Is Technology Slowing Down

[ukbod2015]

We seem to have had certain standards in technology for quite a long time compared to how fast things used to change only a few years ago. My laptop is 5 years old but we still have nothing, in general use, faster than an i7. The 1080p standard for TVs is still going strong as 4k is going to take quite a while to get through to the average user. 3d is 50+ years old and smart TVs are just a computer disguised as a TV. Maybe the Roswell stuffs running out. With one exception battery cars struggle to do more than a 100 miles. What do you think?

[Hymie]

Perhaps it is just a matter of diminishing returns – for sure, one of the next big things will be autonomous vehicles that will have a dramatic effect on all our lives (all over the world).

AI that can do our jobs is still a long way off – even for fairly menial tasks. Humans can readily adapt to a new situation and accommodate it with minimal instruction – currently most software is f*cked with some unexpected input. Just look how long it took programmers to produce chess playing programs that could play to a reasonable standard (where all possible scenarios are known).

Battery technology indeed seems to be packing ever more energy within a given volume – but it is only an energy store, the power has to come from somewhere.

[TTG]

Tech moves so fast I think some of it is held back to allow the backlog to clear and therefore money to be made. Consoles spring to mind.

[Old_Geezer]

As the tech shrank to smaller and smaller electronic parts the speed could increase, as long as the heat could be dissipated. But at a certain point it is difficult to get the heat away, And the materials used, start be be affected by quantum affects; they being so small these effects are no longer too small to ruin anything. This means a new technologies are needed to improve on what we achieved so far.

Of late the solution has to been to stick with what we can manufacture already but process things in parallel to gain speed. But one can only go so far in being able to split tasks to different processors and then combine the results before the solution starts to become as slow as the original designs were.

TV standards are more a case of a need for a dominant technology to become cheap enough to sell, and the ability to stream the data commonplace. Mainly commercial issues I believe.

Battery tech is galloping on apace but again one needs to discover the combination of sufficiently common materials to achieve faster charging, and large capacity. It's asking a lot. Oil holds massive amounts of energy in a small mass, it's difficult to replicate that.

Advances come and go in spurts. I'm, unaware of the rate of new things slowing down. Merely slow downs in areas that were phenomenally quick in improvements over the last few decades.