The failure of human ingenuity

I've been reading a lot of old science fiction, and I keep thinking "Back in the 50s they thought we'd have flying cars and big spaceships and stuff like that...why don't we?" And then I realized, in those stories there's always plentiful, portable, cheap nuclear power. Which probably looked like a good prediction back in the 50s; after all, the people who were writing then had lived through the coal-to-oil transition, and seen all the marvels that allowed (airplanes, cars), and they had just seen nuclear power invented. It probably seemed perfectly natural that the next big technological leap would be to nuclear energy, and that we'd have better transportation as a result.

But nuclear power turned out to be the biggest technological bust in history...fission was too expensive and dirty and dangerous, and fusion has never worked. So we've been living off of oil long after we had expected not to need it any more...and today, our technological advances are in communications, not in transportation.

I think people don't realize just how much the failure of nuclear power represented humanity as a whole running into a wall. For centuries, we had been tapping bigger and faster sources of energy, and the result had been a steady stream of improvements in nearly all areas of human life. Unless nuclear power makes a comeback, though, our future energy sources are going to be more, not less costly than what came before. That is going to slow the flow of innovation.

And who knows? If communications technology runs into a similar wall - if Moore's Law fails, as it will in perhaps two decades if quantum computing doesn't come through - we could see a similar slowdown in the pace of advancements in areas like computer science, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, image processing, robotics, etc. Futurists who expect a technological singularity may be as disappointed as those who expected interstellar travel and flying cars.

If data-processing and energy both hit walls, what happens to innovation? It seems like it must slow overall.

And when innovation slows down, productivity growth slows. That means economic growth slows in rich countries, and poor countries get trapped in poverty as they can no longer use trade to boost themselves to higher income levels. And most frighteningly, it means that the global economy moves back toward being a zero-sum game...in other words, a world where war becomes profitable. That's the kind of world we've been moving away from since the 1400s; we need to keep moving away.

So what's the lesson here? Well, I think it means we need to invest more in basic research, especially in energy where our biggest failures have come. That may work; it may not. But when the technologies may or may not be out there for the taking, all humanity can do is give it the old college try.