If it were just about physics vs travel to the airport time, then what we would have seen is no innovation on the domestic front but real speed innovation across the Pacific.

Even taking into account the costs of getting to the airport, there is enough business to support a 5 hour regular flight from LAX to Tokyo, Hong Kong or Shanghai. The question is at what price.

However, between the regulatory environmental problems and the fact that we don’t really have super cheap supersonic technologies, it ends up that we take the same 747s or their variants as we always have. That just means that we CAN’T produce cheap SSTs. Which means — for whatever reasons (social or engineering) — the technology has stagnated.

Chessmasters had a better “feel” for the game, and can somehow tell when a position is bad without looking as many turns into the future. But with computing power doubling every 18 months, brute force overcomes thaht advantage.

Computers still aren’t good at playing games that don’t take place in an 8 x 8 grid, and are nowhere close to being able to think like a human or even hold a conversation.

Also, to be specific, I am not talking only about the “hazard” of machine overlords, whom Jay welcomes, but about the substitution of a machine-based existence for “humans” who will shed their bodies and become … something, I’m not sure what. Just make sure you hit “save” a lot, and don’t accidentally yank out the power cord.

Even if, as I think, Kurzweil’s scenario is not going to play out quite that way, we are going to have vast changes in our world due to technology, and at an accelerating pace. And there will be lots of social upheaval as a result. And the political result will be lots of people trying to “do something” to slow it down or stop it. We are heading into interesting times.

But that wouldn’t stop a plane with a given speed from getting much cheaper over time. Regulatory factors did that.

“An even bigger problem however is economics. The economically important factor in travel is the time for the entire trip from a person’s front door to the final destination of which time in the air is only a part. By the late-60’s we had reached the point where the majority of travel time was spent moving to and from the airport.”

Which means we needed more, smaller, and more widely dispersed airports/airstrips, and more destinations close to airports/airstrips, to cut down travel time on the ground. If our society had evolved in a different regulatory environment, I could see most of present-day civilization being within walking distance of an airstrip, the way that most of civilization in our world is within walking distance of a parking lot or driveway.

“Kurzweil is talking about the extinction of corporeal humanity, and about the replacement of the species by machine intelligence, amongst other jolly scenarios. ”

That would be bad. But let’s think about how this stuff would get developed.

People build technology because it solves other people’s problems well enough that other people are willing to pay for it. People don’t really need a superintelligent machine overlord, so there’s not going to be a lot of money devoted to learning how to build one. What will bring in a lot of money is coming up with ways to augment human intelligence, with machines interfaced to your brain and so forth. So essentially, unless some government-funded group decided that superintelligent machine overlords would be just the thing to fix up our society and make us all behave, and came up with tons of cash to get some built, we’ll end up with essentially superintelligent humans. Which would actually be really cool.

Physics didn’t slow the progress in aircraft…

Physics does play a big part. Specifically it become increasingly difficult to get higher speeds out of aircraft because the increase in air resistance is non-linear.

From Wikipedia:

Note that the power needed to push an object through a fluid increases as the cube of the velocity. A car cruising on a highway at 50 mph (80 km/h) may require only 10 horsepower (7 kW) to overcome air drag, but that same car at 100 mph (160 km/h) requires 80 hp (60 kW). With a doubling of speed the drag (force) quadruples per the formula. Since power is the rate of doing work, exerting four times the force at twice the speed requires eight times the power.

An even bigger problem however is economics. The economically important factor in travel is the time for the entire trip from a person’s front door to the final destination of which time in the air is only a part. By the late-60’s we had reached the point where the majority of travel time was spent moving to and from the airport. Using a supersonic transport to cut airtime wouldn’t change the overall travel time very much. If you had to build new airport further from ultimate destination any time gained by greater airspeed would be lost in increased time spent on ground travel.

I would argue that every technology has a performance “sweet” range in which the cost of performance easily pays for itself. It is within this range that we see the logarithmic increase in performance. However, before and after the range we see much flatter curves.

Count on more of that. One serious problem with Kurzweil is that he makes many otherwise pro-technology people leery. I only know Kurzweil’s work indirectly through Joel Garreau’s book Radical Evolution. However, taking that picture as fair, Kurzweil is talking about the extinction of corporeal humanity, and about the replacement of the species by machine intelligence, amongst other jolly scenarios. This is, to put it mildly, highly speculative. But the problem is that this image of the future we are heading toward is going to encourage many people who retain some attachment to corporeal humanity to respond to improving technology as a threat. Even a more or less technophilic person like myself found the Kurzweil portion of Garreau’s book to be horrifying. I think if Kurzweil and his type of presentation becomes more widely known it is going to lead to a backlash — in popular culture, in litigation, in regulation and in politics. Kurzweil’s presentation of the future is not one that most people are going to find appealing. And if they think it is like to come down as he describes, they are going to try to resist it and prevent it.

It’s a serious problem, alright, because regulators are getting more and more proactive, stunting technologies before they even get off the ground.

You could easily have longer and shorter periods of explosive growth. Maybe calculation/processing goes exponential for 1-2 centuries before hitting the Wall. Other technologies do it in only a few decades. Any plot of fast growth that doesn’t start before the Ind Rev is not going to be enough to refute the possibility of eventual diminishing returns.

Each time one paradigm runs out of steam, another picks up the pace.
It is important to note that Moore’s Law of Integrated Circuits was not the first, but the fifth paradigm to provide accelerating price-performance. Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of time) from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 U.S. Census, to Turing’s relay-based “Robinson” machine that cracked the Nazi enigma code, to the CBS vacuum tube computer that predicted the election of Eisenhower, to the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal computer which I used to dictate (and automatically transcribe) this essay.
But I noticed something else surprising. When I plotted the 49 machines on an exponential graph (where a straight line means exponential growth), I didn’t get a straight line. What I got was another exponential curve. In other words, there’s exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Computer speed (per unit cost) doubled every three years between 1910 and 1950, doubled every two years between 1950 and 1966, and is now doubling every year.

Technology seldom follows a hockey-stick curve but instead tends to show a spike followed by plateau. Most technologies show a diminishing return effect where it become increasingly difficult to produce additional gains. So you get a performance curve shaped more like this:

______________
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Look at aviation. The speed of aircraft increase on a smooth upward curve from 1904-1960. In the 1950’s it seemed perfectly obvious that the near-future would hold super-sonic airliners and “flying cars” Yet, by the mid-60’s airliner speeds stalled out at just under 600 mph and nobody built flying cars. Even the military lost interest in superfast aircraft. Todays neato aircraft are all subsonic. We can build multi-mach aircraft but they are incredibly expensive and have only a narrow functional niche.

All technologies go through a stage of explosive growth in performance that may persist for several decades before leveling out. Computers may already reaching this point. The problem today is not hardware but software. We can manufacture increasingly powerful hardware but the sheer complexity of writing software to utilize that power is becoming a serious bottleneck. We won’t see the same enormous gains in productivity due to computers in the next couple of decades as we saw in the last three.

We will undoubtedly see “booms” in various fields like neuroscience and nanotechnology but they to will hit a wall of diminishing returns and progress will slow.