The Old Dog Barks

“We’ve Lost the Technology” is what I would often say when people at the company I worked for asked me why I advised them we could no longer run tooling to make products we had once produced at a profit. Sometimes it was sub-components manufacturers who were out of business, sometimes specialized production equipment had been scrapped, and sometimes the loss of industrial memory, the learning curve would be too steep on a small order to keep the scrap rate at an acceptable level. And yes, new OSHA regulations were sometimes the culprit.

This article from Bruce Charlton’s Miscellany explains another part of the problem and ties into the Requiem post below.

Tuesday, 22 June 2010

Human capability peaked before 1975 and has since declined

I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.

This may sound bizarre or just plain false, but the argument is simple. That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans. 40 years ago we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have *not* been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability. . .

The fact is that human no longer do – *can* no longer do many things we used to be able to do: land on the moon, swiftly win wars against weak opposition and then control the defeated nation, secure national borders, discover ‘breakthrough’ medical treatments, prevent crime, design and build to a tight deadline, educate people so they are ready to work before the age of 22, block an undersea oil leak…

Read the whole thing and see if you do not agree with all too much of it.

If you have already read The Man Who Sold the Moon, even if you are unfamiliar with this story, you will understand it. If not find a copy of the book I mention without delay. But don’t let that stop you from listening to this weeks episode. The Man Who Sold the Moon was the first “adult” Heinlein, not one of his juveniles, (as great as they are), I ever read. My dad borrowed it from the Bell Telephone Company library and I read the book while he was at work. Do any companies even have libraries anymore? Must have been in the early 60′s.

This episode of the radio show X-1 — Requiem, sure brought back memories.