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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9550277" data-attributes="member: 4937">The trains that existed in 1890 were more advanced than the ones in 1850, but they were still trains.  They were more numerous, more powerful, and more economical and more accessible, but that just meant the technology had matured.  The way of technology is that for any given invention it starts primitive and then undergoes exponential growth for a period, until at some point the technology becomes mature and then begins to stagnant, improving only slowly or not at all.  Maybe if quantum computing becomes a thing, I'll accept that as a new thing.  The first insulin pump was in 1963.  The microchip was created in 1958. The technology matured but everything about it would be implied by what was available in the 1960s, in the same way that the Orville flier prefigures a Stuka Dive bomber.   The supercomputer in my pocket would be unimaginable to almost everyone in 1965 who wasn't Gordon Moore, but it's still just an evolution of what was visible by that point.  But "Moore's Law" is coming to an end, and indeed in some senses is already long over.  We've reached the limit of the existing technology and with what we know now it will only advance slowly if at all.  3D printing, quantum computing, virtual reality, cybernetic implants, genetic engineering, advanced batteries, reusable rockets, and artificial intelligence are things that are on the cusp of changing the world enough to maybe inaugurate a new tech level, but IMO have not yet done so.  I still feel we are in the tech area began in 1945 with the first electronic computer, the first standoff attack weapons, the first ballistic missile, and the first nuclear bomb.</blockquote>

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