Eli Dourado: "Notes on technology in the 2020s"

[dmm]

elidourado.com/blog/notes-on-technology-2020s/

A technology-optimistic forecast with a lot of interesting data. (The productivity curve flattening since around 2005 is stunning; interestingly enough, that curve has a good run from approx 1993 to approx 2005, mediocre between early 1970-s and early 1990-s, decent before early 1970-s.)

Other tidbits include a report on news.berkeley.edu/2020/06/15/diluting-blood-plasma-rejuvenates-tissue-reverses-aging-in-mice/

"solar, wind, and battery technology where prices have fallen 90, 70, and 87 percent over the last ten years": from www.agglomerations.tech/cracks-in-the-great-stagnation/

Space launch costs down to $2600/kg with Falcon-9 and $1500/kg with Falcon Heavy aerospace.csis.org/data/space-launch-to-low-earth-orbit-how-much-does-it-cost/

but I have not realized that the promise of Starship is closer to $10/kg ballpark. I don't know if that's believable, but the implications are stunning.

***

All this on the backdrop of our social misery: tech-wise we have nice progress, but socially we have rather impressive degradation: e.g. see how the emergency vaccination effort worked in 1947 compared to what we observe today: mobile.twitter.com/ComputingByArts/status/1350732240641290240

Who knows how this combination of potentially rapid technological progress on the backdrop of impressive degradation of social structures would work...

Comments

[dmm]

(I don't know if that nice curve from 1993 to 2005 is real improvement compared to the preceding period, or if it's just an accounting trick.

I remember reading reports that a Clinton years reform in the methods used to compute official inflation had led to understating the true inflation rate, e.g. some hints of it in this 2004 paper: http://www.shadowstats.com/article/consumer_price_index

But I should really revisit this issue (it used to be much easier to find this bit of data on accounting changes which led to "officially lower" inflation numbers, but these days it seems to be a less trivial task).

So this is a "to do" item for me - to check this one.)

[dmm]

Yes, there was this commission, which claimed that the methods which were used were overstating inflation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskin_Commission

So, the correction was applied and the better productivity growth in Clinton years was indeed just an accounting trick.