Tech decline

Where is my flying car, bro?

Well, back before world war II, there were flying cars, in that affluent middle class people who owned enough land, usually rural middle class people, often had their own personal airport, and a private plane that could take off from a very short and very rough runway — which was typically a gravel track that got graded from time to time. The British airforce in world war one and two recruited its pilots from kids that had learned to fly in their dad’s plane.

The regulatory state forbade those planes and those airports, but those who had a plane and an airport got grandfathered in, and when I was a kid there still quite a few old men around who had a dirt track airport, and plane that had had every part replaced several times by small private informal workshops — because replacing the plane would be illegal, and repairing it was theoretically illegal.

in the seventies or so, there was a huge expansion in middle class sailboat ownership, thanks to advances in fibreglass technology in the sixties, that made hulls cheaper and better. Today, fewer and fewer people can afford a sailboat. It is once again becoming a luxury of the rich. If living standards are rising, why can ever fewer people afford a house with a garden, a stay at home wife, or a sailboat?

Western cars have been getting crappier and crappier since the late seventies. Electric cars may well be an improvement in certain ways — but have become useful as a result of Chinese advances in battery technology. China has taken a decisive lead in this area. Also, Chinese high speed trains are a major advance — one that the west has not successfully imitated.

Musk is promising a flying car, with the enormous improvement that it will have vertical takeoff and landing.. If he succeeds, this is partly because of Chinese advances in battery power density, and partly because his charisma and concentrated wealth gives him the ability to influence regulation. However the Chinese high power density batteries, unlike their expected sodium batteries, are expensive, short lived, and prone to fire.

In England today, middle class people who own and provide rental accommodation have just been illegalised by a regulatory regime that only giant corporations can comply with, resulting in a massive collapse of the price and availability of rental accommodation. They have been forced to sell at a price that has suddenly dropped.

Obviously we had massive tech progress with computers — until Moore’s law stopped working.

Photolithography ran out of puff at 180 nanometers, because at shorter wavelengths, it stops being uv light, and become more like very soft X-rays — it becomes very difficult to manipulate shorter wavelengths with matter.

The chip industry found cleverer and clever ways to make do, with declining results and dramatically increasing costs. Progress has continued, but has greatly diminished. When they say “four nanometres” all actual features on the chip are far larger than “four nanometres”.

Large language models are very impressive, and are going to get more impressive. That is real progress, albeit progress far less dramatic that it looked like at first sight.

The next step is contact lithography in place of photolithography, which the Japanese are attempting. So far, however, they have a problem. The chips made by this method tend to have a lot of big errors, because contact damages the mask.

Modern civilisation runs on electricity. And electricity runs on the grid. Power coming out of the grid is vastly more expensive than power at a big generator, the primary cost of power is not generating it, but making it available at the flick of a switch wherever and whenever it is needed.

Green power is enormously more expensive than other forms, because the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow, so green energy makes the grid much more expensive, even though green energy is inexpensive when the sun shines and the wind blows. Grid costs massively dominate, thus the green transition has destroyed Europe.

China urgently wants green energy, partly because they have a pollution problem, but mostly for reasons of national security. They have to import oil and coal, and they do not want outsiders to have the power to turn China off.

China has made a breakthrough with its new sodium batteries, whose very long life makes batteries useful. This can potentially relieve the grid problem. China’s cities are too dense for solar panels on roofs to be very useful, and tend to be located in areas where the weather can remain severely clouded for a long time, and their planned solution for this problem is big centralised solar farms in deserts, and batteries in and near cities.

If you have a sunny climate, which seldom has long periods of severe cloudiness, then rooftop solar panels with local batteries are now likely to become a viable solution even without regulation and subsidy thanks to Chinese tech advances. The promised longer life and lower cost of sodium batteries potentially provide an alternative to the ever rising cost of the grid. However the regulatory state does not like islandable home installations, and finds a variety of ways to make this difficult, without quite outright banning it.

Drones also are a major advance, and all drones depend on China.

So progress has not stopped. Just the west has been regressing in many important areas, while Western progress has greatly slowed even areas where progress continued. However progress continues in the East. It is just that white civilisation has lost its mojo.

This has for a long time been obvious from twenty thousand feet. When one flies in to an eastern city, compare the eastern skyline and the eastern airport with the western skyline and western airport. Western cities have steadily got uglier, lower tech, and poorer looking.