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World_May_Wobble t1_iy3w5ts wrote

Consider commercial aviation. It has seen no gains in 40 years. In fact, it slid back with the death of Concorde. Sometimes things stagnate because there's a lack of imagination, or the economics is bad, or there just physically is no way to do the thing we envision.

Stagnation has been the norm for most of human history, and we should expect more of it with things that aren't closely linked to some kind of feed-forward loop. Smaller transistors help us make smaller transistors. Better AI can help us make better AI. Better VR ... Is just better VR.

Edit: Airliners have seen some gains in fuel efficiency, and they've obviously become more computerized but these are not the kind of exponential transformations we have become used to in computing.

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Seek_Treasure t1_iy4psqj wrote

That's not true, fuel efficiency (and range) in commercial aviation has improved a lot in past few decades.

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World_May_Wobble t1_iy4qkvi wrote

Has it? How many doublings has the range of airliners undergone in the last 40 years?

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Seek_Treasure t1_iy4rd90 wrote

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World_May_Wobble t1_iy4tufx wrote

Likewise airfare seems to have halved at least once.

It's not transformational, and we'd be disappointed if the biggest improvement in VR between now and 2050 was that it was cheaper -- but it is something.

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Seek_Treasure t1_iy4uulu wrote

Airplanes will transition to electric eventually. There's some really hard challenges to this, but the progress is being made. More immersive VR and true usable AR will come. There's some really hard challenges to solve (some, like batteries and heat are shared with aviation), but the progress is there. It's not just hardware, software also helps. For example, fast ML computer vision for eye tracking helps foveated rendering, and we're far from done here.

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