Boffins fear we might be running out of ideas

Because

Most "research" is development. In the past, basic research was often funded by the taxpayer (sometimes indirectly), these days not so much. The quest is now for a short-term financial return, so a basic research project doesn't get past the first step.

there's always

computational chemistry

space exploration

biosphere maintenance

fusion/Thorium power generation

world peace

Eight men control as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people

Is this sustainable? Maybe we need some ideas on how to, uh, even things out.

A resurgence in LSD usage should sort that out.

People today just aren't doing enough psychedelics.

Semiconductors are getting hard to fill

Its getting harder and harder to fill a semiconductor die and afford one. At 28nm we put a 4 core a57 complex, big GCU and VPU codec, cell phone modem on a 60mm die and sold them for under $10. It got to the point that each generation just had bigger/more CPU, GCU, and VPUs and if you didnt jump nodes every other year you were left behind. 7nm mask sets will be $7-$10 Million contain the same old units. But if you mess up, it gets even more expensive. But there was really nothing "new" during the last 5-8 years. You see the same thing from Intel, AMD and NVIDIA as well as the DDR, NAND and other memories. Just more cores, bigger cores, more memory cells. No really new ideas. Just bigger/better/faster. This is why you see the huge consolidation in the area now.

Cruft

revolutionary ideas can only be provided by peop,e who fulfill the following criteria :

a) those who understand the current SOA

b) those who can deviate from the track that the current SOA has laid.

its no different from railroad days : bar the massively high barrier to entry. You created Strata of engineers based on undertsanding, when maybe look at the undergrads that are yelling "why dipoles?" or "why not tantalum?"

these recs, of course, are subject to billion-dollar whims, so adventurousness in the marketplace is... oh, wait. a corroborating factor against ingenuity.

Enough Already!

"The growing scarcity of ideas means more and more resources have to be put into research to maintain economic growth"

I'm all for innovation, but *some* things are at an acceptable level and dont need to "grow"

Doubling

Doubling from 1 to 2 takes one researcher.

Doubling from 1 billion to 2 billion takes 18 researchers.

Each of those 18 are 5.5 million times more effective than the original one.

So, what is new?

All the basic everyday "magic" was sorted by the end of the 20th C. Photography, telephony, radio, television, audio and video recording, computers, internal combustion engines, etc. What we have now are the results of incremental improvements to those.

It's not surprising that as the "optimum" is approached, the graph of improvement over time starts to level out. All the low hanging fruit gets taken. The law of diminishing returns kicks in.

Unless something completely new, akin to the discovery of electromagnetic radiation, comes along then I guess it's just shaving a bit off here, adding a bit there and getting marketing to call the result revolutionary for the next few years.

Another factor

There's another factor to consider too.

Each decade/year/whatever I'd wager the percentage of (lets use the phrase) "scientists" who are engaged in work that is actually counter productive to progress and knowledge.

Like the studies funded by tobacco companies to show smoking was safe, like the scientists taking their paychecks from people only interested in data that can be made to show global warming isn't a thing. They're basically doing reverse science. It's not supposed to advance us, it's supposed to help specific people push a specific agenda for a specific purpose.

Like when the UK government keeps sacking researchers who keep having to say "most illicit drugs aren't as bad as you want us to say they are". They're all people who, in past times, would have been doing something more useful.

Every person involved in such research, who takes such a job, is also chipping away at that "progress made" figure in the wrong direction.

Jposeph Tainter offered no prophylactyics...

...when he wrote 'The Collapse of Complex Societies'

( https://www.amazon.co.uk/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Archaeology/dp/052138673X ) .

Today we would understand this as a n understanding of how a complex non linear system with feedback evolves.

The cycle is broadly

1/. New ecological/technical/whatever niche is discovered that allows population growth.

2/. New population is initially involved directly in its exploitation to produce wealth.

3/. As time goes by more and more bureaucracy evolves to deal with the distribution of said wealth.

4/. Eventually the society is all bureaucracy and no productivity.

5/. Finally, a society in which all the bureaucrats and large sectors of the population have been removed, allows a better standard of living for the survivors, and a steady state at a much lower population density and without the 'bureaucratic civilisation', evolves.

I.e wealth breeds bureaucratic complexity,and bureaucratic complexity in the end stifles production of wealth, usually triggered by running into any one of a million potential 'limits to growth'. A vicious positive feedback process then returns society to a new level of barbarism.

E.g. The Maya who built Chichen Itza did not vanish. They will serve you a beer and tortillas happily. It was the priests who sacrificed them to make the rains come, and the bureaucrats that took food from the peons to give to the priest class, that have vanished. [Presumably the rains didn't come, so they sacrificed the priests].

Today's society is built on just two things: machines and artificial energy. And we have plucked much of the low hanging fruit.

More and more complexity for less and less actual advantage. And finally the barbarians at the gate come in and smash everything, because they dont need it and they don't understand it, and you and your I-phone are just another piece of archaeology to be puzzled over 1000 years from now.

"WE think they had something to do with the 'windmill cult' whereby pointless three bladed devices were erected everywhere to stop the world getting hotter, or so the priests said, in some sort of religious ritual, designed that allowed these prayer devices to be operated on windy days"

"Of course the enlightened people came in and smashed the windmills, and killed all the priests, and the world got colder instead, but that's religions for you in the dark ages of the 21st century"

(excerpt from 'the archaeology of the 21st century: "Do you want fries with that" by Adolf Mohammed el Schloctermeier, may God bless Adolf, his Prophet and martyr to the cause )

Moore's law

It was an observation. Originally 12 months, then 18 months. In real terms in 2D devices per square millimetre it's not as much 2 years except maybe a few devices. It also says little about function or speed.

Really it was simply an Intel process technology goal and very little to do with new idea or research, just fairly obvious incremental improvements in process technology.

It's important not to confuse actual science with implementation, product development and refining application of technology. Babbage improved machine tools, using newer ones to make better ones. That wasn't where his real genius lay. He also did a good book on Economics. While his "engines" were ambitious for the time, the machine tools gave the UK a massive world lead and made a lot of money for some other people.

There has been little new SCIENCE in Electronics since 1950s. More in Biology. ICs, LASER, single chip CPU etc are later implementations of known science and ideas. Even the 1948 transistor was a Victorian idea with 1930s maths and physics. The real problem was getting pure enough Germanium. Bell labs had no wartime stockpiles (used by the other labs working on transistors) and only ordered small batches which got purer each time.

Silicon transistors were delayed by figuring out a process to purify it.

I don't know what to suggest.

It's the law of diminishing returns.

All the big easy stuff has pretty much been discovered, analysed and documented.

What's left is the small difficult complex stuff.

So it's not really a surprise that it's getting harder.

Once upon a time most scientists were polymaths.

Then they specialised to being chemists or biologists

Then they specialisled into being organic chemists or biochemists

Now we're getting into super niches - quantum neuropsychopharmacology

I suppose we've got to settle for logarithmic growth then, now that the exponential one is not longer available.

Or is it becasue...

Lots of research is now dictated by committee, and funded according to "impact", both fomr funding organisations and within companies and institutions like universities. In trying to make research more effective, the exact opposite has happened.

Crop yields have fallen 5% per year? They lost all credibility with that statement, alone.

https://ourworldindata.org/yields-and-land-use-in-agriculture/

The soaring INCREASES in crop yields may be slowing down a little, depending on the crop, but yields are breaking records almost yearly. A five percent decrease would be headlines throughout the world, and put strong inflationary pressure on food prices.

One of the positive attributes of additional atmospheric CO2 is the effect on plants. When levels were in the 280 ppm range, wheat and other C3 crops would actually stop growing in the afternoon of high-growing days in the UK (large fields of wheat 'gulping' down CO2 would cause CO2 levels to fall below that necessary for photosynthesis). Now growth continues. Further, since CO2 is easier for plants to get, plants can reduce the size of their stoma openings, reducing transpiration which reduces water requirements. The Earth hasn't been as green as it is for many, many centuries.

Hogwash

There is no shortage of ideas. There isn't even a shortage of viable ideas that could be realistically developed.

What seems to be happening is that

-- the dismal scientists are failing to recognize that as industries mature the cost of advances increases

-- we seem to be on the epicyclic where each new idea that is developed, doesn't achieve as much economic return compounded by an increasing diversion of energy into increasingly useless endeavors such as following vast numbers of legal rules.

This last can be for several reasons, ranging from the surfeit of maturing research and development paths-- bullet 1 plus the "my pa did it this way, and his pa, so I'll do it the same way!"-- to the increasing atherosclerosis of the bureaucracy in the world (insufficient burning out of dead useless brush in the human environment, as by say a nice non-nuclear world war). The latter includes vast pools of stored labor in the form of cash which sits useless under the fatty cellulite riddled rumps of the filthy rich. [it has not escaped notice that a small number of such parasites have arisen from incestuous plutocratic sewage to assay useful application of said stored labor, a notable example is SpaceX; these instances are the exception however.]

This isn't a multiple hundred years stultifying dark age, just a pause until a paradigm change occurs, or perhaps a world war. At least a world war that doesn't obliterate everyone...

Please...

do not refer to economists as boffins.

Neither group deserves that.

Just in time...

Since the AIs are getting ready to take over anyway...