Progress, stagnation, and flying cars

Metadata

• Author: [[Jason Crawford]]
• Full Title: Progress, stagnation, and flying cars
• Category: #articles
• URL: https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-flying-car

Highlights

• The potential capabilities of mature nanotech are mind-blowing. The incredible speed alone would dramatically lower the price of literally every physical product. Hall estimates that the entire capital stock of the US—“every single building, factory, highway, railroad, bridge, airplane, train, automobile, truck, and ship”—could be rebuilt in a week. And nanotech would allow materials with extreme properties, such as the strength of diamond, to be used for everyday manufacturing and construction.
• Putting together all this and more, Hall summarizes his vision for the future as a “Second Atomic Age” based on nuclear, nanotech, and artificial intelligence. It’s a vision of continued exponential or even super-exponential progress, a world in which we see improvement in the world of atoms as fast as we’ve recently seen improvement only in the world of bits.
• One, the success of industrial civilization at meeting everyone’s basic needs for food, clothing and shelter pushed people up Maslow’s Hierarchy to seek self-actualization, which they did in the form of social activism.
  • Note: I didn’t realize that homelessness and hunger were gone.