18 Comments
Dec 4, 2020Liked by Noah Smith

Noah, do you mind if I assign this essay when I teach the growth section of Intermediate Macro in 2021?

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Dec 4, 2020Liked by Noah Smith

TLDR atoms are cool again

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Two Things:

1. "Science doesn’t progress linearly, but in a branching, ramifying tree." Is that a reference to Kuhn?

2. Also, besides "cancer vaccines", cancer treatment has been revolutionized, especially with the advancement of immunotherapy: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/u-s-life-expectancy-goes-up-as-cancer-deaths-go-down/#:~:text=The%20rise%20brought%20the%20anticipated,heart%20disease%20and%20lung%20disease

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I think the technopessism you were referring to was more of a phenomenon in the past couple years. The beginning of the decade had a lot of optimism! People thought self driving cars would be a thing by now, etc.

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good piece noah , do you think implementation lag of new technologies is the reason for slowdown in productivity?

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"So it’s a little hard to explain the rampant techno-pessimism of the 2010s just by looking at the economic statistics."

I think we have plenty of evidence at this point that public opinion (and the opinion of the chattering class) doesn't correlate much with what's actually happening to tech progress. In particular, I am bewildered that you think the 2010's were a decade of stagnation. So much has happened, technologically, this past decade... I agree with Gwern who says 2010 was the year the future rebooted. https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2019/13#what-progress

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Nice post. The NASA Apollo program was a huge driver of creating demand for new computer chips. In 1963 NASA bought 60% of the USA’s integrated circuit supply. https://books.google.com/books/about/Digital_Apollo.html?id=gXYItzQARVoC

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The links to your reading list are worth the price of admission. As is the outstanding writing. Great work. Thanks from a happy subscriber.

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Surprised to see R&D for food and beverage such a small % of overall. Does that # take into account the work on 3D Doritos?

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Noah, glad to see that you're still doing great work, and fighting the good fight. A great book on how scientific and technological advance works, and the economics and history, if you haven't read it already, is "The Technology Trap" (2019), by Oxford economist Carl Benedict Frey.

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Has there ever been a research program that has gone on longer with less practical benefit than fusion energy research? Any decade now . . .

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Isn't solving global warming "progress" in the same sense that one is a better skier after you fix your broken leg? That is, I don't think you get to count as progress fixes to the unexpected negative consequences of past progress.

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This was written/published before the SolarWinds hack was revealed. Coming from the Infosec compliance field, I can assure you that we are living in the Wild, Wild West with respect to securing our tech infrastructure.

In your future assessment you mention nothing of our failures to assess risk related to cyber security, and our failures to attempt mitigation of those risks, which when exploited are often game-ending for commercial concerns.

My prediction is that the SolarWinds hack will cost the US economy alone $1 Trillion.

InfoSec is going to be the largest growth area in Tech over the next decade. All of the innovation possibilities you mention in your blog are easily weaponized, so securing those technologies must become our first goal, as all those technologies are presently in our "wild."

I expect that in the end our government needs to pull large parts of itself off the public Internet; and that much of our public infrastructure companies, including all ISPs, need to follow suit.

China is coming for us, ala "Mr. Robot." It is clear that current leadership of the CCP believe in Mao's version of the Middle Kingdom concept. InfoSec is our Achilles heal.

All that will be stifling to the larger economy, and competing innovation initiatives will lose out to our need to better ensure our information and technological infrastructure. Despite the fact that we now live in an economy that allows our US government to print money as needed; our dinosaur, Luddite political Elites will starve the good in order to fund the necessary.

Just what I see coming at us while we are in the tunnel. IMHO, the train is only 1000 feet away, and we still have to cross 500 feet if we are to escape a fatal collision.

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I highly recommend the work of Carlota Perez on techno-social revolutions for a good dose of uhm... techno-social optimism for the 2020s: http://beyondthetechrevolution.com/blog/

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