Reclaiming A Future Lost
I remember watching the first few episodes of the docuseries “From the Earth to the Moon” as a middle schooler in science class. I’ve always found it amazing and inspiring that in the span of just over a decade, we went from launching satellites in space to landing a man on the moon. A similar feeling was rekindled watching this summer’s “Oppenheimer”, as the first half of that film focuses on the rapid development of the atomic bomb taking theoretical quantum mechanics and transforming it into the first technology which has had of impact of single-handedly ending and preventing wars. There is a marvel and reverence of these periods in history for just the sheer ambition and stakes in these massive engineering projects. These were projects that pushed the boundaries of known science and challenged us to reinterpret the realms of possibility.
However, when thinking about the technological advancements of today, our more recent advancements have been more grounded and the frontiers that we build into less and less inspiring than the ones we explored and conquered in past years. I am inspired by the past, but find myself rather disinterested with the way things are moving now into the future.
The last time we visited the moon was towards the end of 1972. It’s been over fifty years since we have really pushed the envelope in human based space travel. Physics has also slowed down in terms of pushing the boundaries — the breakthroughs we made in the post-war era have slowly been verified in particle colliders, but the new physics of the 1970s and 1980s — think String Theory — have yielded very few results outside some interesting literature and television concepts.
Our greatest accomplishments and the frontier we have pushed through over the last fifty years have been in the digital realm as opposed to the physical one. We were able to make hardware cheap and effective enough to start invading our institutions in the 1970s and 1980s — which lead to the unleashing of the internet in the 1990s. From the internet — we build tools to traverse and explore it into the 2000s before spending the last decade redesigning the internet to be taken with us wherever we go. Nevertheless, our progress in the digital realm has been slowing down — a lot of the innovation in the past twenty years being reinvention and combinations of concepts that have existed for awhile now. It’s also not clear that the increased prevalence of digital technologies in daily life is a good thing. We are slowing down and potentially moving in the wrong direction.
Artificial intelligence perhaps provides us a new burst of energy and hope for a re-acceleration of development in the digital frontier. Perhaps, it can even start generating insights and breakthroughs that can start to push the boundaries in the physical world where we have been stuck, slowly moving for decades now. I have doubts about how far along AI is and if AI is going to expand the boundaries of our frontiers and number of frontiers of exploring as opposed to just temporarily accelerating existing trends in the digital one. It’s not that AI is inherently incapable — it’s far too early to judge the current advancements in AI — it’s more so that many of the applications of AI are limited by the imaginations of the engineers building them. It’s not exactly that the promise of AI is new — a lot of the core concepts are decades old themselves.
Had we kept our ambitious trajectory from the end of the space race — maybe we would have a colony on Mars, clean energy fusion power plants, or fully automated manufacturing pipelines. At best — we have bits and pieces of these futures and are decades away from realizing them. I think the engineers and scientists of fifty years ago would have imagined that we would be a little bit closer than “decades away”. It’s not that we haven’t made progress — the progress that we have made just seems stagnant particularly in the physical realm compared to the advancements we were making in the first half of the 20th century. The world in the middle of the 20th century looks vastly different stylistically — but functionally is similar. The world at the end of the 19th century would be completely alien to us.
One could argue against technological stagnation, in that we have just prioritized exploration and advancement in the digital realm. What of the potential meta-verse and other untapped digital spaces? Unfortunately, while those sound nice, most of our major problems are still physical world problems. Poverty is a physical world resource problem and it still exists for quite a bit of the world. Climate Change is a physical world problem that potentially threatens our present way of living if left unchecked or ignored. Perhaps worst, is that Luddite thinking is being proposed as a solution to some of these problems, perhaps in part due to a lack in faith in the ability of technology to solve these problems or due to the negative consequences of technological industrialization that we have turned a blind eye to as the evidence started becoming apparent. Instead of ignoring these problems, or blaming progress for causing them, we should be looking at these problems as opportunities to unlock our entrepreneurial horizons.
Our infrastructure is decaying, our manufacturing capability has weakened over the past fifty years through globalization, we have become a society of takers rather than makers, as more aspects of our lives become digitized and artificial, divorced from the physical world. That is not to say you shouldn’t live in the Matrix, but the machines are nowhere near advanced enough where you can expect to live a sustainable life in your happiness machine. Rather than judge such a future, I’ll just say that such a future isn’t likely to exist without a significant mindset change — away from digital and attention based economies — back to the ones based on physical infrastructure that we have been ignoring more and more for the past fifty years or so. This might be an Americentric problem, but seems to be a problem with other advanced economies and is bound to become a future issue in those economies still developing.
One of the reasons for ignoring and developing our physical infrastructure and the systems we utilize in the physical world is that the digital world is a lot easier to build against. The world of bits and bytes is simply easier to manipulate than the one of atoms and particles. Data scales significantly easier than physical stuff does. One can copy a high-fidelity digital representation of a house with a couple of clicks and a few gigabytes of space on hard-drive not much larger than a credit card in a couple of minutes. Try doing that with a physical house or building— we would be so much closer to solving the housing problem if we had that capability.
We have been taking the easy route for a few decades — which has made some aspects of our society more efficient and better. There’s no doubt that the capacity to teach and educate have become a lot better in the past fifty years and technological literacy has improved. However, these tools still seem like sources of untapped potential. We have been mostly using them to entertain and distract each other as opposed towards turning these advancements towards actual problems that we might now be capable of solving with this new digital infrastructure.
I think “hard” tech is the future that we should be focusing on. Rather than visions of utopia that we may have imagined in the mid 20th century, however, we should focus on the major infrastructure problems we face today and take all that we have developed since then and imagine how we can scale the physical world in the ways we have scaled the digital one. Granted that’s going to be very hard — especially considering how lazy and unambitious we have been when approaching these challenging problems as digital technology have become more all encompassing in our lives.
Rather than a future of applications that focus on marginal productivity gains and applications that destroy those gains through capturing our attention and focus via avenues of entertainment — we should build products that automate and scale our supply chains, products that build physical infrastructure, and products that push the boundaries of theoretical and applied science forward so we can build a future our parents may have dreamed about when they were small and we can build technology that future generations can look back and be inspired about.
