated me to get postgrad AI research, I just think that it is a long way off. YMMV.
Yeah, but they haven't put it in the framework of an actual benchmarked test like machine learning problems. They futzed around with prolog and other stuff rather than have any kind of metrics.
You know, I hope you're dead wrong here. Because unless its generality somehow stops at AI research, or we somehow find a way to guarantee it will do what we ultimately want…
The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.
Part of the issue IMHO is that we need a big enemy to tackle big projects. ALCAN highway - 1800 miles long - done in 9 months during WW2. MoonShot - done in 9 years during the cold war. Big enemies unify the people.
The reason we don't achieve lofty visions is that those who would pursue them are being smothered by nationalism. It is ironic that the Apollo mission success is being held out as the ideal (as it always is) because its success is what heralded this crushing nationalism to be brought down upon all our heads.
But I know, no one wants to hear this. That's because they're nationalists. All they can see is nationalist solutions to problems, and since that IS the problem, nothing will change.
Big-idea technological innovation has been led for years by the US, and for some time by the USSR as well. But the Soviet Union is gone, and there may be a cultural shift in America: going at it alone and distrust of government. The libertarian streak that has long been present in American culture seems to be taking hold of more and more people. Even Democrats seem to have a distrust of government, and some even partially accept right-wing axioms about the benefits of small government and spending cuts. But some undertakings are simply too big for private corporations, and require government funding and control. Only Americans increasingly distrust the gov't.
This sentiment is not bad necessarily, but it's becoming pervasive and might be spreading beyond just distrust of government. Americans (or, rather, well-to-do Americans, or those born to the right parents in the right neighborhoods) don't want to be a small cog in a big machine. They prefer going at it alone, or in a small team and encourage individual expression.
So this is not wrong, and it certainly doesn't apply to everyone everywhere, but it might just be one more reason in the decline of huge undertakings, that might require collaboration on a national or international scale, where talented people must be content to contribute their small part to a very large and non-individual expression.