Thursday, May 31, 2012

Good and Plenty

Cosma Shalizi has a book review called "In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You" on Red Plenty by Francis Spufford. This is not a review of his review. This is a response to his invitation to play.

having said that, I should point out that Shalizi ruins the Yakov Smirnoff reference by using the term "In Soviet Union..." as opposed to the historically correct "In Soviet Russia..." set up for the joke. This is a minor quibble, but the small, crabbed pedant in me insists it be noticed, even though Smirnoff jokes are not particularly funny, and therefore any adulteration of them is really a trivial thing.

I should also note that the faux cyrillic use of the backwards R (which in Russian is pronounced "YA" and sounds nothing like a backwards R) to indicate some kind of Soviet reference also irritates the shit out of me. So thank goodness the publishers resisted the urge to title Spufford's book "Яed Plenty". See what I mean? It adds nothing to the context or content.

In any case, I picked up the book from the socialist book collective just this past Tuesday, and have only gotten through the introduction, but I plan on reviewing it as soon as I am done.

Actually, I got turned on to the book because it is currently being discussed at Crooked Timber, and that's where I saw Shalizi's review. Quickly, the book Red Plenty covers that period of history within the Soviet Union, roughly the mid-1950s through the 1960s when it looked like they just might kick the Western world's ass. That magic time (and Spufford does call his story a fairy tale) is one when
"people believed that the state-owned Soviet economy might genuinely outdo the market, and produce a world of rich communists and envious capitalists.  Specifically, it’s about the last and cleverest version of the idea - central planning via cybernetics". 
Now, Shalizi's attention conservation notice (and a cute device it is, considering he provides them as a warning, but which I, invariably, halfway through one of his essays and hip deep in saw grass and gators, finally realize was not meant as an enticement), can be further condensed to:
"Over 7800 words about optimal planning for a socialist economy and its intersection with computational complexity theory... and uses Red Plenty mostly as a launching point for a tangent".
Shalizi does not disappoint. Vaguely recalling through a blue haze of undergrad dope smoke a day or two learning the minimax method of linear programming, and, yes, some distant thought bauble of actually solving simultaneous equations, I was able to skim through the denser sections. And his tangent (forget physically possible, is it computationally possible to optimize a centrally planned economy as large as the Soviet Union's using the crude vacuum tube and occasionally transistorized clunky old room-sized computers of the day? Short answer: probably not, or rather, not in a timely fashion.

But his tangent provoked my own tangents.

He points out that any system usually has a goal, some objective function the powers that be work on optimizing. What would that objective function look like? What would be the goal? Perhaps to maximize the potential of every individual within the society? It is what a eusocial system would do, and paradoxically, it would probably involve maximizing the degree of freedom allowed each individual, or then again, maybe not.
I'll avoid the whole circus geek trap of debating whether a clever use of physical sampling and observation, statistics, human computers (back when the term referred to a profession instead of a machine), electronic calculating machines, and some form of hierarchical administrative calisthenics could not have worked out to produce an optimal Five Year Plan in a month or six. Although the idea, the visuals, of what type of 1950s style dieselpunk electromechanical sensory equipment required just to get a whole society's worth of useful metrics sounds interesting (and conjures up pictures of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, with copper wires and ferromagnets, pneumatic tube delivery systems, and ducts, lots of ducts). I doubt very much, though, that the New Soviet man, or woman, would sit still for having their poo weighed and inventoried by protein content, or their sexual proclivities monitored and categorized, much as is done nowadays voluntarily through smartphones, and drones, and surveillance cameras, and Apple, and Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler, and... who needs 1984, when you got Web 2.0? Why, who needs RFID tags, micro- and millimachines latched onto your clothes and skin, when we've got your credit card buying history? And banks and banks of Cray XK6 supercomputers to process it all? In 21st century America, machines milk you!

In any case, it was nice that Shalizi, being a smart young kid, doesn't write off central planning entirely, but realizes you need the proper tool for the job.

Speaking of central planning, and not that I cheer it's every incarnation, but I do feel it gets a bum rap a lot of the times. One of the things that annoys me is that stupid, unthinking, thoughtless mantra "Central planning doesn't work!" that religious types like libertarians use. We should all call bullshit on it. We should all tell such religious types to fuck off. Okay, actually, what really annoys me are religious types like libertarians, but in any case...

Clearly, central planning - when the goal is well-defined, set, and limited, and manageable - works like a fucking champ. I can find plenty of examples where it works in a spectacularly successful manner.

Don't believe me? Apollo Moon Project? The Japanese economy,  post-WWII? How about the command economy of the United States of America during WWII? You really thought it was free enterprise what whupped Hitler and Tojo? Nah. We didn't have time for market inefficiencies. There was a war on.
There is no such thing as a 1942 model of an American motor car. Why? In January 1942, the Office of Production Management banned the sale of new cars and trucks in favor of tank, airplane, and other munitions productions. There was a whole alphabet soup of regulatory agencies that cropped up during the war years, which pretty much had authoritarian control over every switch and lever of the economy. The Office of Price Administration introduced freezes on commercial, farm, and commodities prices. Widespread rationing instituted, wages and rents controlled, taxation used to control salaries, and consumer credit tightly monitored and reduced. War profiteering was aggressively combated.

Indeed, only the fact that most industries, financial institutions, and resources were not nationalized kept the United States identified as a capitalist state, as opposed to that other dreaded C-word. Of course, the success of the war-time planned economy can only be compared to what Shalizi would call the "objective fucntion", the goal of the acitivity. Objective function for US economy from 1941- 1945? Mass produce weapons, materiel, and warriors. Some 40% of GNP from 1942 -1945 were war-related outputs.


Of course, this type of obejctive function is not conducive to a general prosperity. One look no further than North Korea. Or the Soviet military buildup of the 1970s, when Breshnev and his generals convinced themselves that the US was seeking an overwhelming first-strike capability.

I find it frankly amazing how you much a regime can get away with skeletonizing an economy before people complain and do something about it. I mean, you got people eating roots and digging up corpses in North Korea while their soft, fat, well-fed psychopath of a leader builds useless nukes and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Clearly, this type of objective function is something we could all do without.

But then, I also have to wonder what was the objective function of the free market economy of the US, circa 1870-1900? (And please, yes, don't fall into the trap of platonic derangement. Real world examples of ideological systems are the real deal. You will never get closer to ideal than real, so don't bother with the "But the Soviet Union wasn't a real communist state", or "but the US has never enjoyed a real free market economy" whining bullshit on me. It will not fly. So shut the fuck up).

What was the objective function of that 1870s-1900 Gilded Age economy, that system of system of graft, corruption, kick-backs, usery, debt peonage, theft, piracy, favoritism, all embedded within a cradle of government largesse, which is the default form of free market capitalism, and any and all other forms are merely aberrations thereof? Oh, did I go off on a tangent?

Fine. What was the objective function of the Gilded Age economy? Full employment? Maximize potential of citizens? Oh come on, you know the answer. Them that gots, got more. Simple as that. So, the question I've got is, is there a better way, a more decent world, a world that everyone can, maybe not enjoy, but at least find tolerable? Is there some combination of methods that can work out so that everything is a positive sum game? Shalizi wonders the same thing.

Hmm. The right combination of methods? Sounds like a job for linear programming!

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Down Time

In my 53 years of running, I have had maybe three injuries - none of them serious. Now, we are on number four. I turned my left foot on some irregular terrain this past Saturday. It hurt like hell for all of thirty seconds, and then, walking on it, it felt a little better. I considered continuing the run, but instead walked the two miles home and then immediately iced it.

Sunday morning, it had swolled up to twice its normal size, making me look like I got snake bit. At first I was hobbling around thinking I'd need to get a cane, but then, it started to feel a little better, and I was able to get it into a very loose tennis shoe. So, I went into the studio and worked a few hours. After a while, it really started to hurt, so I went home and iced it.

Monday, I was able to get it into an unlaced boot, which I figured was good as the ankle was now swelling, and the toes were turning purple. Nothing alarming, just tertiary bruising, and after working all day, I went home and ice it.

You get the idea. It's still swollen, I've given up icing it. And I've also given up the idea that I would be running this weekend. It may be two weeks before I run again. Then again, it may be a month.

This bums me out.

I suspect I would be even more freaked out about my foot if I had happened to see the slow motion video of it hyperextended and nearly 90 degrees to my leg. Good thing I didn't see that. I'd probably not run for the rest of the year.

Monday, May 14, 2012

RAM 2012 Midwestern Biennial

Rockford Art Museum's 2012 Midwestern Biennial kicks off this coming weekend. Two years ago, they accepted two of the three pieces I submitted. This year, they took one, which I talked about in this essay. Those two occurrences right there have made me a big fan of RAM. But today, I was informed by the curator that I won the First Place Award for 3D work.

I am now a big, big fan of RAM and the town of Rockford. Plus, I can really use that money right about now.

Here's my revised artist statement:
They say information is power. And yet, the single most important shared connection we have is not informational, but emotional. Emotions have evolved where choice is possible. We feel attraction, love, jealousy, fear, happiness, hate, anxiety because they serve to motivate and guide our actions when and where no immediate reward or logic exists to guide us. Emotions supply meaning and value to our logical choices. Without consciously intending it, most of my figurative work is some kind of comment upon the increasing amount of electronic remediation that occurs in our lives.  We’ve added a filter layer in between ourselves and objective reality in the form of our gadgets – our smart phones, music players, pad and laptop computers, flatscreen TVs. And this filter layer mediates not only our senses, but also the emotional impact of our shared experiences. Increasingly, we have no clear idea how any of this technology works. We use it, but we do not understand it. We take it for granted as part of the background, as if it were all just a prosaic form of magic, and we, like South Sea cargo cultists, unquestioningly perform rituals.
In one sense, we have become modern primitives.

Scotty and Katie with their favorite piece
I don't know how my dad got in the picture
Other things. This past Friday night, I went to NIU in Dekalb, IL, for a former student aide's BFA show. As I was the driver, I did not get to drink. Others did. It was a dual show with the student and his girlfriend (pictured here), and they collaborated on a number of pieces, as well as displayed individual works. Having seen them produce works over the years, was quite pleased with their progress. (Although I must admit I like her works better. Shh!)

Later, we went to a bar for after show drinks. (I did have one beer, which I drank early, and then sipped ice water. I was sober for the hour's drive back to Chicago). I wish I had taken pictures at the bar, because apparently the Daisy Duke look is back, and there were many ladies sporting it. (Either the look is back, or it never left corn-country Dekalb).

Other things. This past weekend, I spent all of Saturday and Sunday TIG welding the aluminum frame for Newman's outdoor sculpture. (Newman is the sculptor I work for on the weekend, and, yes, I work seven days a week, with about one weekend off per month - I need the money). I will post pictures of the aluminum frame next weekend if I remember. The sculpture will be aluminum framed and skinned, and will end up being about 10 feet by 20 feet by 4 feet in dimensions. The name of the sculpture is "High Beam", although, with the number of support struts, triangles, and diagonals we have placed within it, I've taken to calling it the "Graf Zeppelin".

A curious thing happened Sunday. As I was working on the frame of the support portion we have started to call the "Curvy Bottom", I noticed a big, fat old fly had landed on a strut not a foot from face. I had been clamping and welding pieces on, and all the time, that big, fat, old fly just sat there. At first I thought, well, that UV light had blinded it and it was stunned. But, as I'm working, it flitted over to another strut about four inches away. I couldn't guess why it didn't get freaked out by the plasma blast from the TIG torch head. Maybe it likes UV light?

In any case, being a live-and-let-live kind of guy, I didn't kill it, though the thought of blasting it with the electric arc did cross my mind. But, damn, the boldness of the fat little fellow kind of endeared me to it. I almost would have called it cute.

And no, I did not make a pet of it.

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Life Among the Mechas

"I'm beginning to think," said the poet Ezra Furman,"That this wasn't such a hot idea after all".

Based upon my time with Ed Hopper, I was inclined to agree with him.  We were all aware of the fates of societies confronted with a technologically superior culture. The events of the past day merely reinforced our fears.

Each of our diplomatic party had spent the day getting acquainted with the Empire of Texas, and now we all sat around the extendable sectional dinette table within our 2012 Winnebago Journey. We had brought two motor homes over with us through the wormhole from Houston, as we really didn't know what kind of living conditions we would face.

The muted earth tones of the Journey's decor - I think it was labelled 'Travertine', ranging from light tan walls to brown carpeting - was a welcome respite from the... alien landscape outside the motor home.
Not so much alien as, well, there were human architectural elements scattered about, but the scale was all wrong. The ranks of quarter-mile high fungal forms, all with a pearlescent white surface, like a matte porcelain, trailing off to the horizon was one unsettling aspect. The color scheme was monotone, but neither black nor white. The black surfaces were superblack, with a disturbing emptiness about them. The white surfaces not quite white, but with no identifiable grey tone. And those surfaces reflecting sunlight scintillated with an oily sheen, a sick soap bubble surface which made one queasy. The sun shone hard upon us, but no shimmer of heat rose from the ground. In fact, the ground was chill. You could feel the cold through the soles of your shoes. And, in an absolutely cloudless sky, nothing moved. No birds or insects anywhere.

I was scrunched up against the window, staring out at the giant mushrooms that stretched out to the horizon. "Were those people?" I wondered to myself. I didn't know.

Across from me, Furman. Seated next to him our physicist, the lovely Yolanda Salazar, freshly minted with a PhD from Caltech. Will and Ida Parker, our anthropologists, passed bottles of beer around. Yolanda made a face, and got up to make herself a highball. Once she returned with a gin and tonic, the Parkers sat down, and we all clinked glasses.

Furman took a swig, sighed contentedly, looked at Ida, and asked, "So what are we looking at here? Living machines, we got that, but.. Are they a hive-mind? Separate personalities but conjoined like Siamese twins? Fully independent individuals? What?"

Ida looked at her husband, who raised eyebrows back at her. "Well...", she said, "you have to understand this is like rabbits in your backyard trying to figure out how much of a rabbit you are."

"I live in a condo", replied Ezra, "and I don't speak rabbit. But I get the idea. What's your impression?"

"Are far as we can tell, independent individuals. Fiercely independent. But there's an underlying conformity. Enforced? Maybe".

"There is no such thing as arbitrage" explained Will.

"What do you mean by that?" asked Furman.

"Look, in a market setup, it's like information is restricted to speed of light, and so you can have frames of reference, local regions, where you have a price difference. You can simultaneously buy and sell to different local regions to profit from that price difference. It's not like idealized markets where everyone shares the same knowledge at the same time. Which is what they have."

"Via wormholes?"

"Yeah. Embedded in their brains, uh, equivalent of brains."

"Jesus! No wonder they are all so god-damned big!"

Ida and Will glanced at each other, then looked at Yolanda.

"The Texans possess wormhole generating - hell, all - technologies that are much more miniaturized and efficient than ours. I mean, they do a human-sized brain processor about the size of a sugar cube. Basically, our stuff is, like, carved wooden wheels and shit compared to their microchips-"

"Yo-yo, I get that we are incredibly primitive knuckle-draggers compared to them. Spare me the stone knives and bearskins analogies... Wait a minute? They've got the wormhole on a chip? Shit!" (Say what you will about the poet Ezra Furman, he was particularly quick on the draw).

Yolanda nodded. "Yes, they are all instantaneously connected to each other, even across the length of the galaxy. Wormhole mediated subconscious telepathy. And don't ask me how they avoid the whole global causality violation thing. Anyway, it's more of an unconscious communication-"

"Like cloud computing?"

"Please stop interrupting. No. Not like a cloud. That term is too static a description. More like a... cloud dragon. And the Emperor is the cloud dragon. My understanding is, for traditional, sentimental, and legal reasons, the Texans have chosen to keep a human persona as their front ends. The schema, the template, the chosen formats and networks, if you will, are human, or humanlike".

We all let that sink in a minute. I was both relieved and terrified in equal measures.

"So, what happened with the Furman-Kurman show? Does our peranoscopist have anything to offer?"

"'Concentrate and ask again'", I offered. No one laughed. "We split up, at the Emperor's request. He suggested I interview the battle cruiser Edward Hopper, while Furman-".

"-engaged in the metaphorical hearty handshakes and 'hail, fellow, well met'. He requested that an envoy be sent back to old Earth with us. Truth to tell-", just then Furman was interrrupted by a knock on the door. We all started, staring at each other for a few seconds. Another knock, this one slightly more insistent.  Ida went up to the front entry to answer it. After a few seconds, she ducked back in.

"Johnny? It's for you."

I went to the door, and, standing outside, towering a good 30 feet tall, was a large metal giant. He appeared to be made of perhaps titanium, it had that warm, brushed matte silver look about it, but with some very stylish gold trim accenting the limbs. The face was more humanoid than cartoonish, and, disturbingly, was pliable like flesh.

"Mr. Kurman?" it asked.

"Yes?"

"Well, howdy. Ed Hopper" He offered out a hand big enough to crush my skull. I gingerly shook it, surprised to find it warm and soft.

"I hear you all are taking me back to Old Earth as an envoy".

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Front Towards Enemy

Here's a thought experiment. Suppose some biotech guys jigger the genome of people so that they produce chlorophyll. You got green skinned people walking around who, like those little glass globes containing brine shrimp and algae, are self-contained, autonomous and independent. Almost self-contained. They need sunlight, but that's it.

How sociable will they be? They don't have any of the normal needs that force people to depend upon one another. They don't need food or water. Let's make them impervious to the elements, so they don't need shelter either. What do they need?

I've always felt intoxication and sex and other forms of pleasure seeking are biological drives, so let's have the biotech guys modify their brains so that all of that is right out, and they don't need that either.

Okay, they could be coerced. Threatened with being put in the dark unless they work for someone. So, let's make them relatively invulnerable, so that it is too much trouble to subjugate them, cost vs benefits wise, like a society of... hmm, let's see, green-skinned, invulnerable, a society of Hulks I guess.

So about all that's left dependence-wise is boredom and loneliness. Well, we can't really bio-engineer that away without making them dummies, so let's not do that. So, boredom and loneliness are their only dependencies, otherwise they are supremely independent.

How sociable will they be? What kind of people are these Texans, given that they really are completely self-sufficient. Ridiculously self-sufficient even, as they can recreate civilization from literal bedrock all on their lonesomes. Are they social? Civil? Gregarious? Convivial? Or are they more like anchorite monks? Standoffish? Reclusive? Cantankerous?

Your average Texan battle cruiser clocks in at around a million metric tons. Some (very few, fortunately) go up to fifty million tons. None of that tonnage is for living quarters or life support because no living Texan continues to be organic. That vessel is an individual (spacefaring) Texan. Therefore, your average (spacefaring) Texan can be completely devoted to maneuvering, power generation, and war-fighting. There is the usual hardened ablative shielding and armor, a complement of thousands of nuclear warheads (ranging from a few kilotons up to ten megatons), lasers tuned throughout the EM spectrum (ranging from megawatts to terawatts), high energy particle beams of every flavor, and the usual assortments of kinetic weaponry.

The question I have to ask is, why does the Empire of Texas need such a vast fleet of formidable warships, I mean, sorry, such a well-regulated militia? Who are they at war with, or from whom do they need to defend themselves against? I put this question to the battle cruiser Edward Hopper.

Edward Hopper, you ask? Wait a minute. The guy who painted "Nighthawks"? There's a battleship named after him? Well, yes, but not the same guy. Edward Hopper is the battle cruiser whom the Empire of Texas, through the conduit of the Emperor of Texas, assigned to assist and aid our diplomatic party.

Okay, you know what? I'll explain it all later. For now, just, yes, we are having a conversation with a battle cruiser, okay? So, I asked Mr. Hopper, who insisted we call him Ed, and he answered:

"Well, I guess it all boils down to the fact that apparently the Almighty has a deep and abiding love for parasites, He made so many niches for them".

"That's kind of an evasive answer".

"It's not meant to be. But consider our historical precedents, which are not all different from Earth history. Any society is bound to have a few members that prefer to game the system, or prefer not to act out of good faith, or prefer to keep the cooperation to a minimum. Or, you know, act like selfish assholes. You get one selfish asshole, and the next thing you know, you got multi-megaton space ironclads bristling with everything from nukes to nunchuks".

"Yeah. I- I understand all that. The question is it all inertia of history here, the fact you are all well-armed, or do you guys have an active and current adversary?"

"Currently? No. But, we're more than just spacefaring battle cruisers, right? I mean, each of us is a von Neumann self-replicating space probe, capable of recreating all of civilization from scratch".

"Okay, you guys are some one-to-two-thousand years ahead of us technologically, and therefore post-scarcity, and, I guess, post-Singularity, and I'm guessing the Empire is more like a network cloud or a Bose-Einstein condensate than a political entity. Maybe what I'm asking doesn't apply -".

"Exactly, I mean. We've colonized this whole galaxy, and by colonizing, I mean not only terraforming - which by the way, there's millions of really nice earthlike worlds around here now, I mean you couldn't tell the difference between them and old Earth - but we've replicated our civilization throughout, and what you call weapons, all those nukes, lasers, blasters, missiles, and guns? Well, they are also tools, engines, and batteries, the kind that provide the enormous energy flux to power factories and fabricators, and - you know for use on anything from biosphere nano-assembly to stellar tectonics".

"Or, you can blast the shit out of your enemies with them".

"Well, there's that also I suppose. When you need to..."

"You're not going to answer my question, are you, Ed?"

"...I thought I had"

I was starting to get the feeling Ed, clearly an expert rationalizer, should consider running for office.

Monday, May 7, 2012

"The Great Stagnation": A Book Report

"The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better", by Tyler Cowen.

Tyler Cowen seems to be fairly bright economist. When I picked up this slim book, a 2011 NYT bestseller, at the library, I expected to read an exploration of some thoughts I've been having about collapse capitalism. My thoughts along those lines are superficially similar in that I view most of American exceptionalism as the product of mostly luck - free land (taken from the aborginals), free labor (exploited from immigrants and slaves - both the chattel and debt peonage kind), free reign (provided, for the longest time, you were white and male), and free protection (in the form of two vast isolative oceans).

I've always thought probably the worst modern thing that happened to America was the collapse of the Soviet Union - in that we learned all the wrong lessons from it, resulting in a form of triumphalism that made us hugely overconfident, swaggeringly arrogant, and dangerously risk-seeking.

And Cowen, in a classic removed academic way, places a lot of the blame for the current malaise upon over confidence, but...

But, for all his talk of low-hanging fruit, and after reading 1493, I expected something more from Cowen's book. I expected him to recognize the biggest, juiciest, lowest hangingest fruit of them all was the conquest of the New World. That's really everything. Everything.

Consider this brief counterfactual. Picture Eurasia as seen, for the longest time, from it's real center of gravity, which I would place, give or take, around Persia. That area, and the weighted portions of civilization in India, China and central Asia, for the past 10,000 years, is where all the important shit happened. At the margins, off to the Far West, was Europe - a shitty little cultural backwater marginally and sparsely inhabited by a climate challenged group of slow fucking learners.

So, here's the counterfactual. The New World never existed. You sail west, you die. Columbus, Ponce de Leon, Balboa, they all disappear, and finally people give up on the Atlantic. What happens?  No Spanish empire. No silver. No trade with China. Vastly More importantly, no potatoes. No cod fishing. No population growth in the northern reaches of Europe. No Dutch trading empire, no English trading empire. No Industrial Revolution. At least, not from Europe. The soils of Europe, always on the verge of depletion, receive no guano from South America. The population of Europe never explodes. Europe stays where it has always been, a marginal land, a backwards people.

This is not to say the Industrial Revolution doesn't take place. It just doesn't happen with the usual white male triumphalism involved. No loss , but certainly no betterment either, all the world's peoples being the shits that they are.

But I digress. To borrow from the somewhat dated vernacular, the conquest of the New World is the shiznit.

So, I start reading The Great Stagnation, and within a few pages, I realize this Cowen guy belongs to the neoliberal sect of the libertarian religion. Oh, fucking great. Which means, quite naturally, I will be subjected to many assertions with no evidence. Or rather, with cherry-picked evidence*, as religionists are wont to do.

It doesn't mean I stopped reading. But I did start skimming.

Cowen's main piece of evidence for the technological slowdown is a study done by Jonathon Hueber, in 2005. Hueber himself uses a lot of arbitrary evidence to back up his claim. This link has a great many issues with Hueber's conclusions. I have to agree. There is no evidence of a drop in innovation. On the other hand, there is a great deal of evidence for financial and political mismanagement of technologies, but Cowen doesn't really want to explore that in any embarrassing detail, perhaps because it would involve a critique of his own opinions.

With the final realization of many of the dreams of Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation", with the very close finishing touches on mass-production of nanomaterials, such as graphene, silicene, metamaterials, amorphous materials, ceramics, exotic composites, etc. suggest that the Golden Age of Materials Science v 2.0, is here. The fact that the financial industries have pulled away a lot of talent from the STEM areas suggests we would be 10-20 years ahead of where we are had that talent not been wasted in the banking sector.

In short, I don't buy Cowen's arguments.

*Notice that Cowen, in the link, shows a chart to back up his argument for a technological plateau and a slowdown which is not entirely honestly presented, much the same way global warming deniers show only that part of the data that does not show warming. But in this link, with a more comprehensive chart, you can see that Cowens' downslide is actually the mid-90's bubble anomaly presented as business as usual.