Stagnation

Recently there have been a lot of discussions on stagnation or lack of innovation on /g/ but also elsewhere. This page is a compilation of issues and resources.

Concept

It took about 60 years from the Wright brothers' first powered flight to SR-71 (Blackbird) reaching Mach 3+ and the moon landings. We were promised cities under the oceans and holidays on Mars. Instead, another 60 years later, we are today in a position that we cannot even send astronauts beyond low Earth orbit. So what happened? Or as many complain: where is my jet pack?

In Academia

Tyler Cowen published The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better in 2011. His thesis is that falling innovation has resulted in slowing economic growth.

Some also ask Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? (2020) They conclude that "More generally, everywhere we look we find that ideas, and the exponential growth they imply, are getting harder to find."

Early 2023, an article in Nature suggested that Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time.

In Debates

Peter Thiel laments lack of development since 1970 and that we no longer see any great leaps such as the Apollo program, the freeway system, and the Manhattan Project. He argues that there was never any low-hanging fruit; it was always of intermediate height and the question was, were people reaching for it or not.

Neal Stephenson also laments the Innovation Starvation (archived from World Policy, 2011) and Innovation Starvation, the Next Generation (2014).

Wired, always ready to cultivate new problems, has an article claiming that optimism is now problematic.

In Software

Rob Pike notes that Systems Software Research is Irrelevant and that operating systems are in a decline, that "Hardware has changed dramatically; software is stagnant," and that there is "misinterpretation and misapplication of the scientific method."

In Media

The Japanese are again in the forefront, and Jinrui started in 2007, about a future where humanity has declined. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is probably also a good example of "stagnationpunk" (as well as cyberpunk and solarpunk), and the ending is telling:

The night of humanity... May it be a peaceful age.

It is the time when the whole world which had been like a festival, slowly calmed down. Here is an introduction to the gentle time called the Age of the Calm Evening.

Lately it has also reached the mainstream business news, such as Wall Street Journal covering Stagnant Scientific Productivity Holding Back Growth. They show that research and development spending does not correlate well with productivity growth.

Trends

Google provides tools for analysing the popularity of various terms, here the Ngram Viewer based on books, and Google Trends for search terms, both based on the three terms, "stagnation", "dead end", and "collapse". Clearly, authors as well as people in general, are concerned. Not all articles use these exact terms, such as this article complaining that society has become effete and lost the will to try new things.

People

Progress takes people, no matter if they pick low hanging fruits or, in rare cases, have fruit falling on their heads. So what happens with this group, the geniuses? Simply put, they are no longer made and consequently they are gone. Prodigies continue to exits but it seems expectations differ from that of the past.

References

Also see Knowledge Event Horizon.

External Links

Some contents has been taken from the CybFAQ has was updated to 5.1 Preview 2. Newer versions may exits elsewhere in the net.