There's something that changed among the culture of the scientists and technologists from 50 years ago to now. And the change is very drastic.
The scientists I have seen/read from that time are mainly Carl Sagan and Feynman. But I don't think it's limited to them only. You pick up that time's media regarding science and you will feel a certain sense of wonder and curiosity and excitement about the great mysteries of the universe that we have started to uncover. The scientists of that time were telling how these were just baby steps that we have started taking, and there was a certain thrill about how great it would be in the future. And this isn't about science in particular, it's also about technology, or to be more exact, the collective effort of discovery and innovation. This great sense of wonder and excitement and onlooking towards the future greatly heightened the imaginations of the people of that time. These elevated imaginations can be sensed in the media of that time including both fictional and non fictional works. People seemed to believe that anything and everything was possible in future.
However today, the people including the scientists and innovators do not seem to believe that. Today, it seems there is a central vision of the future in the collective conscious of the people. And people really don't think anything drastically out of that vision is going to happen. There is a certain sense of confidence that is near-reaching arrogance. Scientists no longer seem to consider themselves as babies taking their first steps on the shore, rather they believe that most of the science is a settled affair, and anyone contradicting to them is mentally incapacitated. Same is the case for innovators and technologists. The space for healthy disagreement has greatly collapsed while unhealthy/violent disagreement is thriving.
I don't know if the culture of the innovators trickle down to the masses, or if the innovators seem to carry with them the culture of masses to their fields, but whatever it is, I believe at all times the collective culture has been similar among the innovators and the masses. Many thinkers seem to disagree with this as they create a virtual dichotomy between the culture of innovators and that of the masses with the painting of innovators being explorers and breaking the conformity of the masses and so on, while masses being influenced like a herd. I think there obviously will be differences between these two groups at any time, but the collective sense of outlook of future among both will essentially same. The reason for that is that the influences of both of these groups on each other are inseparable. Let's move back 50 years and consider what was happening in the lives of the masses. They heard that there is new machine that is now springing up among people who can afford it, in which you say something and someone thousands of miles away listens to your voice exactly as it sounds at the same moment, and then you can also hear the other person back when they say something in their machine; so one can literally have a verbal conversation thousands of miles away synchronously. The machine became more widespread, and soon enough the masses had it too. Telephone, Radio, Television, and later Computers. I think we don't appreciate how much of a difference they had brought into the lives of the masses. So, it is entirely imaginable why the imaginations of even the masses were so much elevated and why to them, everything was possible in future.
Surely, we continued to progress in the last two decades, but certain elements diminished: the imagination, exploration, and experimentation. Just the other day, I saw a tweet with some different shapes and form factors of mobile phones in early 2000s (Edit: it was this one), but if you look at the technology of that time, you will realize how crazy the designers were being with the designs of these things, and I mean crazy in a good way. Today, essentially all mobile phones look the same. There have been many shifts in the design culture, I don't say they were in right direction or wrong direction, but the weird thing was that at each shift almost everyone followed the exact shift at the same time. Compared to a few decades ago, the experimentation with completely new and different designs is almost zero. Because technologists and scientists have the collective idea that things are now settling in. The same thing is downstream in the masses as well.
The LLM breakthrough due to the transformer architecture was like the decades of imagination finally culminating in reality. But when it rolled out to the masses, what did they do with it? Nothing. Nothing interesting. I'm not denying how great an achievement it was and how some innovators are greatly leveraging (wait, I shouldn't use that word) it. But I'm talking about the masses specifically who are mostly using it to write letters, reports, linkedin posts, assignments, etc. or are chatting with it like a gf/bf greatly enchanted by its sycophantic behavior.
So what's my point by saying all of this?
There has always been nostalgia of the past among people, and I don't deny myself having it. But the nostalgia does not have any functional value of it at all, if we do not take this chance to objectively study observe the past and try to observe the patterns of change along with their reasons. There is a structure to which all changes happen and I think these changes are worth further exploration. The first step is acknowledgement of change, and that is what I am doing here. My initial thought is that it is going to take a few more decades for this culture to revert back, but I think it's too early to say anything, and there is certainly more to uncover from this pattern.
I just recalled something and then I checked out. Feynman has this interesting lecture called "The Unscientific Age", in which he points out how some things are needlessly unscientific in the society and how people by changing their attitude towards it can greatly benefit themselves. It is interesting because some problems he had pointed out in general society have today seeped into the innovators. I'll end this by copying a few passages from there.
The first one has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions—that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions—then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn't know the answer, if he is an honest man. It is important to appreciate that. And I think that I can illustrate one unscientific aspect of the world which would be probably very much better if it were more scientific. It has to do with politics. Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, "What are you going to do about the farm question?" And he knows right away— bang, bang, bang. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. "What are you going to do about the farm problem?" "Well, I don't know. I used to be a general, and I don't know anything about farming. But it seems to me it must be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say that they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way that I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it, and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it. Now, I can't tell you ahead of time what conclusion, but I can give you some of the principles I'll try to use—not to make things difficult for individual farmers, if there are any special problems we will have to have some way to take care of them," etc., etc., etc.
Now such a man would never get anywhere in this country, I think. Its never been tried, anyway. This is in the attitude of mind of the populace, that they have to have an answer and that a man who gives an answer is better than a man who gives no answer, when the real fact of the matter is, in most cases, it is the other way around. And the result of this of course is that the politician must give an answer. And the result of this is that political promises can never be kept. It is a mechanical fact; it is impossible. The result of that is that nobody believes campaign promises. And the result of that is a general disparaging of politics, a general lack of respect for the people who are trying to solve problems, and so forth. It's all generated from the very beginning (maybe—this is a simple analysis). Its all generated, maybe, by the fact that the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying to find a man who has a way of getting at the answer.
Now we try another item that comes in the sciences—I give only one or two illustrations of each of the general ideas—and that is how to deal with uncertainty. There have been a lot of jokes made about ideas of uncertainty. I would like to remind you that you can be pretty sure of things even though you are uncertain, that you don't have to be so in-themiddle, in fact not at all in-the-middle. People say to me, "Well, how can you teach your children what is right and wrong if you don't know?" Because I'm pretty sure of what's right and wrong. I'm not absolutely sure; some experiences may change my mind. But I know what I would expect to teach them. But, of course, a child won't learn what you teach him.
I would like to mention a somewhat technical idea, but it's the way, you see, we have to understand how to handle uncertainty. How does something move from being almost certainly false to being almost certainly true? How does experience change? How do you handle the changes of your certainty with experience? And it's rather complicated, technically, but I'll give a rather simple, idealized example.
You have, we suppose, two theories about the way something is going to happen, which I will call "Theory A" and "Theory B." Now it gets complicated. Theory A and Theory B. Before you make any observations, for some reason or other, tha t is, your past experiences and other observations and intuition and so on, suppose that you are very much more certain of Theory A than of Theory B—much more sure. But suppose that the thing that you are going to observe is a test. According to Theory A, nothing should happen. According to Theory B, it should turn blue. Well, you make the observation, and it turns sort of a greenish. Then you look at Theory A, and you say, "It's very unlikely," and you turn to Theory B, and you say, "Well, it should have turned sort of blue, but it wasn't impossible that it should turn sort of greenish color." So the result of this observation, then, is that Theory A is getting weaker, and Theory B is getting stronger. And if you continue to make more tests, then the odds on Theory B increase. Incidentally, it is not right to simply repeat the same test over and over and over and over, no matter how many times you look and it still looks greenish, you haven't made up your mind yet. But if you find a whole lot of other things that distinguish Theory A from Theory B that are different, then by accumulating a large number of these, the odds on Theory B increase.
Example. I'm in Las Vegas, suppose. And I meet a mind reader, or, let's say, a man who claims not to be a mind reader, but more technically speaking to have the ability of telekinesis, which means that he can influence the way things behave by pure thought. This fellow comes to me, and he says, "I will demonstrate this to you. We will stand at the roulette wheel and I will tell you ahead of time whether it is going to be black or red on every shot."
I believe, say, before I begin, it doesn't make any difference what number you choose for this. I happen to be prejudiced against mind readers from experience in nature, in physics. I don't see, if I believe that man is made out of atoms and if I know all of the—most of the-ways atoms interact with each other, any direct way in which the machinations in the mind can affect the ball. So from other experience and general knowledge, I have a strong prejudice against mind readers. Million to one.
Now we begin. The mind reader says it's going to be black. It's black. The mind reader says it's going to be red. It's red. Do I believe in mind readers? No. It could happen. The mind reader says it's going to be black. It's black. The mind reader says it's going to be red. It's red. Sweat. I'm about to learn something. This continues, let us suppose, for ten times. Now it's possible by chance that that happened ten times, but the odds are a thousand to one against it. Therefore, I now have to conclude that the odds that a mind reader is really doing it are a thousand to one that he's not a mind reader still, but it was a million to one before. But if I get ten more, you see, he'll convince me. Not quite. One must always allow for alternative theories. There is another theory that I should have mentioned before. As we went up to the roulette table, I must have thought in my mind of the possibility that there is collusion between the so-called mind reader and the people at the table. That's possible. Although this fellow doesn't look like he's got any contact with the Flamingo Club, so I suspect that the odds are a hundred to one against that. However, after he has run ten times favorable, since I was so prejudiced against mind reading, I conclude it's collusion. Ten to one. That it's collusion rather than accident, I mean, is ten to one, but rather more likely collusion than not is still 10,000 to one. How is he ever going to prove he's a mind reader to me if I still have this terrible prejudice and now I claim it's collusion? Well, we can make another test. We can go to another club.
We can make other tests. I can buy dice. And we can sit in a room and try it. We can keep on going and get rid of all the alternative theories. It will not do any good for that mind reader to stand in front of that particular roulette table ad infinitum. He can predict the result, but I only conclude it is collusion.
But he still has an opportunity to prove he's a mind reader by doing other things. Now suppose that we go to another club, and it works, and another one and it works. I buy dice and it works. I take him home and I build a roulette wheel; it works. What do I conclude? I conclude he is a mind reader. And that's the way, but not certainty, of course. I have certain odds. After all these experiences I conclude he really was a mind reader, with some odds. And now, as new experiences grow, I may discover that there's a way of blowing through the corner of your mouth unseen, and so on. And when I discover that, the odds shift again, and the uncertainties always remain. But for a long time it is possible to conclude, by a number of tests, that mind reading really exists. If it does, I get extremely excited, because I didn't expect it before. I learned something that I did not know, and as a physicist would love to investigate it as a phenomenon of nature. Does it depend upon how far he is from the ball? What about if you put sheets of glass or paper or other materials in between? That's the way all of these things have been worked out, what magnetism is, what electricity is. And what mind reading is would also be analyzable by doing enough experiments.
Anyway, there is an example of how to deal with uncertainty and how to look at something scientifically. To be prejudiced against mind reading a million to one does not mean that you can never be convinced that a man is a mind reader. The only way that you can never be convinced that a man is a mind reader is one of two things: If you are limited to a finite number of experiments, and he won't let you do any more, or if you are infinitely prejudiced at the beginning that it's absolutely impossible.