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Why breakthrough discoveries have not been heard for decades – in the material Trends
Probably, such judgments will seem strange to many. Especially today, when we seem to be witnessing a “golden age” in the field of technical, medical, scientific and social progress, and nothing seems to be left until the point of singularity.
However, according to many experts, our ideas about the irresistibility of human progress are just a decoration, elegantly built by the media. In fact, everything that we are so proud of today is just a legacy of half a century ago, refined and brought to mind.
Discovery of X-rays and the double structure of DNA, penicillin (i.e. antibiotics) and insulin. Development of methods for in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the first steps towards the creation of AI. And also – transistors, atomic energy, the beginning of space exploration, television, the first computers and the Internet. And this is only a part of what was discovered in the last century and led to the development of industry and productive forces, which changed our everyday life beyond recognition.
And if these and other discoveries of the so-called “golden quarter” (1940–60s) have today been improved and finally integrated into our lives, then we ourselves have not produced a fundamentally new one in the field of scientific and technological cluster.
“Of course, the personal computer and its cousin, the smartphone, have brought great changes: many goods and services have become larger and their quality has increased. But compared to what my grandmother saw, the basic circumstances of life are the same today, ”writes American economist Tyler Cowan with a share of sad irony.
What is the reason for this “technological stagnation”? Why has scientific and technological progress not moved forward for almost half a century?
course to slow down
Global population aging is one possible answer to the question. At least, this is the conclusion reached by a group of Russian scientists from the Higher School of Economics, the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Social and Humanitarian Education of the Moscow State Pedagogical University.
They published a collective research article in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change, in which they not only described one of the possible factors hindering the pace of technological growth, but also gave a forecast for its near future.
Scientists believe that technological development, although moving in a trend with hyperbolic acceleration, is quite regularly replaced by periods of slowdown. For example, we can divide the entire history of mankind into three super-long cycles, each of which began and ended with a technological revolution:
- agricultural (between 12 thousand years BC and 3000 BC);
- industrial (from the last third of the XNUMXth century to the first third of the XNUMXth century);
- cybernetic (between 1950 and 2060–70).
In each of these three big cycles, a single repeating scenario can be observed:
In other words, the model of linear and stable progress familiar to us, created by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, does not work. The logic of technological growth always includes both periods of acceleration and decline. And today we are all witnesses of a period of such a decline.
According to Alexei Korotaev, one of the participants in the study, head of the Research and Educational Laboratory for Monitoring the Risks of Socio-Political Destabilization at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, such a pattern of acceleration followed by deceleration is clearly visible in the dynamics of the Earth’s population. For a long time, it was believed that demographic growth was also moving at a constant acceleration. However, since the 1970s, there has been a change in the global trajectory – acceleration is replaced by a slowdown, and this trend, according to UN forecasts, will continue.
Is it possible to describe these rates of technological acceleration and deceleration through some regularity? The authors of the collective article believe that yes: the correlation must be seen in the dynamics of the population.
“In our study, we wanted to show that the trend of technological development that we observed in the last century cannot be directly transferred to the present. After all, along with the slowdown in population growth, there was also a natural slowdown in the pace of technological development – the development trajectory changed to another. And, according to our data, we reached the singularity point on our cybernetic cycle already in 2018, so the current slowdown is quite natural,” says Alexey Korotaev.
According to the researchers’ forecasts, this trend will continue until 2030, when the third stage of the cybernetic revolution will come – the era of “smart” self-regulating systems. And then the fourth phase will come in 2055, when these systems will be improved to such an extent that they will take center stage in the new production process.
Moreover, the most significant transformations will take place in the field of medicine, because by this time there will be even more elderly people, which means that the demand for such technologies will increase many times over.
The Machine That Displaces the Scientist
However, the above interpretation is not shared by all experts. This is mainly due to the fact that such a model, for all its clarity, “sins” with excessive mathematization, which overly schematizes a complex reality. If we move away from this model, the field that explains the slowdown in the pace of scientific and technological progress becomes more multidimensional.
For example, Taras Varkhotov, Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy and Methodology of Science, Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov proposes to consider several factors at once that led to the “stagnation” of scientific and technological development.
- The XNUMXth century, in fact, summed up the development of fundamental science, after which the transition began to a completely new form of existence of knowledge, from which economic efficiency is required.
Modern science breaks up into more and more isolated areas of knowledge, each of which operates with different concepts, laws and mathematical means.
In other words, the once unified scientific space is now fragmented, and the mechanisms of coordination between different disciplines and the formation of a coherent “scientific picture of the world” are weakening. As Stanislav Lem noted: “It is very possible that already now in the scientific book depositories of all continents there is a lot of information that, if simply compared with each other by a competent specialist, would give rise to new valuable generalizations. But this is exactly what is hindered by the growth of specialization, by the internal, constantly growing differentiation of the sciences…”.
As a result, a person loses the opportunity to receive a full-fledged fundamental scientific education – in the field of both the humanities and the natural sciences. The latter, according to Varkhotov, “become more and more applied and engineering – and due to this, they cease to work with general fundamental laws.”
- Modern science has increasingly resorted to computer computing power.
And although they allow processing such arrays of data that are not available to humans, the price of these capabilities is the gradual transfer of ideas about reality to computing systems – we ourselves already see it. So the more we “delegate” research tasks to machines, the more we lose in terms of the ability to discover something new.
“Machines do not have the ability to open anything. Only humans have this ability. And the quantity of knowledge does not necessarily have to turn into quality. Moreover, those discoveries that we value so much today were made on significantly smaller information arrays. Because all the novelty in any system of knowledge has always been brought and will be brought by a person,” notes Taras Varkhotov.
bureaucratic utility
Another factor that hinders scientific progress is the total economization of the entire sphere of scientific knowledge and the associated increase in bureaucratization, which deprives scientists of their freedom. Over the past century, there has been a deep penetration of economic mechanisms and the logic of thinking into the territory of knowledge, which, at the same time, historically has always existed outside it.
If you look at what preceded, for example, the First Scientific Revolution, you can see that science arose from the activities of individual enthusiasts who did not have a single system of communication and who did not form a community. Even by the authorities themselves, they were regarded as talented eccentrics who can sometimes give out something valuable, but nothing more.
But after some time it became clear that experimental science can turn into a powerful social tool that brings pure utility. From that moment on, the transformation of the scientific process into an industry began, and scientific activity itself was no longer perceived as something associated with creativity. Added to this was the fact that science has become mass, and the research itself has become more and more expensive.
To ensure control over the funds that are invested in science (global investment growth was 2007% between 2013 and 31 alone), the state and large investors began to develop more and more sophisticated bureaucratic mechanisms. The goal was to make the profitability and accountability of the academic world as predictable and transparent as possible.
To do this, they began to introduce all sorts of university rankings, indices – the most famous of them is the Hirsch index – which were supposed to measure the quantity, quality and significance of scientific publications. In addition to this, scientists were forced to fill out endless questionnaires, reports, and every year changing applications for the next grant.
All this not only trivially takes time and effort from a scientist – for example, American researchers spend up to 42% of their working time on grant documentation – but often makes him resort to various tricks.
In this sense, one of the telling stories occurred in South Korea in 2006. Back then, veterinarian and stem cell researcher Hwang Woo Seok was convicted of fraud after publishing two articles with fake results in the journal Science. At the trial, the researcher justified his action as follows: if he had reported the lack of results, he would not have been given a new grant, without which he could not continue his research. And so the scientist went on a forgery – he believed that he would get results, but did not know when exactly.
Finally, the economization of science has also led to the fact that research itself has lost its “proactive” attitude. Historically, scientists have always acted on the verge of what is socially permitted and what is not permitted, shifting the boundaries of taboos. And in order to get new results, they almost always had to take risks, including human health.
Today, however, fear, on the one hand, has limited the activities of the scientists themselves, and on the other, has forced venture funds to invest only in proven projects that will bring a guaranteed income.
As British science commentator Michael Hanlon points out, the Apollo space program would not be possible today, not because we don’t want to go to the Moon, but because the level of risk would be unacceptable.
As an example, the publicist recalls how the Swiss genetic engineer Ingo Potrykus developed a variety of “golden rice” in 1992, the grains of which contained vitamin A in concentrated form. This discovery could prevent blindness in a huge number of people, but there was a fuss in the media about the safety of this product. , and the development was decided to curtail.
Graphite pencil and 3D printer
But not all experts tend to be so pessimistic about the current state of technical development. For example, Alexander Chulok, Ph.D. in Economics, Director of the HSE ISSEK Center for Scientific and Technological Forecasting, believes that it is not worth simplifying reality, especially technological reality. Perhaps the slowdown in development is just an appearance associated with a complex economy and existing business models.
“It is useful to remember that the open-hearth furnace was invented in 1864, but the last such furnace was closed in our country in 2018. That is, the innovation of the 3th century ceased to be used only two years ago. And this shows not our total backwardness, but the diversity of the economy. Of course, any technological paradigms that describe the logic of scientific and technological development are good on paper. But in real life, we can use a graphite pencil at the same time, and with it a XNUMXD printer, ”Chulok notes.
Therefore, the expert believes, modern technological reality must be considered non-linearly. Both the process of adapting new technologies and the return on investment in them is too multifactorial a phenomenon that cannot be simply described using generally accepted financial or economic models. Moreover, the very slowdown in scientific and technological development can be associated with the rate of penetration of innovations, which is not something stable.
“In my opinion, the main factor that you need to pay attention to in the first place is the effects produced by this or that technology. And it seems to me that in the next decade we will see the emergence of new developments in all spheres of life: from smart orchards and deserted oil wells to bioelectrical interfaces and creativity in virtual universes. They can be attributed to the phenomena of the new industrial revolution or characterized as an upgrade of existing developments, but they will definitely change our lives. And this is the most important thing,” Chulok sums up.
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