Sitting around the other day, drinking beer and playing a video game, lying back and generally being privileged and decadent it occurred to me that we’re not really going anywhere; the idea that there’s no generation gap = stagnant culture (i can’t be the only one who’s felt vaguely depressed about all the Live8 stuff) and also that a lot of clever people are spending a lot of time helping people to share holiday photos rather than sorting out important stuff. Those fat advanced societies of certain 60s science fiction (they generally get trashed by the heroic, vigorous crypto-fascistic free-market humans) seem closer to where we’re at most of the time than the Cory Doctorow/Charlie Stross style Singularity stuff that’s all the rage at the moment. If you’re not in the know, (and why should you be? You probably read proper books or maybe Dan Brown and Harry Potter, either way I expect you avoid the shiny cover section in Waterstones) these guys are saying technology is advancing so quickly, and that this rate of change itself is accelerating so rapidly, that in twenty years we’ll be so crazily advanced that well who knows what, the Internet will gain sentience and we’ll all download our brains into the latest model of iPod or something, basically they’re saying “hey, we don’t know” (you’re sci-fi writers, if your not going to even attempt to extrapolate what are we paying you for?).

Anyway yesterday I found 2 web pages which are saying similar things, to what i was thinking, helping me feel a warm glow of connection to my fellow man and suggesting that the beer/video games combination is a probably a popular one.
The first one

We flatter ourselves that we live in interesting times but isn’t this just one more example of that particular blindness our solipsistic age has about itself, a more severe form of the disease whereby Princess Diana can be rated the most important (or was it second-most important) Briton ever?

and the, perhaps more interesting, second one

Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon’s Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California … says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead.

OK so some of his data is kind of arbitrarily chosen (how do you judge the importance on an invention? I’m sure the printing press didn’t really send immediate shockwaves around the world, maybe Furby’s are actually really important) but it’s certainly a refreshing change from cloying techno-utopianism which is the standard for large swathes of the web. Particularly regarding Moores Law which has hidden the fact that people haven’t actually been getting much better at the programming side of things for a generation, you see that exponential curve and think it solves everything, but really it can sort of hide reality; we’ve found one thing that we can incrementally improve very quickly for a limited period of time and we think that all technology and development works like that, an idea for which there’s really not much evidence.