Cargo Airships Are Happening

This reads as a technologist that has absolutely no clue about anything regarding the shipping or the logistics industry. I hope someone told these guys what the spent is on new (water) ships globally, because it points only in one direction.

Yeah, it seems like every attempt at an airship company for the last 70 years or so just ends up speed-running the development of modern travel/logistics that makes airships obsolete. Same way crypto is/was speed-running the need for modern financial regulation.

On a broader scale I also wonder if we're near the top of a technological S-curve. It's worth remembering that until the industrial revolution the average pace of technological advance was extremely slow. The Mongols conquered Asia with weaponry that would have been instantly familiar to people living 2000 years earlier. Perhaps our descendants 1000 years from now will still be using refrigerators virtually identical to our own.

CRISPR, Yamanaka factors, computational biology, brain computer interfaces, Starship, LLMs... we are nowhere near the top of the tech S curve.

Most of those are still in the lab, Starship is an incremental improvement that was largely a matter of funding, LLMs are at best a threat to telemarketers and customer service reps, perhaps paralegals.

I'm really sick of breathless, Disney-fied tomorrowland fantasies of what technology might theoretically be able to do, and pronouncements of "breakthroughs" that dissolve into nothing once any real-world application is attempted. I understand it's necessary to drum up dumb money for startups, and it makes for a good amusement park ride, but I'll believe the AI "revolution" is here when a car drives itself coast-to-coast through all weather conditions without incident.

I'm still waiting on graphene super-capacitors to make batteries obsolete.

I don't know how old you are, but regardless, can you not see how technological change has occurred within your own single human lifespan? This wasn't true in a meaningful way to an individual's life trajectory until the last century or so. The changes are coming so continuously and with such significant future implications, it's impossible for me not to just stand in awe.

Whether the specific proof of radical change you're waiting for happens in the next 24 months or over the next 100 years, it's still instantaneous in comparison to everything that came before it.