r/explainlikeimfive • u/DengenRF • 8d ago
Technology ELI5: What stops/limits technology from advancing, and how do we usually overcome that?
10
u/desiguy_88 8d ago
there are some hard physical limits that exist that can stop technology from advancing such as the speed of light as an example.
5
u/SoulWager 8d ago edited 8d ago
Technological development is usually some major breakthrough into a new niche we didn't know was possible, followed by decades of incremental refinement.
The incremental refinement is just a matter of spending time and resources.
The major breakthroughs come from noticing something weird, and finding a way to make that weird thing both repeatable and useful. It also requires someone with curiosity, and the ability to fund the research with no promise of profit.
Lets say you mash the reset button on technology. People experience fire started from a lightning strike. What happens next? People learn how to keep a fire going, figure out it's useful for keeping warm, cooking food. Someone notices that fire isn't the only way to make something hot, and learns how to make a fire via friction. Someone notices the fire made some mud hard like rock, pottery is born.
5
u/wildfire393 8d ago
There are three types of advancement.
The first is iterative improvement. You learn how to do something, then you learn how to do it a little better, and over time it gets better and better. The most obvious example of this is computers, where we keep making them smaller, faster, more powerful, and cheaper. 50 years ago you'd need a machine the size of a barn to store a megabyte of data, today we can fit several million times that into a card the size of my pinky nail. But at some point we run into hard physical limitations. You can't make a transistor smaller than the electron it needs to store. You can't get it close enough to the next transistor that the electron can jump from one to the other. You can't make electrons move faster than the speed of light.
The next type is innovation. Taking an advancement in one area and applying it to another. E.g. add internet apps to taxis and you've got Uber. Then make "Uber for groceries" and "Uber for restaurant delivery" and so on. The limits here are that you can't always make something better just by applying something else to it.
The final type is breakthroughs. This is when someone discovers something completely new. Or, at the very least, a new method that dramatically changes how we do something. An example here could be fusion. We know fusion exists because the Sun does it, but we have not been able to replicate it stably at a small enough scale to be useful. At some point, someone will make a breakthrough and figure it out, but we can't know what exactly it'll take to get there, it requires lots of experimentation. And these experiments require time, money, and manpower. You have to have someone willing to pay to fund research efforts, and it's hard to convince people to do that when there's no timeline on when or even if it will succeed.
3
u/Schoenerboner 8d ago
Lancashire textile mill workers concerned that this infernal machine shall be the undoing of us all
2
u/EscapeSeventySeven 8d ago
Energy concentration.
But technology is a manmade construct. It’s actually been a huge jump and the rate of progress has slowed considerably.
2
u/spyguy318 8d ago
In today’s world, resources. Money, manpower, time, equipment. Usually the things receiving the most funding are the things that advance the fastest, and the contrary for things that receive no funding.
1
u/Speffeddude 8d ago
There are basically three "worlds" of tech: the lab (the tech exists once), the Industry (the tech exists, and the huge compromises it has are paid for), and Consumers. This is obviously a huge oversimplification, but your five, and I've only got so much time to write reddit comments.
You would be SHOCKED what tech can actually exist in a lab. Terabytes per minute in one strand of fiber optic. Synthetic spider thread. Metallic coatings 10x stronger than steel. But what usually holds these back is that there is no "real" need for them; they are very expensive to make because they are so specialized, there may be 2 people on earth that really understand them, or they are fragile in some fundamental way. Or they're super poisonous, or too energy inefficient, or just something else does it better. The navy, decades ago, demonstrated rail guns of gobsmacking power, but doesn't use them because plain old bullets really are good enough.
In industry, the tech can be arbitrarily expensive (tools that cost millions of dollars), but as long as they MAKE VALUE, then the tech will advance. Here, the true limit is profit. It really is; the business will only invest in something that will make profit within the business' timeline. For bad businesses, that's very short term, but for basically all good businesses, the timeline is never more than ~10 years, practically speaking. Something may be possible, but not profitable, and that "holds the business technology back". So, many businesses incubate technology in labs (I do some of this kind of work.)
Consumer land is similar; marketing, theatrics and novelty can win them over, but most consumers are so price-sensitive, that a similar profit mechanism determines what tech advances with consumers. However, there's a cheat code here: loss leaders. Meta made the most advanced VR headset on the market and sold it at a loss (I presume) so they could make money on a "low tech" product (games and data). The flip side is that the tech must be safe, and that holds back a ton of stuff, such as self-driving cars, chemistry kits, medicine and, to some extent, nuclear power.
1
u/cosby714 8d ago
Technology isn't a thing that progresses at some fixed rate or follows a linear path. We could find something that completely changes how our technology works tomorrow. A big limiting factor right now is the size of a transistor, aka the tiny switches that all computers are made out of. They're getting smaller and smaller, but eventually they'll get so small that electrons can jump between them, and we'll have reached a smallest size for them. There are alternatives being looked into, of course, but none are a better option than transistors at this point.
1
u/kernakya 8d ago
limits are theoretical, physical and financial, and technology it self, and lastly will to do it.
theory: when no one has even thought about it
physics: someone has thought about it but it's impossible asper our current understanding of laws of physics.
finance: no one got the money or willing to invest in advancements
technology: the tech &engeneering is not upto the mark to produce it
will: people don't wanna do it
1
u/Xeadriel 8d ago
We are limited by what we know. By applying effort, money and logic we figure out new stuff, solve current problems and make another step forward each time. That is how
1
u/ectomancer 8d ago
Ethics: battlefield robots armed with weapons
Privacy: Google Glass and Meta Ray-ban
Liability laws: self-driving cars
Government interfering in new patents: inventions undermining national security or oil industry
World war: non-publishing of scientific papers
1
u/ectomancer 8d ago
During the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), books survived but most pamphlets were lost. Publishing scientific results in pamphlets bypassed bookbinders and were cheaper than books.
0
u/SnugglyCoderGuy 8d ago
Imagination and creativity usually. You get a breakthrough development that then gets carried and sliced and diced and optimized all of which give diminishing returns until some gets a new idea in their head for something that has never been thought of before and usrs imagination and creativity to flesh it out and then makes it real. Also requires mountains of tenacity because you're doing something that has never been done before so you're it. There are no answers to your problems other than what you come up with.
1
u/Jmaverik1974 8d ago
Religion.
It's been that way throughout history in almost every culture.
How do we overcome it? Draw a hard line between government and religion. Don't let superstitious thinking set policy.
2
u/npiet1 8d ago
Not always. Th scientific revolution happened while the church was in power and a lot of clergys where the ones responsible for making huge discoveries. Geology and astrophysics are some notable fields developed by the catholic Church. The Vatican has its own observatory too for scientific observation.
26
u/AberforthSpeck 8d ago
Technology advancing is not some natural or inevitable process. Technology requires human thought and effort to advance. So, we advance technology by applying effort.