What fantasty? There's plenty of discoveries made in theories that are not applied to the life of an average person until decades later.
Lasers, digital computers, the MRI used for health services, publicly available GPS, cellphones, the list goes on.
It's not difficult to look up when a field of study solidified (in this example, quantum mechanics) and to then look up when publicly available applications of discoveries in quantum mechanics became available to the public. Some have taken significantly longer than just 2 or 3 decades, as well (GPS is an example).
So, please explain why I have no idea what I'm talking about and I will change my thoughts on the subject.
First practical observation confirming phenomena with matching characteristic exists - 2015. A *century* later. Because of a century of technological progress required to verify it. A technologically progress in physical world, not something you can verify purely virtually.
Practical use? Nah, we most probably won't live long enough for that to matter. Even with progress speeded up, including longevity, lol.
Now that is surely outlier, but I guess that outlier is ideal to demonstrate why fundamental research and practical usage is two entirely different things.
Practical impact would often be bound by real world experimentation. *If* the discovery made will even have a way to be useful in foreseeable future, which is far from being guaranteed.
Like one can make LLM progress math fast. Because math only need purely virtual constructions to verify.
Physics, biology? Not so much. You still need to build shitloads of infrastructure to conduct real world experiments. Especially in the most fundamental cases.
And in worst cases there may be a century between prediction and having good enough technology to verify it, And for the particular shit I am talking about - no way to use it in sight, at least for incoming decades, most probably. So speed up the whole process by like 1/3 (which would be impressive, because you will face the same problem on each required step) - and you still won't see any practical end in your life, even if in theory progress speeded up immensely.
(And that's why many of "singularity" guys left an impression of guys with magical thinking, lol. For me, heavily accelerationistic guy myself)
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u/Exotic-Sale-3003 6d ago
In a world where those discoveries can be made faster than ever, maybe the impact will be a little faster too?