I really don’t care about IQ tests; ChatGPT does not perform at a human level. I’ve spent hours with it. Sometimes it does come off like a human with an IQ of about 83, all concentrated in verbal skills. Sometimes it sounds like a human with a much higher IQ than that (and a bunch of naive prejudices). But if you take it out of its comfort zone and try to get it to think, it sounds more like a human with profound brain damage. You can take it step by step through a chain of simple inferences, and still have it give an obviously wrong, pattern-matched answer at the end. I wish I’d saved what it told me about cooking and neutrons. Let’s just say it became clear that it did was not using an actual model of the physical world to generate its answers.
Other examples are cherry picked. Having prompted DALL-E and Stable Diffusion quite a bit, I’m pretty convinced those drawings are heavily cherry picked; normally you get a few that match your prompt, plus a bunch of stuff that doesn’t really meet the specs, not to mention a bit of eldritch horror. That doesn’t happen if you ask a human to draw something, not even if it’s a small child. And you don’t have to iterate on the prompt so much with a human, either.
Competitive coding is a cherry-picked problem, as easy as a coding challenge gets… the tasks are tightly bounded, described in terms that almost amount to code themselves, and come with comprehensive test cases. On the other hand, “coding assistants” are out there annoying people by throwing really dumb bugs into their output (which is just close enough to right that you might miss those bugs on a quick glance and really get yourself into trouble).
Self-driving cars bog down under any really unusual driving conditions in ways that humans do not… which is why they’re being run in ultra-heavily-mapped urban cores with human help nearby, and even then mostly for publicity.
The protein thing is getting along toward generating enzymes, but I don’t think it’s really there yet. The Diplomacy bot is indeed scary, but it still operates in a very limited domain.
… and none of them have the agency to decide why they should generate this or that, or to systematically generate things in pursuit of any actual goal in a novel or nearly unrestricted domain, or to adapt flexibly to the unexpected. That’s what intelligence is really about.
I’m not saying when somebody will patch together an AI with a human-like level of “general” performance. Maybe it will be soon. Again, the game-playing stuff is especially concerning. And there’s a disturbingly large amount of hardware available. Maybe we’ll see true AGI even in 2023 (although I still doubt it a lot).
But it did not happen in 2022, not even approximately, not even “in a sense”. Those things don’t have human-like performance in domains even as wide as “drawing” or “computer programming” or “driving”. They have flashes of human-level, or superhuman, performance, in parts of those domains… along with frequent abject failures.
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.