What about energy?
It's true that if you look at most areas of technology they are advancing rapidly. Except energy. Energy has stagnated since the 1950s.
I'm on the fence on this issue, but there are many very intelligent and knowledgeable people who are predicting a kind of anti-singularity: in the 21st century, fossil fuel depletion will send us way back, perhaps even de-industrialize most societies.
Is our civilization simply a machine that is transferring the order (low entropy state) in fossil fuels into order within itself (technology and economic complexity), and when those fossil fuels run out will this ordering process cease?
The lack of major breakthroughs in energy in the past 50 years is pretty dramatic. Nuclear looked like an energy panacea once, but it's turned out to be clunky and hard to scale. Solar panels and wind turbines are interesting, but the problem with those is that we basically can't store energy. Energy storage is either super-expensive per kilowatt-hour and not scalable (e.g. Li-Ion batteries) or very inefficient (e.g. water electrolysis to hydrogen).
Without a breakthrough on the order of cheap ultra-capacitors or fusion, I'm afraid we'll be seeing peak everything pretty soon, including technological complexity.
The thing is: all the technologies of the "singularity" are energy consumers. Where are the producers? What is going to power the singularity?
Then there's another area that makes me horribly pessimistic: politics. Most of our societies are degenerating to banana republic levels of corruption. Even if the energy problem is technically solvable, it seems to me that our political systems may be set up to do the absolute worst possible thing in this area: ride the fossil fuel crash into the ground in an orgy of war and despotism.
It's true that if you look at most areas of technology they are advancing rapidly. Except energy. Energy has stagnated since the 1950s.
I'm on the fence on this issue, but there are many very intelligent and knowledgeable people who are predicting a kind of anti-singularity: in the 21st century, fossil fuel depletion will send us way back, perhaps even de-industrialize most societies.
Is our civilization simply a machine that is transferring the order (low entropy state) in fossil fuels into order within itself (technology and economic complexity), and when those fossil fuels run out will this ordering process cease?
The lack of major breakthroughs in energy in the past 50 years is pretty dramatic. Nuclear looked like an energy panacea once, but it's turned out to be clunky and hard to scale. Solar panels and wind turbines are interesting, but the problem with those is that we basically can't store energy. Energy storage is either super-expensive per kilowatt-hour and not scalable (e.g. Li-Ion batteries) or very inefficient (e.g. water electrolysis to hydrogen).
Without a breakthrough on the order of cheap ultra-capacitors or fusion, I'm afraid we'll be seeing peak everything pretty soon, including technological complexity.
The thing is: all the technologies of the "singularity" are energy consumers. Where are the producers? What is going to power the singularity?
Then there's another area that makes me horribly pessimistic: politics. Most of our societies are degenerating to banana republic levels of corruption. Even if the energy problem is technically solvable, it seems to me that our political systems may be set up to do the absolute worst possible thing in this area: ride the fossil fuel crash into the ground in an orgy of war and despotism.