For example, transportation technologies are generally in this category. This might change soon with the advent of self-driving cars, but it’s still hard to reconcile any “law of accelerating returns” with four decades of no meaningful progress.
Fatal car accidents per million miles driven,and per capita, are down precipitously. Although consumer automotive technology is not becoming faster and faster, using it is becoming safer and safer. In human terms — in terms of its ability to implement our values, which certainly include using it without dying or killing — the technology is advancing steadily.
(Of course, this construes “consumer automotive technology” broadly — including airbags, highway design, and Breathalyzers! — not just things like engine design.)
Fair enough. “No meaningful progress” is an overstatement. But so is “advancing steadily”: under any meaningful metric, 2011 cars represent much less progress over 1950s cars than the latter represented relative to the 1890s horse carriages or the early motor cars circa 1900.
And in any case, even steady advances would still be a counterexample to the supposed trend of exponential progress and accelerating returns.
Fatal car accidents per million miles driven, and per capita, are down precipitously. Although consumer automotive technology is not becoming faster and faster, using it is becoming safer and safer. In human terms — in terms of its ability to implement our values, which certainly include using it without dying or killing — the technology is advancing steadily.
(Of course, this construes “consumer automotive technology” broadly — including airbags, highway design, and Breathalyzers! — not just things like engine design.)
Fair enough. “No meaningful progress” is an overstatement. But so is “advancing steadily”: under any meaningful metric, 2011 cars represent much less progress over 1950s cars than the latter represented relative to the 1890s horse carriages or the early motor cars circa 1900.
And in any case, even steady advances would still be a counterexample to the supposed trend of exponential progress and accelerating returns.