Frankly, I think the biggest cause of the "stagnation" you're seeing is unwillingness to burn resources as the world population climbs toward 8 billion. We could build the 1970s idea of a flying car right now; it just wouldn't be permitted to fly because (a) it would (noisily) waste so much fuel and (b) it turns out that most people really aren't up to being pilots, especially if you have as many little aircraft flying around from random point A to random point B as you have cars. A lot of those old SciFi ideas simply weren't practical to begin with.

... and I think that the other cause is that of course it's easier to pick low hanging fruit.

It may not be possible to build a space elevator with any material, ever, period, especially if it has to actually stay in service under real environmental conditions. You're not seeing radically new engine types because it's very likely that we've already explored all the broad types of engines that are physically possible. The laws of physics aren't under any obligation to support infinite expansion, or to let anybody realize every pipe dream.

In fact, the trick of getting rapid improvement seems to be finding a new direction in which to expand, so that you can start at the bottom of the logistic curve. You got recent improvement in electronics and computing because microelectronics were a new direction. You didn't get more improvement in engines because they were an old direction.

Your six categories are now all old directions (except maybe manufacturing, because that can mean anything at all). In 1970, you might not have included "information"... because wasn't so prominent in people's minds until a bunch of new stuff showed up to give it salience.

At the turn of the last century, you had much more of a "green field" in the all of the areas you list. You're going to have to settle for less in those areas.

And there's no guarantee that there are any truly new directions left to go in, either. Eventually you reach the omega point.

That said, I think you're underestimating the progress in some of those areas.

Manufacturing

The real cost of basically everything is way down from 1970. Any given thing is made with less raw material, less energy, and less environmental impact.

I build stuff for fun, and the parts and materials available to me are very, very noticeably better than what I could have gotten in the 1970s.

Materials are much more specialized and they are universally better. Plastic in 1970 was pretty much synonymous with "cheap crap that falls apart easily". In 2021, plastics are often better than any other material you can find. 2021 permanent magnets are in 1970s science fiction territory (and more useful than flying cars). Lubricants and sealants are vastly better. There's a much wider variety of better controlled, more consistent metal alloys in far wider use, and they are conditioned to perform better using a much wider variety of heat treatments, mechanical processing, surface treatments, etc. Things that would have been "advanced aerospace materials" in 1970 are commonplace in 2021.

Mechanisms in general are much more reliable and durable, and require much less maintenance and adjustment.

I don't believe 1970 had significant deployment of laser cutting, waterjet cutting, EDM, or probably a bunch of other process I'm forgetting about. They existed, but there were rare then, and they are everywhere now. 1970 had no additive manufacturing unless you count pottery.

It's true that there's no real change in how major bulk inputs are handled... because that stuff is really old (and was really old before 1970). There's not much dramatic improvement still available, and not even that many "tweaks".

Yeah, you don't have MNT. Although there's a lot of "invisible" improvement in the understanding of chemistry and the ability to manipulate things at small scales... and MNT was always supposed to be something that would suddenly pop up when those things got good enough. It might qualify as a "new direction", but there are no guarantees about exactly when such a direction will open up.

Construction

Construction has always been conservative and has never moved fast. Given a comparable budget, 1970 construction wasn't all that different than 1870 construction, the big exceptions being framed structure instead of post-and-beam and prefab gypsum board instead of in-place plastering.

As for 1970 to 2021, in 1970 you would have used much more wood to frame a house. Nobody used roof or floor trusses in residential construction. There was also a lot more lead and asbestos floating around... and they needed lead and asbestos, because without them their paints and insulation would not have remotely approached 2021 performance. For the most part they weren't as good even with them. There's also much wider deployment of plastic in construction (because plastic doesn't suck any more). Fasteners are better, too, or at least it's better understood which fastener to apply when and where.

I can tell at a glance that I'm not in a 1970 living room because the plugs are grounded. Also, unless it's a rich person's living room, the furniture is prefab flat pack particle board with veneer finishes instead of stick-built wood.

Agriculture

When I was a kid in the 1970s, the fresh food available in your average supermarket was dramatically less varied than it is now, and at the same time dramatically less palatable. Even the preserved food was more degraded. We actually ate canned vegetables at a significant rate.

If you didn't live through maybe the 1980s to the 1990s or early 2000s, you can't really have an idea how much better the food available to the average urban consumer has gotten.

A big part of that was better crop varieties, and I think another very big part was better management and logistics.

Energy

Energy is doing quite well, thanks, with several major, qualitative changes.

We have working renewables. Solar cells in 1970 were just plain unusable for any real purpose. Wind was a pain in the ass because of the mechanical unreliability of the generators (and was less efficient because of significantly worse turbine geometries). We're also better at not wasting so much energy.

Batteries in 1970 were absolute garbage in terms of capacity, energy density, energy per unit weight, cycle count, you name it. Primary cells were horrible, and rechargeables were worse. You simply did not use a ton of little battery-powered gadgets of any kind. That's partly because all the electrical devices we have now are much less power hungry, but it's also because batteries have actually started not to suck. People in 1970 would have looked at you like you were crazy if you suggested a cordless drill, and that has nothing to do with the efficiency of the motor. By the way, that progress in batteries is based on a crapton of major materials science advances.

Yeah, nuclear didn't happen, but that was for political reasons. One notable political issue was that fission plants are easy to use to make material for nuclear bombs. Nobody quite caught on to the whole CO2 issue until it was too late. And "nuclear homes, cars and batteries" were never a very practical idea, so it's not surprising that they haven't happened. You don't want every bozo handling fissionables... and controlled fusion for power is probably impossible at a small scale, even assuming it's possible at a large scale.

Transportation

The limits on transportation technology are energy and the Pauli exclusion principal. These are not things that you can easily change. You can't expect new transport modes because the physical environment doesn't change. You can't expect a bunch of new engine types because there are a limited number of physically possible engine types.

For actual deployed infrastructure, you have to add political limits (which are probably the main reasons you don't have much more efficiency by now)... and limits on what people want.

Doing a lot of space flight is a massive energy sink, and there is no urgent reason to waste that energy at the moment. Yes, I have heard the X-risk arguments, and no, they do not move me at all. Neither does asteroid mining. And the manifest destiny space colonization stuff sure doesn't. Maybe the people who want all that space flight are simply a minority?

Supersonic transport is also not worth it. Speeds have gone down because nobody wants to waste that much energy or deal with that much noise (or move the material to dig huge systems of evacuated tunnels).

Medicine

Yeah, it's a hard problem, see, because you have to hack on this really badly engineered system, which you're not allowed to shut down or modify.

That said, cancer isn't a single disease, and "the cure for cancer" was never going to be a thing. I think that actual medical people understood that even in 1970. There've actually been very significant advances against specific kinds of cancer. There are also improvements in prevention; screenings, HPV vaccine, whatever.

"Heart disease" isn't really a single disease, either. But there's a lot less of it around, with less impact, and not just because people stopped smoking. Even if you eat all the time and never exercise (which we're worse about than in 1970), ya got yer statins, yer much better blood pressure meds, yer thrombolytics, yer better surgery, yer better implantable devices...

Oh, and they turned around a vaccine against a relatively novel pandemic virus in under a year. They identified that virus, sequenced its genome, and did a ton of other characterization on its structure and action, in time that would definitely have sounded like science fiction in 1970. They actually know a lot about how it works... detailed chemical explanations for stuff that would, in 1970, have been handwaved at a level just about one step above vitalism.

Gordon, however, points out that GDP has never captured consumer surplus, and there has been plenty of surplus in the past. So if you want to argue that unmeasured surplus is the cause of an apparent (but not a real) decline in growth rates, then you have to argue that GDP has been systematically increasingly mismeasured over time.

So far, I’ve only heard one only argument that even hints in this direction: the shift from manufacturing to services. If services are more mismeasured than manufactured products, then in logic at least this could account for an illusory slowdown. But I’ve never seen this argument fully developed.

The argument which jumps to my mind is that value-of-bits is more systematically mismeasured than value-of-atoms. Information is generally cheap to copy. Marginal cost of copying the information is close to zero, therefore its price will be close to zero. That is exactly the condition under which GDP would be an especially poor measure, so we'd expect GDP to be increasingly poor as a larger percentage of growth shifts into information goods.

I still think the overall stagnation case you put forward is strong, though.

Something missing from the top-level post: why stagnation.

I'll just put out that one of the tiny things that most gave me a sense of "fuck" in relation to stagnation was reading an essay written in 1972 that was lamenting the "publish or perish" phenomenon. I had previously assumed that that term was way more recent, and that people were trying to fix it but it would just take a few years. To realize it was 50 years old was kinda crushing honestly.

Here's google ngrams showing how common the phrase "publish or perish" was in books through the last 200 years. It was coined in the 30s and took off in the 60s, peaking in 1968. Interesting & relevant timing!

While reviewing two other progress studies posts for the LW 2019 Review (Concrete and Artificial Fertilizer) I found myself thinking "these seem neat, but I don't feel like I can directly apply the knowledge here very much. What I really wish Jason Crawford would write (someday) are posts that take a birds eye view of progress, taking advantage of the gestalt of all the different object level "how did we invent X?" research and then deriving insights about the bigger picture.

So, I am quite delighted by this post, which I feel like does exactly that.

I think there is a partial explanation that comes from Goodhart's law and human desire for superstimulation, and the ease with which that type of superstimulation is now available.

Capitalism is effective at fulfilling human desires, which are measured on the level of personal tradeoffs, taken on a very short time scale. The measure is not about human progress write large, but until people's basic needs are satisfied, the two are very well correlated; enough food, labor saving devices, etc. If we are trying to advance "human progress" than at a certain point, the individual-level, short term motive no longer suffices.

If you want longevity, you need people to be willing to pay for it now - but they aren't. If you want space travel, you need the beneficiaries to exist now, not in a few generations. But this got worse, because we've found a much faster feedback loop for desires than physical progress - screens. They are dopamine devices, and they absorb almost unlimited capacity for desire. That means we're wireheading, and any longer term goals will be ignored.

I'd be really happy to hear ideas for how this can be routed around, as short of a global pandemic to convince people to actually care about some specific technological advance like a vaccine, I don't know what motivates society enough to overcome this.

Curated.

As noted in a previous comment: I appreciate this post because I think it's fairly hard to make sense of all the stuff going on in the technological-innovation-space, if you're just looking at individual "trees" rather than the collective "forest." I know Jason Crawford has been thinking a lot about this space over a long time, getting to look at a lot of individual trees enough to take stock of how the collective forest is doing. 

So, getting to see how he changed his mind about things, and how that exploration fed into updates on the stagnation hypothesis, was useful to me. 

I can't point to the episode(s) or post(s), but I believe both on his blog and on his podcast Conversations with Tyler, Tyler has expressed the idea that we may be currently coming out of the stagnation of stuff in the Real World driven by stuff like SpaceX, CRISPR, mRNA, etc.

Since then, the “third Industrial Revolution”, starting in the mid-1900s, has mostly seen fundamental advances in a single area: electronic computing and communications. If you date it from 1970, there has really been nothing comparable in manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation, or medicine—again, not that these areas have seen zero progress, simply that they’ve seen less-than-revolutionary progress. Computers have completely transformed all of information processing and communications, while there have been no new types of materials, vehicles, fuels, engines, etc.

One of the challenges here is defining what counts as a "new" category of innovation as opposed to an incremental improvement on an "old" category.

I expect many people would count the invention of Bakelite as a "new"material. Bakelite was the first fully synthetic plastic, invented in 1909. But all plastics are polymers, and Bakelite mainly just replaced these natural polymers with a cheaper, better alternative. It is chemically distinct from the natural polymers it replaced, and its synthetic nature was truly revolutionary.

But that's just the problem. What makes a material "revolutionary" depends less on how physically distinct it is from other machines and materials, and more on what economic possibilities it unlocks. The compound bow, invented in 1966, might have been "revolutionary" if it had been invented in 10,000 BC. Because it was invented centuries into the gunpowder era, it was not.

So "stagnation" really ought to mean that we are creating economic demand at a lower rate than in the past. The airplane created economic demand for flight, and improvements to the airplane in terms of safety, speed, cost, and destinations increased that demand. Now, the airline industry is a poster child for stagnation. It's not that people don't want to fly. It's just that there's no economically tractable way to make them want to fly more.

A structural feature of medicine that promotes "stagnancy" in the sense of economic demand is the fact that people take most medicines only because they get a disease. No matter how good a statin is, patients won't take it unless they're at risk for something like a heart attack or stroke, and they usually will take it if they are at risk. Only medications for entirely new diseases can create demand where there was none before, and these medicines are mainly (though not exclusively) in the category of rare diseases, which limits the economic impact that any one of them can have. So "stagnancy" in the field of medicine merely means "we have at least one go-to treatment for almost every common illness."

Note that this isn't 100% true. In HIV, we have PrEP, which is a new category of medication that people use to prevent acquiring HIV, and thus attacks HIV from a whole new angle, creating a whole new type of demand. COVID vaccines and medications also have this attribute. We had nothing, and now we have something.

This structural feature of "stagnation" is almost, but not quite, an inevitability. Some technologies are "generative," in the sense that they make further new products possible that would have been meaningless before. iPhones are "generative" because they are not only in demand, but they create demand for many other products and services to improve and exploit them: waterproof and decorated cases, magnetic stands for use in cars, bluetooth headphones, etc. Air travel is "generative" because it creates demand for things like tourist resorts, travel guides, gift shops, neck pillows, and wheeled luggage.

While "stagnation" ought to set in within any given product category for the purely structural reason that we naturally wind up creating at least one product to satisfy each form of demand, I see no reason why we would a priori expect to see a decline in these "generative" technologies that create knock-on forms of demand. But I do accept that a decline in GDP is empirical evidence for such a decline.

There are certain categories of progress that I think we neglect in these discussions.

• I'd tentatively count Ukraine's so far successful repulsion of Russian invasion, using innovative arms and intelligence supplied by other countries, as an example of progress. As is the ability to punish Russian aggression with international sanctions. In the past, my guess is that the difference in manpower would have counted for a lot more, and it would have been much more difficult to weaponize the global economy against Russia. Who knows what the knock-on effects will be if Ukraine is able to win the war?
• Note that many of these definitions of "progress" and "stagnation," including the ones I'm offering here, are specifically about progress for the global rich. The global poor have seen massive progress since the 1970s, and I don't think anybody seriously denies that.
• Another example of "progress" in atoms is the rise of polyamory, gay marriage, greater permissiveness around divorce and contraception, and other forms of social and sexual advancement. These forms of progress aren't machine-based, but they do seem heavily facilitated by the internet, which makes it much easier for minority interests to connect, form community, and share information. Cultural progress of this kind must somehow be relevant as a form of economic progress, but I have no idea how it would be counted in traditional measures of GDP. It seems to me that this might ultimately prove to be economically generative over time as these communities have a chance to mature. After overcoming a material bottleneck, people turn their attention to social bottlenecks. Maybe eventually they turn their attention back to material bottlenecks, or to something else.

All that said, there's still something compelling to the question "where's my X?"

If I could list some things that I really want, and for which it seems no technology exists, I might wish for:

• A better way to collate various DNA precipitation protocols, ensure they work with the materials and equipment in my lab, and train me to execute the protocol successfully.
• Much better couple's therapy than presently exists. Being able to have a therapist experience in which both members of the couple feel the therapist has the capacity to simultaneously be "exclusively" their individual therapist while also being able to act fully as a therapist for the couple.
• Effective, non-addictive, and legal nootropics.
• VR-controlled robots with fine manual dexterity.
• Cheap miniature heat-and-humidity-resistant stick-on microscope cameras that could be accessed over the internet.
• An affordable laptop with 3-4x the screen space.
• A much easier way to try on clothes and other products.
• Technology that could automatically and reliably find the highest-quality local services that fit your price range and schedule.

But mostly, what I want are things that already exist, but cost more money than I'm willing to pay. I want my own house, access to better lab equipment, more money to buy better-quality food, a Maine Coon cat, a really nice bike, etc. etc. etc. I have a lot of room for material progress in my own life without requiring any new technologies in order to get it. Over time, I fully anticipate that I will realize these forms of material progress.

Unfortunately, material progress will come with declining health and fewer years of life remaining. Eventually, longevity will become my bottleneck to progress, and this is true for every human.

Based on all this, I think that a progress agenda that focuses on increasing the supply and quality of goods and services that already exist, while working toward longevity technology, would address the two areas that I think are most relevant for making material improvements in my own life.

Longevity among the global rich currently appears to be slowing down, but I would not be surprised if that trend changes in my lifetime, and I think it's mostly a consequence of the time it takes for the science and engineering community to master the suite of new technologies we've developed over the last 20 years.

I'm not sure if sheer material abundance is decelerating. Global meat production was accelerating from 1980-2018, but suddenly flatlined in that year. World car production was pretty linear from 2001-2016 and has fallen off a cliff since then. World PC shipments have been fairly steady since 2006. World energy consumption flatlined in 2019, but was visibly decelerating after about 1980. These make me weakly update to "yes," material progress is decelerating.

As Cowen and Southwood point out, these decelerations are happening in a context of massively increased scientific research. This suggests that scientific innovation is not the driver of economic production that it once was. If I had to guess, I'd blame a combination of coordination problems, regulatory slowdowns, philosophical differences, and underinvestment in public infrastructure. We should have had full nuclear power a long time ago. The way we regulate medicine is onerous. Insane laws like the Foreign Dredge Act accumulate obstacles and linger far too long because it's so hard in a democratic context to coordinate to repeal them. How is it that fission scientists have been so underfunded for so long? We have the miracle of CRISPR-Cas9, and every article on the topic prefaces it by stating that it's wildly controversial.

From a bird's eye view, humanity rarely knows what it wants most, feels embarrassed about those desires it has identified, and even when it's not too confused or timid to pursue its objects, often has no clear idea of how to cooperate in order to get it. Humanity needs therapy.

From that perspective, a "philosophy of progress" seems like it's pointing in the right direction. "Have you considered that what you might want is material abundance, longer lives, a community you enjoy, and the technology that allows you to get these things without constantly producing catastrophic side effects?"

effective debate notes: I've read main points of every first-level comment in this thread and the author's clarification.

epistemic status: This argument is mostly about values. I hope we can all agree with the facts I mentioned here, but can also consider this alternative framework which I believe is a "better map of reality".

I disagree with your conclusion because I disagree with your model of classification of tech frontiers. In the body of this article and most comments, people seem to agree with your division of technology into 6 parts. Here's why I think this model might be not very capable: I believe it assumes every kind of innovation is "fundamentally" or "canonically" same. 

1. Specifically, it ignores different area's different "transferrability" or "interconnectivity" with other fields. For example, innovations in manufacturing/agriculture/energy/transportation/medicine generally cannot be transferred to one another directly; while innovations in information can be transferred to other fields easily. Google scholar "machine learning" + any of the five fields and we should be able to find plenty of literature reviews on them.
2. It doesn't care about how important different fields matter to us on a "meta" level. One defining characteristic for humans is the use of complex language and theory of mind. None of the other 5 field in the original framework contribute directly to languages and the use of languages; while information technology by definition includes the enhanced efficiency and accessibility of a wide variety of discussions and knowledge-sharing. I see that you might agree with this point here by your discussions in the first half of the article. However, the impact of this aspect of information technology can be much bigger than other fields in the original classification, including:
   1. Simply more potential for progress: if you ask scholars 50 years ago in their very specifically subdivided fields, that they would have so many pre-prints to read even if they don't sleep or eat, they'll probably ask "what's a pre-print?" before even saying "no way!". Internet-based tools are constantly increasing accessibility and thus quantity of research, while simultaneously increasing the speed of research through streamlining the research process from knowledge acquisition to reproducibility to peer review. Results may take a bit to propagate from the science world to tech world, but this level of meta-scientific discovery is really unprecedented since the invention of the printing press (and I know you're not talking about the scientific frontier here, so this is just an example rather than a point).
   2. From nation states to human civilization: sure, technologies like social media divide us and that's a huge problem we should think about hard, but instant communication across the globe and very good machine translation services have already transforming a large part of the human population into a group of shared values and fundamentally agreeable ways of thinking (im kinda talking about the type of thinking by the time of enlightenment without coining a specific name for it, since people outside of the western tradition doesn't call it our way; doesn't mean they don't think like this), and it should be trivial that this would bring technological progress.
3. Economically, bits > atoms. The previous sentence is used metaphorically, and what I'm trying to convey is that bits are ideas. Ideas can be copied from person to person, or from machine to machine, at a speed many times as fast as copying physical objects, and at a price of zero (mostly). This makes even a tiny innovation in IT matter the same as huge innovations in traditional industries: you can have an entire field dealing with more efficient ways to predict protein structures while spending countless hours, but a machine learning model (alphafold 2) can match lab performance at much less cost and much better scalability (I know way less about biology than I know about machine learning, so please correct me if I'm wrong!)
   1. Cost and scalability are the central point being made here - one of the most important innovations in my book is the public cloud industry led by the Amazon Web Service. Hiring more research assistants have a diseconomies of scale: coordination, management, communication (in a PHYSICAL environment! be sure not have any OSHA violations - and lawyer up! - and make sure to secure your lab equipment - maybe add a guard - ...etc) all become harder the more people you hire. However, if you're just adding another 100 GPUs to your infrastructure, you wouldn't need "middle management" for them - maybe their programming counterpart, but they're much cheaper, and you can get many of them open-source.

So my main point is that, the information revolution should really be a printing-press-level innovation, and comparing it to electricity or steam engine really missed a lot of important fundamental differences of IT, and these unique characteristics are already manifesting themselves everywhere. So here's my alternative framework for the original categories (roughly):

• All important technological innovation categories (impact* from least to most)
  • Helping us enhance reality
    • Manufacturing & construction
      • concrete, civil engineering, skyscrapers
    • Energy
      • non-renewable energy, fission, renewable energy, fusion
    • Transportation
      • highways, containerization, international shipping, self-driving cars
  • Helping us enhance ourselves (but physical)
    • Agriculture (not as important technology-wise since we can already meet all the needs we have; just a matter of redistribution)
      • genetically-modified corps, genetically-engineered corps
    • Transportation (partly)
      • subways, intercontinental flights, self-driving cars
    • Medicine/Bio-*
      • polio vaccines, CRISPR, COVID-19 vaccines, immortality
  • Helping us enhance ourselves (but conceptual)
    • Information
      • alphabets, printing press, internet

Prescriptively (more of 'predicting the future'), my belief is that although in the past years our focus shifted from more heavy-industrial innovations to more "meta" and indirect ones (also including non-technical ones like communication theory), the latter has more potential than the former from the points above.

*: Since no innovation come alone, our value functions for importance and impact of an innovation should not only include immediate impacts, but also potential ones that might take longer to fully manifest but we can already see coming.

Edit 1: add epistemic status

When it comes to medicine I think the key thing we notice stagnation is in lifespans. Focusing on individual diseases is misleading. Curing cancer is commonly seen as being worth three years in life-span. Health in Hong-Kong is two times curing cancer better then health in the US if you use lifespan as your measuring stick.

Looking at the history it seems interesting that the change in progress in lifespan was more in the early 1960s then in the 1970s. The Kefauver Harris Amendment in 1962 might be one of the key drivers. 

In the last decades we had conceptual innovations in medicine like Evidence-Based medicine and meta-studies. We can finally say that Chiropratics do roughly as much for back pain as our other medical interventions for back pain because we can use metastudies which means we have an alternative to rejecting it because we don't like the theory. 

“Go into a room and subtract off all of the screens. How do you know you’re not in 1973, but for issues of design?”

At least if you’re in an average grocery store, you can tell it’s the 2000s from the greatly improved food selection

I speculate that there may be anthropic reasons for some of the stagnation.

In particular, I suspect the slowdown in growth of energy production may be what we would expect to see because in worlds where energy production grew faster we would have also had more abundant and more powerful weapons that would have been more likely to kill more humans, thus making it less likely to find oneself living in a world where such growth didn't decrease.

As for transportation, I would say the average time to get to a place have dropped considerably in past 50 years, not because of any specific invention, but because airplanes has become less toys for the rich and more of buses with wings available to everyone. Similarly, densification of the motorway system made it faster to go places by car.

It's not clear, of course, whether that kind of thing counts as technological progress. But if not so, what kind of progress is it?

I mostly agree with your thesis, but I noticed that you didn't mention agriculture in the last section, so I looked up some numbers.

The easiest stat I can find to track long-term is the hours of labor required to produce 100 bushels of wheat [1].

1830: 250 - 300 hours

1890: 40 - 50 hours 

1930: 15 - 20 hours

1955: 6 - 12 hours

1965: 5 hours

1975: 3.75 hours

1987: 3 hours

That source stops in the 1980s, but I found another source that says the equivalent number today is 2 hours [2]. That roughly matches the more recent data on total agricultural productivity from the USDA, which shows continued improvement, but not on the scale of the mid-1800's [3].

On the other hand, if the Wall Street Journal is right, being a farmer sounds a lot less strenuous today: https://www.wsj.com/articles/farmers-plow-through-movies-while-plowing-fields-11557508393 (paywalled). Instead of manual labor, farmers can sit in an air-conditioned tractor cab and watch Netflix! That's progress of a different sort, I suppose...

I also wondered about the impact of GMO food. That sounds possibly revolutionary to me, so why does its impact not show up in the numbers?

The sources I found suggest that recent GMO advances can improve yield by 10% in corn [4] or 20 - 50% across a range of other crops [5]. That's great, but not as dramatic as I thought it could be.

[1] Farm Machinery and Technology Changes from 1776-1990 (thoughtco.com)

[2]  Wheat Trivia - Food Facts & Trivia: Wheat (foodreference.com)

[3] USDA ERS - Agricultural Productivity Growth in the United States: 1948-2015

[4] New genetically modified corn produces up to 10% more than similar types | Science | AAAS (sciencemag.org

[5] GMO crops have been increasing yield for 20 years, with more progress ahead - Alliance for Science (cornell.edu)

Edit to shorten (more focus on arguments, less rhetorics), and include the top comment by jbash as a response / second part. The topic is important, but the article seems to have a bottom line already written.

I wonder about the question of catch-up growth.

There's a point raised in Is Scientific Progress Slowing Down [LW · GW] by Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood about problems relating to using TFP as an estimate of the value of progress, which is that it is hard to categorize ideas which are adopted late. Duplicating one of the quotes in the comments there:

To consider a simple example, imagine that an American company is inefficient, and then a management consultant comes along and teaches that company better personnel management practices, thereby boosting productivity. Does this count as an improvement in TFP or not? Or is it simply an increase in labor supply, namely that of the consultant? On one hand, some hitherto-neglected idea is introduced into the production process. That might militate in favor of counting it as TFP. On the other hand, the introduced idea is not a new one, and arguably the business firm in question is simply engaged in “catch up” economic growth, relative to more technologically sophisticated firms.

Generalizing a bit, this seems like it could introduce counting problems everywhere. For example, after WWII half of Eurasia had to be rebuilt; does this count as catch-up growth? What about the industrialization of other countries, whether via deliberate economic development strategies or outsourcing - these factories weren't built with state-of-the-art techniques, but rather because the same old technology was cheaper to build and operate there.

How closely does this global boom in catch-up growth coincide with our 1970s stagnation timeline, and can a part of the explanation be something as simple as capital being redirected from technical progress to expansion of the current technical base?

Note that this can be modeled pretty simply.

Evolution is slow and for the sake of argument, assume human intelligence has not changed over the time period you have mapped.  If humans haven't gotten any smarter, and the next incremental step in the technology areas you have mentioned requires increasingly sophisticated solutions and thought, then you would expect progress to slow.  Fairly obvious case of diminishing returns.

Second, computers do act to augment human intelligence, and more educated humans alive increase the available brainpower, but this too contrasts with probably exponentially increasing difficulty in certain fields.

For example, in the field I presently work, I see huge teams of people and very sophisticated equipment used to support further improvements in microprocessors.  I think in the past the teams needed to be much smaller, and the equipment was simpler, and the gains were easier.  

The fields you mention there are specific bottlenecks we can discuss in detail but I feel that would make this post too long.  But the TLDR : nuclear turns out to have long tail risks that current human run organizations can't economically efficiently manage, transportation is gated by energy and human reflexes, medicine is limited by a number of inefficiencies, and manufacturing has seen enormous improvements, just not in the way you think.  The rise of China has made manufactured goods of varied quality levels far more abundant than in the past, and has made them accessible to billions more people.  Your "typical home, subtract the screens" model is implicitly assuming a nice home in Los Angeles in 1955 or so.  But over in China most people did not yet have running water and had minimal access to electricity.

The singularity model is simply, we know that each of the fields mentioned, we can create toy examples of "minimum limit case" where we don't know the limits of physics, but we do know what we could achieve if we had limitless intelligence to engineer to the limits rapidly.

Below I have listed what are the 'minimum limit cases'.  We don't know how far the fields can be pushed past the point I mentioned but everything I mention is pretty conclusively supported by evidence as being feasible.

Note that everything listed, including medicine advances, require supporting advances in AI to make them feasible.  We don't have that yet.  We have a lot of toy models made at a small scale but not the integrated systems just yet.  By AI I mean limited function agents able to choose good (but not perfect) control outputs for a robotic system, not self amplifying superintelligences.

Medicine - we know that aging is governed by processes that accumulate negative changes over time.  Stopping/reversing these changes is possible if we knew exactly which genes to rewrite.  At the limit case, medicine would be able to produce artificial replacements for any organ, stabilize any dying patient with high speed AI/robotics to identify the correct intervention and apply it, and turn off the root cause of most diseases.  

Transportation - a packet switched network of vacuum trains/point to point flying cars/overhead transit pods/autonomous cars

Energy - solar panels over all buildings and deserts, batteries at every electrical panel, a network of demand regulation

Agriculture - robotic farms in a sealed pod

Construction - robotics that assemble a building from pre-fabricated building blocks that come on a truck

Manufacturing - robotics that are sophisticated enough to manufacture themselves and to self-clear nearly all faults

Another argument in favor of the slow down is that you don't hear people arguing that innovation is speeding up. It's either slowing down or the same as before.

I’m not sure you are talking about technology advancement but rather the gifts of different hydrocarbon ages. Your IR1 to me is better described as everything we could do with coal. IR2 is everything we could do with oil. IR3 seems different to me, if humanity invented true AI -will we be literally gods?

Also there is the issue of order of magnitude improvements only being noticeable when they pass the human scale and seeming irrelevant either side. Commuting to work in a flying car might be fun, but flying my desk home at the speed of light is far faster and vastly more practical, not to mention shrinking my work desk to a fraction of an SSD.

Finally it seems like a get of my lawn/kids these days post. Romans had chariots and roads and indoor heating, cars and interstates are impressive in scale and speed, but so is flying my office desk.

What will be the next big driver of technology innovation? (Especially as 8-10 billion people may have to go through more expensive hydrocarbons over the next 50 years slowing down the technological feedstock) My guess is abundant green electrical power, and slightly improved batteries combined with ai and crop improvements to feed us, these will be held back by resources per person declining (oil per capita peaked in the 70s I think, good wood is expensive), and climate change issues.

Great article, small (but maybe significant) nitpick. I don't think there's great evidence that innovation-by-bureaucracy is bad, and I actually think it's pretty good. The sheer quantity of innovation produced by the two world wars and space program is spectacular, as is the record of DARPA post WW2. Even the Soviet Union could do could innovation by bureaucracy. At the company level, it's true that lots of big innovations come from small new companies, but at the same time Bell Labs, Intel, Sony were monsters. I actually think that the retreat of government is a big part of problem. 

Maybe it's wishful thinking but I think the stagnation is temporary. I think there is reason to believe that progress can come in waves. Scientific advancements of the early 1900s led to much of the technological advancements of pre and post war era.  So to, I think it reasonable that computation advancements of the last 30 or so years will lead to a number of interesting advancements:

I think it is reasonable to assume that many of the items from the list below will happen in the next 10 to 20 years.

• Self driving cars
• 2.5x batteries
  • electric cars 
  • electric airplanes
  • independence from fossil fuels
• Genetic engineering revolution (crispr, mRNA vaccines etc..)
• Large advances in AI possibly AGI.
• Fusion ?

If/when we hit AGI there will be a huge wave of progress. 

Maybe it's because we're now using the fiat system. The fiat system was introduced in 1971, and everything has been going downhill from there. It could be correlation or causation. But it's definitely something. This makes it more vivid: 

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

And what’s the matter with bits, anyway? Are they less important than atoms?

Arguably, yes, because they are less fundamental. A revolution in our understanding of the fundamental laws of physics begets more secondary revolutions down the line; quantum mechanics alone gave us lasers, nuclear power and those very bits - to name but a few. So from a revolution in our understanding of the world comes the promise of more revolutions once that reaches the application stage. Understanding quantum gravity might lead to warp drives. But no matter how great our ability to manipulate bits, the best they generally can do (except for the possibility of AGI, I guess) is help us squeeze more efficiency out of what we have already. We feel the energy problem especially keenly right now, of course, and far from helping all that much, computers only eat up ever more energy, sometimes in rather pointless ways. A clean, cheap source of energy right now would be worth far more than all the social media in the world. 

Seems to me that solving the problem of the safe mass-production, storage and transport of gaseous and liquid hydrogen would be the game-changer, for terrestrial needs as well as space travel.  It can be gotten from water or even air. If the danger of handling could be reduced, it would surpass petrol as the primary fuel and then off we go. Solves the carbon problem and the energy resource problem.  

Then if someone figured out how to better harness the sun's energy... Of the energy that reaches earth, what do we capture and put to use now, like .001%?  Or hydroelectricity from the tides? Lot more reliable than winds.  All the current problems/roadblocks seems to be energy-related. 

There is one aspect which you almost completely ignore in your post and which I believe is vital: WHY is stagnation bad? WHY is progress good? You make it sound as though you just want fancy gadgets for the sake of having fancy gadgets.

You have a "quantitative" section, but what exactly are you trying to quantify? Why is economic growth good?

You should spend more time pondering: What (quantifiable) factors are valuable in and of themselves? And have these factors improved or stagnated?

For example, I believe there is less famine and fewer people living in extreme poverty worldwide. Lifespans may have stagnated in the developed world, but how about in the developing world? If poor people are less poor and live longer, that is extremely important progress. They need the progress way more than we do.

Conversely, climate change and other looming environmental disasters may make poverty and suffering skyrocket again and make the world a much worse place, even if our gadgets grow ever fancier.