How Close are we to the end of the tech tree?

[Marduk]

Frankly, I'd worry less about reaching the top of the tech tree, than about modern civilization losing the ability to climb higher up the tree due to loss of the things that make such progress possible.

Which is decently rich and functional countries continuing to exist and do R&D.

Say, in the first place IRL who even believes technological innovation is stopping or slowing down?

Because I’m betting they’re a bunch of environmentalist-champagne-socialist douchebags who essentially say that advancements in tech won’t come or help the environment and that advances in technology only benefit the rich and stuff

Actually it's a common impression after the unusual speed of low hanging fruit of IT revolution got everyone used to much faster rate.

Intel Puts the Brakes on Moore’s Law

Intel will slow the pace at which it rolls out new chip-making technology, and is still searching for a successor to silicon transistors.

www.technologyreview.com

That said, for environmentalists, to a degree I can see where they are coming from

People forget that our digital devices whilst taking up less and less physical space and don’t need trees for their pages, still take up constant energy

The internet and those data storage housing all run near 24/7 and need power to work and getting the material to make those digital storages requires mining

Being green isn’t easy, but we can try maximizing the fuel we use. Like not needing a butthole because we use up all the food as energy and somehow using the waste as an extra energy store....yes its a weird idea but efficient body

Who cares about what environmentalists think besides themselves? They are a crazy cult at this point. A living proof that when it comes to grand worldview narratives, the things that fill the void after traditional religion are necessarily going to not have its problems or worse.

We aren't talking about a massive data center here, but a cybernetically modified human body. There is no reason for such focus on energy efficiency. A civilization capable of commonly using those is naturally going to be rich enough that few thousands of calories worth of energy needed to run one will be even cheaper than it is in today's first world countries. So why build the whole cybernetics around increasing energy efficiency?
My bet would be design based primarily on reliability, toughness (people don't wanna die from accidents, duh), comfort, utility and even aesthetics, energy efficiency being a secondary concern somewhere after those, and more of a minimum technical requirement for the former - power storage for cybernetics may be an issue, and you don't want to damage the nearby non-cybernetic bits with excessive waste heat.

I was thinking more genetic modification that sort of manages this: Body Supremacy

And if we ever become cyborgs, I expect them to be extremely energy efficient, maybe using nanotechnology that absorbs sunlight like a plant in order to survive

Maybye in a green North Korea...
Think about it. It's horribly impractical, one would need to spend nearly the whole day in sunlight to recharge...
And to add insult to injury, not much energy from this size scale either, even at near perfect conversion efficiency (very much unlike plants or even modern photovoltanics), at more northern latitudes it may struggle to provide the energy equivalent of a normal diet. And that's not even getting into the issue of biochemical nutrients the fleshy bits would still require, you can't get those from sunlight.

 

[Scottty]

Maybye in a green North Korea...
Think about it. It's horribly impractical, one would need to spend nearly the whole day in sunlight to recharge...
And to add insult to injury, not much energy from this size scale either, even at near perfect conversion efficiency (very much unlike plants or even modern photovoltanics), at more northern latitudes it may struggle to provide the energy equivalent of a normal diet. And that's not even getting into the issue of biochemical nutrients the fleshy bits would still require, you can't get those from sunlight.

If a human-sized animal lives by eating plants, each day it has to eat an amount of plant matter that took several days to grow. This is why there have to be many times as much plant life as there are herbivores, and many times as many herbivores as there are carnivores.

 

[Deleted member]

I don’t think we have even begun to fathom the real nature of the universe yet, let alone approach what is technically possible.

 

[prinCZess]

There is no spoon tree. *waggles fingers*

We seem to get this attitude in some every few generations that 'this is it, we're coming up on the height of human progress' and it never really pans out. Mankind is a curious animal, and people are going to keep fiddling with things and making innovations long into the future until some Doctor Farnsworth-style fellow crosses wires on his doomsday device and sends the universe to kingdom come (or natural events lead to such). Even in dystopian hellholes people find new ways to do things and better things to do it with. I don't see us approaching an endpoint anytime soon...I mean, hell, there's an entire 90% of the universe* we didn't know existed until relatively recently and we've got to figure out what THAT'S about, right?

*This is based off vague recollections of dark-matter stuff, and could be wildly incorrect or naive in presentation. Dammit Jim, I'm an internet-poster not a physicist!

 

[JagerIV]

Looks like the question I should have asked is if there is an end to technology, rather than how close we were to it. I didn't realize that would be a controversial question.