Monday: Interview with Lisa Wehden at Reboot 2020

On Monday at 12:45 Pacific, I’ll be interviewed by Lisa Wehden about “The New Movement for Progress”.

It’s part of the Reboot 2020 conference hosted by the Lincoln Network. See the full day’s schedule and register here.

Progress, stagnation, and flying cars

A review of Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall

Suppose you were to reach into the mirror universe, where everything is inverted, and pull out a book that is the exact opposite of Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth.

Instead of being written by a scholarly economic historian steeped in the study of the past, it would be written by an engineer who has spent his career on futuristic technology. Instead of coming from a prestigious academic press, it would be self-published, with misformatted tables and a cover featuring garish three-dimensional lettering. Instead of sticking to extremely conservative predictions about future technologies, it would speculate audaciously about the limits of the possible, from nanotech to cold fusion. Instead of a sober survey of economic history in one country and time period, it would range widely through engineering, physics and philosophy, exploring the power-to-weight ratio of jet turbines in one chapter, and describing the rise of the counterculture in the next. And instead of proclaiming the death of innovation and the end of growth, it would paint a bold vision of an ambitious technological future.

That book has leapt out of the mirror universe and into an Amazon Kindle edition (priced at 𝜋 dollars): Where Is My Flying Car? A Memoir of Future Past, by J. Storrs Hall.

Hall sets out to tackle the title question: why don’t we have flying cars yet? And indeed, several chapters in the book are devoted to deep dives on the history, engineering, and economics of flying cars. But to fully answer the question, Hall must go much broader and deeper, because he quickly concludes that the barriers to flying cars are not technological or economic—they are cultural and political. To explain the flying car gap is to explain the Great Stagnation itself.…

https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-flying-car

Video: The Non-Linear Model of Innovation (Slate Star Codex meetup)

I gave a talk to the Slate Star Codex meetup titled “The Non-Linear Model of Innovation”. This is a summary and integration of the writing I’ve done on the relationship between science and invention, including “Science and the Industrial Revolution,” “Pasteur’s quadrant”, and “Innovation Is Not Linear”.

In brief, I argued that:

• Science does form the “epistemic base” for invention
• But technology “gets ahead” of science
• And technology feeds back into science

Most of the talk elaborates on these points, giving examples of each point, different ways each point is true, and reasons behind each.

Video: Five minutes on cement at Ignite Long Now

I gave a five-minute talk on cement at the Long Now Ignite talks event: “Instant Stone (Just Add Water!)” Based on my previous posts.