I love it when people tout a result as being "only 15-30 years away." Is there any large scale human technological research project in all of human history which lasted 20 years and actually produced what was promised? There is no incremental path here; any time someone says "20 years" it means they have no idea how to do this thing.
The human genome project. Their goal when starting was "this will take 15 years", they completed it in 13. The Apollo program: goal of less than 9 years (end of the decade) when it was proposed in 1961 to land a man on the moon and return him to Earth, completed in 1969.
If you go back quite a ways, I'm willing to bet at least some of the innovation-required Castles and Cathedrals and Pyramids of history were completed "on schedule" with it known up front that they would take many years to finish.
I suspect a lot of projects are accurately classified as 10-30 years away, given a certain level of funding and a dedicated team. Absent that, they may very well take twice as long or more. I always like to see what these long-term oriented institutions like SENS and MIRI say they would do if they had x times more money, to see that they've got a plan -- fortunately those ones do give that information.
This is the source of the "joke" that fusion will always be 20 years away. It's because it's been grossly under-funded ever since that prediction was made.
This is really interesting! Have you read the source report? I'm curious as to why/how the predicted required budget would fluctuate so much. For such a specialised and frontier based project, surely you'd be aiming for consistent staffing (and thus consistent staff budgets) year on year no?
My guess is that is fluctuates because there are a discrete number of new experiments to be constructed, and these don't cost a constant amount during their construction.
That was my guess as well. Looking at the graphs, there are about three clear peaks in the maximum, accelerated, and aggressive plans, muddled out a bit in the moderate plan.
What are these three experiments? Which of them have already been done in the existing plan? And what others might need to be added?
Also curious is the expected total cost. Eyeballing each plan average cost and multiplying by the duration, the total costs are 6x14=84, 4x17=68, 3x22=66, and 2.5x29=72.5 billion dollars. The accelerated and aggressive plans are more expensive than the moderate plan!
I suppose there's some additional overhead costs associated with keeping the program running for 29 years instead of 17, but I would have expected all the rush orders, overtime, and extra staff to make the faster programs much more expensive.
Neither of these numbers is equal to or greater than 20. 20 is a "I don't know how to do this" number of years. 10 is building a dam. Quantum computing has already been "a thing" for longer than 20 years; careers have been made ... people have retired. Today we get news of 1 bit worth of progress made since 2001. Now we can factor 30 instead of 15....
The LHC was approved for construction start in 1995. The wiki article doesn't capture it but you can bet the science behind the design of the LHC wasn't all done the year before. It didn't achieve its first real goals until 2015.
LIGO was dreamed up in the 1960's to detect gravitational waves. Took until 2002 to get the first one built big enough to theoretically detect them, and until 2015 to finally get measurements demonstrating the existence of waves.
Real science is slow. This "20 years means I don't know" business is indicative of perhaps not appreciating the difference between basic science and applied science/engineering. I know we're used to engineering projects pumping out new awesome tech every couple years, but basic science is hard and takes a long time.
Ligo was most certainly not dreamed up in the 1960s, and the LHC was completed in 10 years.
I picked the word "technology" instead of "science" on purpose. Science isn't slow or fast; it can't be predicted at all. Technologies; different story. Someone says I'm going to build you a piece of technology and it will take 20 years, that means they don't know how to do it. There are no exceptions.
For most research areas I'd agree, "20 years" = "who knows". But for cryptography people using it should keep looking carefully at how long something they encrypted will remain safe. People may be betting a lot on the assumption that something stays secret for at least 50 years. Therefore any significant shift in those probabilities is newsworthy, in my opinion.
I understand your point, but it does happen. For example, commercially available LED lighting that is more efficient than compact fluorescent. The blue LED was invented in the early nineties and you just knew it was a matter of time before we would get efficient white-light light.
The problem is that for every person who says, "This is 20 years away", there are unrealistic people who are saying, "This is 5 years away". And there are pessimistic people who are saying, "Oh, this is just going to go on for ever. They don't really know how long it's going to take".
Will you ever be able to read popular news articles and reasonably expect the predictions to be accurate? I doubt it. Are there people in the world who have a pretty good idea how long it will actually take? For a great many things, yes.
Kind of off topic, but wow LEDs have gotten a lot cheaper very quickly. I recently moved and replacing all the incandescent bulbs and a few halogens lights with white-light LEDs was a lot cheaper than I thought it was going to be, judging by my memory of some LEDs I bought during the last move a few years ago... and they're at least as or even more energy efficient for the same lumens. I'm usually part of the crowd that thinks Kurzweil hypes his curves too much and additionally is "curve deterministic" instead of pointing in the right research directions to make things happen sooner/better, but there really are a lot of exponentials (and slightly less impressively power laws) out there if you look for them, and they can shake up expectations quite a bit when you're predicting linearly all the time... The genome project usually comes to mind since Kurzweil mentions a lot that by the halfway point they were only 1% "done", so getting the other 99% in the next 7 years seemed pretty ridiculous if you were a layman extrapolating linearly and didn't read that they actually planned for an order of magnitude decrease in cost (https://books.google.com/books?id=rtq1bS7g-OEC&lpg=PA529&ots...).
Completely off topic, but I replaced almost all of my traditional lights with led lights (except for some oddly shaped ones) two years ago. It wasn't that cheap, but I haven't had to replace a single of them yet. I figure if they last 5 years, they'll have paid for themselves between the costs of replacement bulbs (some of my fixtures ate normal lights every few months), the cost of electricity, and the pain of having to drag out the ladder every time I needed to replace one.
Ha ha... Super off topic, but last year we moved back to Japan and I had to buy all new light fixtures. I decided to go with these new LED panels. I'm trying to remember the details, but I bought 3 panels each 5,600 lumens for about $100 US each. Even now I have a hard time believing that, so I just did a quick price check online and they are still about the same price. Not only that, but IIRC they get over 120 lumens per watt, are colour adjustable, and have a remote control. It just seems too good to be true. I've only ever seen these lights in Japan, which is really a shame because they are amazing. (of course they are about a meter in diameter which wouldn't suit most western homes...)
Slightly more on topic, it's the thing in my home that most makes me feel like I'm living in the future :-)
I'm ok with 20 year predictions when it comes to converting an existing invention into its commercially available mass produced form (like white LED lighting). Or the growth of the 1995 Internet into its now ubiquitous level.
I'm very skeptical when people do 20 year predictions from the current state of the art into something which is impossible to do today for any amount of money, such as this quantum computing based RSA breaker.
Short answer : over 114 years from 1714, Britain sought and paid rewards for accurate measures of longitude. Resulting of course in the invention of 'modern' clocks.
The Manhattan Project at least comes close. It's arguable that the start of the project was not the start of the research. On the other hand the theoretical framework necessary for it was still pretty new.
Less than 3 years from generating a half of watt of power in the Chicago pile in December of 1942 to blowing up a city; 4 if you count the previous year. Nobody said, "give us 20 years and we'll make you an a-bomb." They pretty much knew how to at least figure out all the lacunae in 3 years.
