Slashdot Mirror
Are The Benefits Of Technology Waning?
FallLine writes: "U.S.News and World Report has an interesting and well writen article called the The Slowing Pace of Innovation. It argues that innovation between, approximately, 1900 and 1950 had a far greater impact on the average person (and society as a whole) than innovation between 1950 and 2000. It comments particularly on innovations of the past 20 or 30 years (i.e., cell phones, PCs, the internet, etc.) and compares them with earlier inventions that most of us take for granted (i.e., the lightbulb, sanitation, plumbing, etc). This article is long overdue, in my opinion, as it puts the innovations of today into proper historical context, even when we look back just 100 years."
0wnage!
i am the greatest!!!
Of course, take whats in the subject, reword it, add another sentence, post it, and instant karma! congrats, youve just become a karma whore.
Many people seem to confuse innovation vs. invention. Invention is creating a new thing/technology. Innovation is sensing and successfully responding to a market need.
This article seems to forget that perhaps the most important innovations of recent times have been SOCIAL innovations.
Some good: FDR's GI bill of rights, which provided an entire generation of Americans with higher education, the Generally Accepted Tarriffs and Treaties (GATT, now WTO), which dramatically lowered global trade barriers in part to dissuade another world war
Some bad: Nazism, Maoism, Stalinism.
The age of innovation on the social level is just beginning.
-Stu
True, current fighters can't cruise supersonically. That's not because it's technologically impossible, but because their mission profile doesn't require it. There have been military planes capable of supersonic cruise, though. In addition to the SR-71, there was the YF-12A interceptor version with similar performance, intended to replace the F-106 for interception of Soviet bombers. It never went into active service, though.
The other significant supersonic-cruise military plane was the General Dynamics B-58 Hustler. In service from 1958 until 1969, it was designed for supersonic cruise. How does a New York - LA round trip in 4 hours, 41 minutes sound?
The SR-71. I am not aware of a replacement of the SR-71 especially since it was brough back into service for the Gulf war. Why didn't they use a more capable replacement if they had any?
Because funding of military projects is based solely on political perception of needs...there won't be a replacement until the politicians believe (correctly or not) that we need a replacement.
You're right about the SR-71 being in a league of its own -- at cruise, with the compressor bypassed, the afterburner effectively becomes the combustion chamber of a ramjet. Gotta love elegant engineering, eh? ;)
Whose priorities? The VCs gave money to every assinine idea so they could get rich, not so they could advance society. To the VCs, it is 'clear thinking' to bank on 1 of 10 ventures paying off. Maybe you disagree, and thus the large impasse is created.
IMHO - The biggest impediment to human progress is our free will. Things that are important to 'socially minded' folks are not important to others. Once our basic needs are met, the importance and allocation of resources becomes complicated. Such complications are fodder for wars, famine, and any other Bad Things (tm) that have occurred since humans became 'civilized'.
OTH - I do not want to give up my free will so we can become like the 'humans' in THX 1138 .
Later.
"Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life."
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
Granted, the mapping of the human genome or landing a probe on Mars probably doesn't bring us the same awe that radio, moving pictures and the telephone brought to generations before our time, but they are none-the-less fantastic and amazing and certainly beneficial. We're a species with the ability to ultimately craft our entire future in almost every aspect. Barring our propensity to blow ourselves up and poison our world into oblivion, the benefits of our discoveries and creations are limitless and the benefits are, to this point, at their zenith.
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seumas.com
Exactly. Computers may not have improved our quality of living at home much, but lets look at what the computer has done for the economy, workplace, and efficiency in the workplace.
Workplace conditions are about as important as living conditions.
The point is, we've had more time to weave electricty into every part of our society, to the point where we have become totally dependent on electricity. In another 50 years, people will have become so dependent on "smart" devices (i.e., embedded computers), that they won't know how to function without them. How many people do you know now who know how to operate a manual SLR camera (i.e., with an external hand held light meter)? How many garages can fix automobiles with mechanical points and spark coils?
I think you would be VERY surprised how difficult this would be!! For starters, forget driving a car (electronic ignition), or having the bus arrive on time, or watching TV (solid state), or even listening to the RADIO (unless you still have an old vaccum tube model left around from the days of your youth). Don't even think about using the phone (all the switches are computerized), and you'd better hope it was a warm day, because you wouldn't be able to get any electricty or natural gas.It's all a matter of perspective...
--
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Longevity is the next big technological horizon. When human lifespans, including their working lifespans, are significantly increased - and the manner and distribution of that increase - are really IMO the only technological issues that will at its core transform society the way that the telephone, telegraph, plumbing, electricity, the automobile, antibiotics, aviation and film did.
The reason for this slowdown of progress (for lack of a better term) is that, so far, we're only improving on already invented technology, not inventing new. The jet engine of today would be perfectly understandable to one of the engineers of the WWII vintage ones. The Wright Brothers would be able to understand the workings of modern aircraft. Alexander Graham Bell would be able to understand the workings of modern telephones - and with a bit of a leap - also cell phones. Why? Because our daily technology is merely an extrapolation of tech invented decades ago.
The television is a simple (in hindsight) extrapolation of radio which is an extrapolation of telegraph. The computer, the jet plane, the Space Shuttle and just about every other example of our vaunted technology can trace it's lineage the same way - step-wise progress on what has come before.
The only thing that will bring about a new, household technological revolution is NEW TECHNOLOGY. Not improvements of old, existing stuff, but technology based on something entirely new. I'm not saying that we should throw out what we already have, I'm just saying that, until we get a new platform to build upon all we'll get is an improved model of what we already have.
For my money, I'm betting on Nanotechnology - not microtech but true nanotech - to be that platform. When you consider the possible uses of that technology, you start to realize the profound changes it could make in our daily lives. For instance - actual, final cures for cancer, aids, aging - even the common cold. Want a new house? Go buy the basic nanotech bundle to build it. And it won't be necessary to cut down a forest to put up the frame, either. Nanotech has the potential to assemble your new house out of pretty much anything that's lying around - trash, rock, dirt, etc. - by reassembling the molecules from something useless into something useful.
Yes, I read SF. No, I don't expect this level of maturity in that technology any time soon. But...I do expect to see the beginnings of it in my lifetime. And, I expect it to bring about a societal change even more profound than the internal combustion engine, the telegraph and the airplane. The question will be whether I can keep up with it or whether I'll be resigned to the trash heap of time with Ozzie and Harriet.
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Be alert!!! America needs more lerts!
Time's fun when you're having flies. - Kermit the Frog
I was going to email this, but you've (wisely) left your email out of your user profile, but try going to Britannica.com - they sell the Encyclopaedia Britannica on CD/DVD. The site itself is some wanky portal site, but the Encyclopaedia is still promoted on the front page, and from tick-list on the the Compare Britannica 2001 page:
Entire text of 32 vol. Encyclopædia Britannica : Tick (for all versions)
So they still seem to be in business - although I think they nearly went out of business, as they originally sold the CD version of their Encyclopaedia at about £400 (it's less than £90 now). But then, that's what Encarta cost when it first came out (although most people don't believe that anymore), but Britannica were asking £400 when MS had already dropped the Encarta price to the usual £40-70 you pay these days.
Er...that's it really. Thought you might like to know - I have no connection with Britannica, and have not actually used the CD/DVD version myself, so caveat emptor.
Tim
PS. Why did you think they were out of business? Even www.encyclopaediabritannica.com takes you to that web page...
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Don't blame the existence of better entertainment and bigger house for people's *choice* to buy them. That same family, were they willing to forgo the choices available now, and live at the scale that was common in the 40s (house size, etc.), could have a similar lifestyle.
It seems to me that people in general are very good at continually increasing their wants to stay ahead of their resources, without limit? I'm not trying to be derogatory here, by the way.
Does Fukuyama address this idea?
My daughter (who can seemingly spend hours playing with refrigerator magnets) would certainly disagree with this statement :-)
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
The discovery of a new aspect to the physical universe that promotes a new way of thinking (like atomic structure did That'd be LSD, discovered in 1949 by Albert Hoffman. Understanding time Ever have deja-vu?...That's understanding time, it's when your realize the past, present, and the future are all happening at once. Finding telekenesis happens It does, as does telepathy, goto psycom.com and do it for yourself!
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
Obviously this guy never picked up his copy of Civilization: CTP......hehe
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
That's all we've accomplished since 1950, really.
Well, why don't you go out and invent and market a revolutionary new engine? People might want it, but then you might bump into the old if it's not broken there's no point in fixing it problem. Cars last decades and drive for hundreds of thousands of miles. The engines in most cars outlasts the bodies. There's just not much point in improving a proven design, IMHO.
Yes, fuel efficiency and the type of fuels used could stand to be worked on some more, but in the end the internal combustion model will be with us for a while longer. Because it works.
PC innovation never truely took off until IBM was opened up and anyone could make clones.
What are you talking about? All that occured since IBM created the PC (as in the IBM PC, not the personal computer) is that other companies and the industry as a whole have kept making it smaller and faster. There's not a whole lot of innovation going on the personal computing market, compared to the early days, before the x86/Wintel archetecture became such an intrenched standard.
And Sony's trinitron doesn't prevent anyone else from making monitors. They just created a means of displaying an incredibly sharp image. If the extra sharpness matters, then you can get a Sony picture tube. IF it doesn't, you can go elsewhere. And there's no stopping anyone else from creating a new means of sharping a CRT's display... I'd say that was a bad example, when so many much better examples exist...
Such as Intel patenting the P6 bus, so that there can't exist pin compatible non-intel CPUs that use intel's chipsents. Things like that, i'd say hamper the industry a lot more than a patent on a specific (optional) display technology.
True. You'd have to get a life.
Or more likely you'd be:
chatting on your ham radio
playing pinball
watching TV
spinning 45's
:^)
No it's microsoft it's self, look:
:)
"Then between 1972 and 1995, for reasons economists are still debating, the rate of improvement collapsed to less than one fiftieth that of the previous era, despite a widespread adoption of computers."
Microsoft started:
1975
Now when was Microsoft starting to loose ground:
1995 ?
New things are always on the horizon
Technology is approaching its end game.
nanotechnology.
robots with artificial intelligence.
genetic engineering.
these will bring about changes at least as profound as agriculture or the industrial revolution. much greater than even public sanitation or electricity.
there will be plenty of uses for more than 640K of ram.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- A.E.
I think this is an example of one of the sources of tension between the innovations everyone here is mentioning, and the article's sense of a lack of same. The social space for change in this country has shrunk dramatically since 1950. Why is there no bullet train between San Francisco and LA? Technology? Maybe a bit. But it's mostly the social obstacles. If we were willing to just throw people out of the way wholesale, the way that (say) the big irrigation projects in mid-century did, it wouldn't be a problem. But we're not. It's a country of lawyers now. (Which ties back to other points made here, that the big changes since 1950 have been legal and political, not technological - the expansion of civil rights, for instance.)
Unrelated second point: how different is life for the average person in the world now than it was in 1900? Not nearly so much as it is in the USA, I'd wager. There's a lot of room for all of this stuff to spread out yet.
Who needs plumbing when you've got slashdot?
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
He also has a series of short stories set in a world where teleportation (based on an "amplified tunnel diode effect", i.e. quantum tunnelling, so no matter replicators) is widespread. He did assume you need both a transmitter and a receiver. (In TAPOT, he notes, "If you don't, you get a short war...")
"The Alibi Machine" notes that alibis - "I wasn't there, I was somewhere else" - are obsoleted by teleportation. You can pretend to leave a party to go to the bathroom, kill someone, and be back before the hors d'ouvres are finished.
Then there are "flash crowds" - a physical distributed denial-of-service attack, you might say. Something interesting comes up on the news, and maybe a tenth of a percent of the viewers think, "Hey, that's interesting, I'll 'port over there and see it in person." Suddenly you've got hundreds, thousands, or millions of people zipping in from everywhere...
In "The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club", some thieves have made a good living hopping into flash crowds, starting riots, and looting during the confusion.
Anyway, interesting to speculate upon. But I think practical teleportation is a long way off, if it ever comes.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
>>Right now I spend 1.5+ hours on the road a day coming and going to work. Why can't someone innovate a way to cut out that time and make my life better -
They have. It's called public transportation. Only, everybody wants to drive their own car.
>>And given the troubles with landfills filling up, I don't think we've mastered sanitation yet!
Garbage is really raw materials, but it will take very cheap, very fast, very efficient computer processing to make the transition. I don't think we're even close yet.
The average photograph taken during the (US) civil war had much better detail and long-term survivability than the average photograph taken today.
Yep, he's stretching the boundaries to make his point.
Somewhere I read that one of the most profound inventions occurred during the so-called dark ages. The horse collar. For the first time mankind could effectively use more than his own power.
At nearly every point in the past 5+ centuries we have records of people saying, "my god, how far we've come, there's nothing left to be invented!" Hmm, see, I didn't think there was anything after the ballista either, but hey, some people proved me wrong. Right now we look back and see things as "well, duh, that was the logical progression." But people never saw things this way when they were actually happening. As much as I see things similarly, I am skeptical that things are as simple as they're trying to be made here. We can discuss this in hindsight in half a century. We'll probably look about and laugh at how silly we were for this conversation. Seron,
----------------- Oink. Moo. rarr! -----------------
My above examples seem Utopic, I admit, but they're just an medium case example of change.
That seems like a pretty big technological/biotech event.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I think an important difference between the technological advances of the first and second half of this century is that while most of the former were driven by the public sector, most of the latter were made in the private sector.
A market economy will not produce the goods that are best for society, but rather the goods that are best at making a profit for the producer. The research that brought life expectancy to 1950's levels was largely academic, not corporate. Sputnik was not launched into space to further the interests of a joint stock company.
Instead of, say, investing research effort in the space program, we invest it in developing Ford Excursions. Instead of building homeless shelters, we erect mini malls with payday loan outfits. The invisible hand gives us Windows ME, TV shows like "World's Scariest Police Chases," and the McRib sandwich ("you eat the bones!"). Instead of a cure for malaria, we get Viagra. Instead of widespread electronic privacy through encryption, we have encrypted entertainment media.
The (probably accidental) steeping of Americans in a culture that inexplicably has a profound distrust for authority has delivered us a much more insidious, underhanded form of servitude. As the influence of government was diminished, the ease with which it was controlled by monied interests grew. At present, the purpose of goverment has changed from a banding together of citizens for the common good to a confederation of self-serving corporate interests.
Witness the recent debacle of electric utility deregulation in California. Corporate interests hijacked the aforementioned cultural phenomenon to advance their agenda of deregulation. "If we cut out the (nosey, bureacratic, inefficient) government, prices will drop." Prices have gone up. Deregulating cable and even airlines has had a similar effect (the latter on published, full-price fares).
With luck, the dawning of the new century (just 28 hours to go!) will bring about the sort of progressive attitude that became widespread at the dawn of the current century.
Hopefully America will get pull its collective head out of its collective ass and reinstate the sort of government that can make a market economy work. Specifically one which sets up the rules of the game so that when profits are maximized, the public good is maximized.
Look, I realize that plumbing is neat and all, but let's get serious: those chumps lived in the past! Can you imagine how much that sucked? If they wanted to play Carmageddon in 1890, they had to deal with extremely questionable framerates if the game ran at all. Patches were still decades away. Though Dr. Derek Smart, PhD , at least told them tales of BattleCoveredWagon 2000 A.D.
We, however, live in the future. Love In The Time Of Cholera begone -- we're Leet in the Time Of Handspring. Maybe the authors of this article didn't notice this, but just because technology hasn't helped us pee better in a while doesn't mean the pace of innovation is slowing. For example, right now I am listening to pirated music on my shiny new laptop while betting on the Broncos with someone in another state. Soon I will go play SSX until I pass out. I realize that the flu vaccine probably helped more people, but just because we're focusing our efforts on entertainment instead of staying alive doesn't mean we're innovating less.
LK!
I agree and would suggest that in terms of baselines: if you move from zero to one you have an infinite percentage increase. Moving from 1 to 100 is much less, yet the difference is large (99 compared to 1). Since we are basing our "progress" on "common man impact", when basic needs are met we've finished. If we redefine progress we have barely begun: weather control, genetic enhancements, spreading life offworld. Perhaps one could consider progress in terms of impact on the species rather than in terms of the impact on meeting individual needs.
Silicon has peaked? Not so sure...but for sure nothing else is in the race yet. Biotech engineering is the future (compare solar panels to photosynthesis)but its complexity is such that it hasn't really achieved critical mass. When genetic engineering and nanotech converge, silicon will at last be in a race.
As long as you insist on basing progress in terms of effects that the common man feels then once basic needs are meet there is no measurable progress. What about progress in terms of meeting specialists needs? Medical diagnosis as an example: will you live alot longer due to NMR and CAT scans? The average person might not see the effect of these tools because they don't use them in their daily life. Does this mean there is no progress? Only if you presume that the only measure is the effect felt by the "common man". Rather than transporting Ozzie and Harriet consider transporting Einstein, Bohr, etc...Their worlds are less common, and have changed radically.
Between 1900 and 1950 there were two world wars. It has long been known that war is responsible for periods of furious innovation. We haven't had anything on such a large scale since 1950, so it's no major surprise to me that we haven't advanced our standard of living as much.
And lets add genome technology and nanotechnology...
>Also note the 60s/70s views that we'd all be
>living on the moon by now. Clearly, optimism was
>high regarding the continuation of technological
>innovation, but what people forgot to take into
>account was that the research currently on the
>bleeding edge is so complex to maintain and
>manage...
I'm afraid that I disagree with your opinion as to why the space program did not continue on to colonization of the moon. You said that the technology was too complex for anybody to understand (at least that's how it read to me) and so consequently it collapsed and wasn't maintained and managed any more.
However, I think the reason why the space program fizzled out to the (still great, but not quite as earth-shattering) level it is today is simply because it did not fit into modern society properly.
NASA Right now could arrange a flight to the moon, by constructing some new launchers and capsules and the like; I mean, they must still have all the Apollo blueprints. However, they could probably do it far more safely, and more effectively from a research standpoint. However, this would cost a significant amount of Money, and would, barring some freak discovery, not result in any noticable "gain" for a long time. And this, unfortunately, is where the problem becomes evident.
In the 60's, because of the influence of certain Presidents, people were willing to see their tax money go into a space program, mainly because it allowed them to advance in the Space Race with the Russians and various others.
Now, however, Society has "developed" (I use that word with some trepidation) to the point where if it doesn't provide instant gratification it really isn't worth it, and consequently, no one is willing to pour billions of dollars into, say, the colonization of the Moon, because they won't see any appreciable "benefit" for many years.
Therfore, as I see it, the crux of the issue, the main reason why the Space Race fizzled out as it did, is not because the technology was too complex and therefore unattainable, (after all, if a human being invented it, surely another human being could improve on it, much less figure out how it works), but that Society as a whole is simply too cheap to obsessed with instant gratification to support it.
This is simply the opinion of one man, and I will be more than willing to listen to anyone's reaction, providing it contains even a modicum of intelligence beyond "you're wrong. period."
-ws/dtl
ìì!
Oof, you're a bit harsh.
First, these inventions were either confined to prototypes or reserved for the very tiny elites of the 1800s if they were available at all. Mass sanitation is purely a 20th century phenomenon.
Second, life without the IC and lasers would be far less jarring (hey, I lived it, briefly, and I even remember bits of it) than life without lightbulbs. Go ahead. Try to live two days without electricity. Or the internal combustion engine.
Then spend a day without using a CD or a microchip. Listen to some audio tape, read a book, watch TV, talk on the telephone, drive a car. All of those, though many of them now include lasers and ICs, existed before 1950--only TV became popular shortly after 1950.
People wondered in the 1980s what the US was doing wrong compared to Japan and the Asian tigers. After all, even Red China had 10% or better per year growth, while we had a piddly 2-5%. Well, when you're at the bottom, it's easier to make progress.
For an education on this, I urge you to watch the PBS series (I think a BBC creation) "1900 House", which unlike Survivor or Real World, actually teaches you something. Just see how tough they had it compared to Leave It To Beaver. A Hoover is a wonderful thing.
Exactly. And this almost ties in with the fundamentals of modern technology. Sure, the lightbulb was (and is) fantastic, but more importantly it gave way to things that are now implemented in current technologies. Perhaps the writer of the article errs when he defferentiates between the two. One merely plays off of the other - no single era's produtcs can then be considered greater than another's.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
The first 70 years of the century was in great breakthroughs. People who did them didnt stop and waited for the general public to catch up. The public could take it or leave it. The wordprocessor vs. typewriter example is the key for the difference. Of course the productivity hasnt increased. People are using networked computers (MSWord attachments + e-mail) the way they would use typewriters+pneumatic-mail-tubes. The real, efficient and automatic information exchange hasnt occurred yet. We have only began to separate the information from its paper presentation (using XML). This is not because the researchers didnt understand the issues 20 years ago (SGML), but because the public couldnt grasp the concept and were more than happy to accept paper oriented WYSIWYG technologies. Thus, the big corporate money isnt funneled to research and new technologies, but to satisfying general population and making them feel at ease with technology. And as for government spending: I am ready to put aside >30% of my income for education, scientific reasearch and space technologies, but how many others will let their government spend on technology the amounts of money they did in the 50s and 60s. Most people today read horoscopes the way they did 100 years ago, but today they feel free to protest agains GM food and influence research budgets.
wow. this article would be true......
for about 5% of the world who happened to be wealthy, white, and living in america at that time
( who also didnt live during WW1 or WW2)
the article ignore the rest of the world who did not leap to those great inventions (even including Europe to an extent)
it also ignores the low living standards of minorities
THUS LIVING STANDARDS FOR THE WORLD HAVE BEEN INCREASED
finally it ignores advancements in other areas such as greater global peace, increased tolerance
( heh 1st post in bout 2 years?)
Let's look at this diminishing returns argument. That as the crux of his/her argument is IMO, utterly irrelevant. After food, a secure place to sleep is a diminishing return. Heck, using a toilet is a diminishing return when compared to the return of throwing your waste out onto a street and possibly into a sewer.
So her argument is something like 'there can be no more gigantic leaps in quality of life as compared to the jump of hunger to food and nowhere to sleep to secure person and house, so we are at the end of history. To be a more fulfilled person living in an increasingly homogenous society is the end of history.
Well philosophers these days just determine the "significance" of the work that specialists do in fields such as chemistry, physics, computer science, cognitive science, and mathematicians.
I'd rather read something like "principles of neuroscience" than some wack like "the epistimology and significance of intelligence". If I want to learn about evolutionary biology I will go to an evolutionary biologist by way of text, paper, or book. If I want to learn about ethics I will iterate through information distilled down to the current lowest level of knowledge - whether that be psychology or (in my case somewhat simplified or introductory) neuroscience. If I was studying ethics I might wonder if I was studying fatherly advice or testable hypotheses.
Sociology, political science etc just give you patterns of human behavior and intuitive implications and course of action. That's good enough in many cases. But i'd much rather understand why. How did said behavioral pattern evolve? What other animals share this behavior? What is it about the structure of our their brains that makes them similar or different; etc.
They aren't useless by any means, but I think there is a reason why there aren't many rich philosophers anymore. The current philosophical idealogy most people have now is that events are relative to the observer - and that came out of physics not philosophy.
Ok, so basic set theory came from a couple of philosophers cum mathematicians. The material they churned out that was categorized as primarily philosophy isn't much more than intuitive fatherly advice though.
"The invention of the wheel revolutionised the world a lot more than the invention of the transistor ever will."
So? Why are you limiting your argument to a 1:1 comparison? The invention of the wheel, though a pre-requisite for future technologies is dwarfed by the aggregate technological development in the past 2 centuries.
I don't even see a specific objective or subjective qualitative or quantitative argument made here. What does impact mean? Lives saved? Standard of living increased? What? Modern medicine saved more lives -- but of course relied on the closer world the invention of the wheel gave us - but please -- it's like arguing that "after we evolved the ability of language everything else after is nothing".
" bet the same would not have been true, or as true, 100 years ago"
We are all human. Besides specific language or dialect, customs and prejudices, we are arguably not that much different. The fact that these barriers are being broken has nothing to do with the end of history. What the hell is end defined as anyway? Less war? Less exploration? That's what history books are filled with. Monarchy lasted for thousands of years. The corporate republic may last just as long. But wtf is with equating that with the end of history? Oh no, less conflict, peace means the end of history. Even then I think said people are talking a little prematurely - after all the last world war was only 55 years ago.
Anyway, back to "culture" change. Did scotts really live that much differently than canadians 100 or 200 years ago? I don't think so. Before the industrial revolution the paradigm was agriculture and the traditional economy. After it was mass manufacturing at efficient economies of scale, capitalism, consumerism, and the corporate republic. of course, you're right. What it means to be human doesn't change all that much with technology and social advancement. Quality of life does though.
I'm rambling now, but hey.
I do a bit of technology forecasting for a living, and I don't think I can even begin to imagine what kinds of biologic technology we might have by then. Or what we're going to do with polymer semiconductors. To name just two.
It would be nice to have a clean cheap energy source that the rest of the world could use to "catch up", though.
I'd say the plow beats that.
While I agree, that having that information is beneficial, I have to also agree that it's still not as revolutionary as "moldy bread".
I'm not saying that we aren't doing great things, but I don't feel like we're doubling life expectancy.
Using your statement of "instantaneous access to life-saving information". Say it's extremely fast, and only takes 50 milliseconds to get a diagnosis. Is it really going to be that much different than getting it it 5 minutes. There's a factor of 6000 difference, but it's effect is mostly just convenience. Especially if nothing is going to be done until tomorrow. [In the case of something like a surgery].
I think the failing isn't necessarily in technology, but just the fact that technology is starting to come up to the level of operating at the speed of life. Things don't really change all that much in a day or week.
If you get cancer, it takes months/years for it to develop to a serious state. That's a lot of time for diagnosis. And even if it's cured and I live an extra 10 years, that's not much more than 10% of my life expectancy.
I think the article failed to make a positive point of the fact that middle class has been redefined. Because of technology we have been able to reduce poverty, diminish disease, etc.
I think it's just an issue of diminishing returns. Kind of the whole argument that computers don't need to be any faster for 90% of the average person wants to use it for. That's not to say that I don't want to play better games, compute more accurate physics to create fusion reactors, etc. I just don't think that it has as much of an overwhelming impact.
As for your views on feminism, are you really trying to suggest that equality is one of the downsides of the introduction of the pill? Strange...
The benefits of advances like the introduction of safe contraceptives far outwiegh any adverse affects.
Secondly, we have made technical improvements the last 50 years that have been targeted to improve on something that already exists, e.g. build faster motorways. Research into IT deployment in organisations the last 35 years indicate that IT is often used to cement an old organisational structure, instead of creating a new one. Slashdot is however an example of something "new" (ok, I know it has BBS roots but you get my drift).
I believe we will see whole new lifestyles (which is after all what humans are good at adapting to). I don't think IT will be the driving force in this, but rather gene technology and biology (combined with IT of course).
I believe the biological revolution will be so big that we will not know afterwards what hit us...
It is useless to attempt to evaluate the impact of today's cutting-edge technology contrasted to the impact of 50 - 100 year old technologies. Of course the older technologies will have had greater impact on society -- they have had more time to be deployed and refined.
What value would a light bulb have had for a person in the 1890's who was satisfied with gas lighting -- gas lighting was adequately bright and required no new systems to function. What value would an automobile have had to the same person compared to the more conventional buggy or even streetcar -- with most roads at best being crushed stone but most being deeply rutted mud the average motor vehicle of the time was useless outside of a fairly large city.
Technological innovation and the creation of entirely new technologies proceeds apace, in some ways it is highly accelerated due to the communication and sophisticated data archival technologies that were floating around labs like Cern, Bellcore, and Lawrence Livermore in the 1980's.
What about the Human Genome Project? What about ubiquitous computing? What about higher temperature superconductors? Nanotechnology? For what it's worth, even the white LED could dramatically change power consumption and distribution.
I'll let everyone know which technology was more revolutionary -- that of the first half of the 20th, or the second half -- fifty years from now when we have had the chance to truly evaluate today's bleeding edge and see whether its cuts are shallow or deep.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
His tone reminds me of the folks who advocated closing the US Patent office prior to the turn of the century, arguing that everything that could be discovered had been discovered. He's probably equally wrong.
The best measure of how much technology is affecting society is the average life span. Pollution and car accidents make it go down, modern plumbing, modern medicine and good information transfer make it go up.
So how are we doing? A link from a previous slashdot article indicated that life expectancy is going up by 120 days per year. I'd say that increases are coming as fast and furious as they used to be.
Bryan
for a list of ways in which technology has failed to improve our daily life, press 3 now
-- seen in a Usenet tagline
This is pretty obvious. The old technologies have become such a part of our lives because they're old. If telephones weren't invented until 1950 I don't think they would be quite so integrated.
Damn, they are the most important invention in my mind. I can't wait for the Railroad technology to be discovered whenever I play Civiliaztion 2. You can quickly build railroads to all your cities, improving food and trade which leads to an abundant growth in new technology.
Wow, maybe Sid Meyer was on to something!
Rangers Lead the Way!
I saw either this or another story with the same arguments recently. It seems to me that lots of people expect change to occur in a relatively smooth, continuous fashion. The theory of punctuated equilibria, at least with respect to human civilization, says that things like social change stay relatively stagnant for long periods of time, and then rapidly change over a short period of time. Perhaps this also applies to technology.
Anyone who's ever worked on a decently sized project knows that you run into lots of dead ends and problems. Eventually, after you've run into enough of them, everything just works, and it's relatively clear sailing. Now, scale this up to the world on a large scale. There's more brains working on it, but the problems are more immense: renewable energy, space travel, nanotech, AI, making websites that don't suck.
It's quite possible that we're just in a lull period where change is rapid, but having little effect on our lives. That is to say, we're running into those dead ends faster than ever. For example, there are thousands of researchers all over the world poking and prodding at various carbon nanotubes, strands of DNA, silicon MEMS, etc. It'll probably be another 15-20 years, but eventually some unshaven grad student is going to yell 'Eureka!' and start pouring champagne down his pants. There are also dozens of companies working on the gravity well problem, or how to get things into low Earth orbit, where it's easy to launch stuff from. Eventually one of them will get the right cost/benefit ratio for the market to adopt it. Right now, though, it's just a bunch of engineers burning through capital.
The person who wrote this article does not have much appreciation for the behavior of complex systems (i.e. Humans and Technology). We may not be seeing the benefits for a while, but that's not to say all our current work is in vain. Just like Edison said..he discovered a thousand ways not to make a light bulb before he finally got it right. There will always be a huge mound of dead and dying poorly implemented technologies before a killer app emerges.
(Just kidding. Please see my "Seattle" post for my real opinion.)
Seattle, the entire anti-globalization movement, and possibly even Nader (and by unintended consequence Bush) would not have happened without the Internet. The Internet is bringing globalization to the minds of the populace the way television brought real war to the 1960's populace. The movement is just beginning, so perhaps that is why the author overlooked it or does not see it snowballing. But the fax machine played an important role in Tiennamen Square, one of the important events of the past couple of decades and a foreshadow of the power of the Internet. The Internet is Gutenburg squared, not just an improvement in efficiency, but as Douglas Englebart says an improvement in efficiency of such magnitude that it is a completely new thing.
Also, the article completely blew past the negatives of technology -- the unintended consequences, e.g. greenhouse effect, sprawl, obesity, etc. And how this is going to get worse in the future (as in Bill Joy's predictions). Perhaps Twilight Zone had it right all along -- the best time to live is latter 20th century.
Well, perhaps while we're waiting for AI and nanotechnology to destroy the world (2020?), the Internet will foster real political change and real democracy for the first time in history. So perhaps 2010 will be the best year, not 1960.
If I were to take the graph of Sin(theta), I could tell you that it was going up on a certain interval, or that it was going down on a certain interval, depending on what interval I pick. Sure, we're not as inventive as we were in the 1900's-1950's, but we ARE as inventive as we were in the 1850's-1900's. So, overall, I'd say we've remained constant.
Light bulb, teleportation, yeah, they're pretty much in the same ballpark.
And if the just about impossible task of developing practical teleportation were accomplished, you figure its impact on society would be to get you to work faster?
Newton said that.
Or even misquoted out of context.
That's because most of the technology we have today is still based on what was invented half a century ago...
--The Groove
Twenty years ago, engineers wrote proposals and reports longhand, and made rough sketches and graphs; secretaries typed them; draftsmen and illustrators did pen-and-ink renderings of the graphics. The engineers proofed these and redlined them, and the corrections were often done directly on the originals. Design work was mostly hand-work, with lots of extrapolation and interpolation of graphical data; the few computer runs were expensive in both time and dollars, when they were done at all.
Yet these very same engineeris gave us:
the Concorde
SR-71
Apollo 11
Hydrogen Bomb
None of these have met their match in the last 30 years.
The 777 is an advance in the sense that the autopilot can do a lot of the flying of the aircraft by itself i.e. it has more computers onboard. Aerodynamically it is (barely) an incremental improvement over the 767. About going supersonic: If the 777 is capable of going supersonic (it might be, it has VERY powerful engines) it would be uncotrollable the very second it broke M=1, because the center of pressure moves once you are supersonic and the weight and lift vectors would make a torque couple that tends to point the nose down. In addition drag will increase A LOT and so supersonic flight will not be sustained for long. Personally, I think the Concorde and the 747 are pretty much at the peak as far as aerodynamics is concerned.
I was talking more about the actual design process and the complexity of those things, but anyway let's see:
I see you agree with me on the Concorde. Also, while military fighters can go supersonic, they can't CRUISE supersonic, like the Concorde does. The exception is the F-22 which is not even in service yet.
The SR-71. I am not aware of a replacement of the SR-71 especially since it was brough back into service for the Gulf war. Why didn't they use a more capable replacement if they had any? Anyway it still is the highest and fastest flying aircraft on record (bar some top secret projects, which I doubt).
Apollo 11. Ah, you agree again. We have not gone back to the Moon or any further for that matter. The Vikings had a 100% success rate on Mars in the 70s. The latest two Mars probes, well, you know... A proof that the computer is only as smart as the person who operates it.
H-Bomb. I agree they were perfected except on the capability. The Russians had a 100 Megaton H-bomb (the biggest ever) in the 50s and that's pretty much all you need for wholesale destruction, and it was designed by hand.
Lastly, I know that technically my argument holds because nobody has surpassed these things since they came about. But, I do agree that we probably are capable of doing better, just the will is not there. The problem is we can claim we are better all we want, but actions speak louder than words and in the large scale engineers in the 60s make us look like wussies as far as actions are concerned.
Did the fighters you mention use afterburners for cruise? The Concorde does too, I think. However, the F-22 is supposed to cruise without using afterburner i.e. just normal turbofan regime. The SR-71 uses a ramjet engine so it's in a league of its own.
Jonathon Rauch's article in this week's Atlantic is a case study of the application of IT to the old economy. It's a very detailed exploration of arguments that partially refute Gordon's stance that productivity growth is very sector limited. (Even Gordon has shifted, I believe he used to claim few manufacturing improvements.)
The author also states that there has been no technological transformation to equal the mail to telegraph transformation. I think the web/internet, in its original (CERN) sense of a way to publish worldwide for pennies, has a potentially equal potential for transformation. A vast amount of human knowledge (yes, and noise, but humans are very good at sorting out noise) can now be published worldwide for an infinitesmal fraction of the pre-1980 cost. Twenty years from now that impact may seem much larger than it does today.
It all depends on where one measures from. I do think that the period from 1965 to 1990 may be considered a time of relative "calm", a period where much was happening below the surface. I suspect, however, that the period from 1990 to 2040 may rival the shocking transformations of the early 20th century. And that prediction, of course, assumes that we don't develop sentient machines (An event that would render all comparisons to past eras irrelevant.)
One last thought (sorry, long post), last year, in their famous millenium issue, the Economist published a graph showing economic output per person over the past 10,000 or so years. I wish I could find a way to link to it (the original may have come from the World Bank). It's a very slightly sloping line until the 18th century, where it starts to head up. Then it heads up very sharply around 1890 and goes exponential. There's another inflection to a higher exponent around 1980/90. Studying that curve is mind boggling.
john
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John Faughnan
John Faughnan
jfaughnan@spamcop.net
i think u'll find a hell of a lot of fibre optics use led's as opposed to lasers. ther aint no laser in the back of ur hi-fi, or on the front of your live drive.
except the mapping of the human genome you are right about that. I think the one thing that ois truely killing innovation is the current state of the patent/copyright system.
Look at the computer inustry. As soon as there were only few companies holding patents on to many things, innovations slowed to a crawl. Look at the trinitron tech from Sony. Since they are a large company they could afford not to license the tech to few if anyone else. The result? The only places you could get the technology for the longest time was through $5000 dollar Sony TVs, even when the tech itself isn't overly expensive (compared to what the sold it at).
It gets really bad when somebody/company makes a new innovative tech but is restricted because a part of the new tech uses a patented process/tech and a large company, like Sony, refuses to license it and the new tech withers and dies. It would mean sony would have to compete with a company they licensed the tech too.
PC innovation never truely took off until IBM was opened up and anyone could make clones.
"Technology is approaching its end game. The End of History Socially, Culturally and technologically is upon us gentlemen"
That, my friend, is utter hogwash. Certain individuals at the US Patent Office made similiar statements at the turn of the last century. Technology won't reach a dead end until it reaches the limits imposed by nature. There is a LONG way to go before we reach that barrier. I think you underestimate the ability of the human mind and its tools.
Derek
One promise I can make for you... it will all come to the same end.
1800-1900 saw an explosion in mass produced commodity items (tools, fabrics, food, etc.) 1900-1950 saw an explosion in luxury items (transportation, entertainment, communcation.) Over time, items only available to the upper classes become available to everyone (E.g. clothing in America is now given away for free to anyone needing it!)
In 1950-2000, the biggest thing that has become available to more than just the rich is, I think, freedom and self-determination. 1900-150 saw two world wars, with numerous people living under colonial rule. 1800-1900 was even worse: many bloody wars, vast chunks of the world under colonial rule (in many cases virtual national slavery.) Today, democracy is spreading to more and more nations, dictatorships are falling like flies, colonialism is dead. The last totalitarian governments seem to be collapsing under their own weight.
The 1950-2000 state of the art is making it easier and easier to expose injustice, human rights violations, etc. It is making it easier for people to express their outrage. It is making it easier for their governments to take action to promote worldwide fairness and law without massive loss of life. It is making it easier for those living in situations they don't like to just get up and leave.
It's a mistake to judge progress by looking for jet-packs, personal helicopters, and 3-D home theaters. Instead, look at that low-caste Indian emigree working alongside you: 50 years ago, he would be stuck in small town doing menial labor, rather than hacking code as a peer and friend.
Surf the 'net (Slashdot)
Play videogames (computer or console
Watch movies (DVD or VCR)
Listen to music (CD)
These all seem like very shallow and unnecessary things. They probably are. But they happen to take up a large chunk of my time. Just try to tell the average Slashdotter that he can't have his computer, his Palm Pilot, his Cell Phone -- see how he reacts. Yes, perhaps these things aren't necessary. But for the average upper-middle class citizen, they're a way of life. So don't tell me that you could take me back 50 years in a time machine, and my life would essentially be the same. It wouldn't.
And neither would yours, methinks.
--
These aren't the droids you're looking for.
< SLASHDOT LUNIX BAIT >
:-)
/SLASHDOT LUNIX BAIT >
Come on everyone! The real reason for the slowdown in innovation is the government case against Microsoft.
<
_Adam Poulos ;
True, the computer has helped ease many tasks and will allow us to research more effectively. But in reality, except making it cheaper to communicate, has the computer really given us anything very important? Warfare has advanced, and a cruise missile can hit any target needed due to its advanced electronics, but is it really that different from a V-2 missile? Cell phones definitely keep us safer and easier to reach. But beyond saving a trip to the nearest payphone, have they really changed humanity much?
The research going on today may change humanity. Genetic engineering may create stronger, smarter humans. Nanotechnology may allow us to heal quicker and less painfully. New propulsion technologies may allow us to explore other planets. But from what I can see, the technology created in the past 50 years has only increased our safety and has decreased costs. It has not changed humanity like the railroad or the lightbulb or the telephone.
This raises an intresting point. But a few things that they may have over looked is....
1. How long did it take the inovations of the first half a century to have
the impact that they have had.
2. ALso the originail invention may have taken a long time from the point it was intoduced to the public and to the point where it became practical for every one to own one(i.e. back in the day it was only practicul for the town's general store to have a telephone but but through refinement it became almost a necessity for all household to have)
"knowledge is good" - Animal House
One thing that this article seems to ignore, is that many of the newer advancements that WOULD have such a dramatic effect scare people, or offend people.
Take genetic enhancement for example. That COULD have extreme benefits to society. Maybe in the future there could be cow milk that cures cancer. Pigs with human organs to be used in transplants. Are these possible? Yes. Will they become common any time soon? Probably not.
10% of the effort will produce 90% of the improvements
90% of the effort will produce the other 10% of the improvements.
This will apply to both producing the ultimate Web-browsed and to improving long-distance communications. Any kind of incremental improvements will obey this rule.
The way to go around this is by revolutionary improvements - when creating something totally new you will find yourself in the "smaller investment yields biggest gain" part of the process.
I believe that the point of the author is that no such break-the-mold improvement has been made in the past half-century.
I believe that the biggest innovations in this period will come from genetics and biomedical advances. Most cancers may be curable in an appropriate genetic fashion by 2020-30. By contrast, today's chemo and radiation is like doing brain surgery with a sledgehammer. Auto-immune diseases (read diabetes, cirrosis, lupus, etc...) while poly-genic, and hence more complicated than most cancers, may be curable by 2050. Finally, there is the aging question. 120 years most of which is healthy by 2050? Maybe.
Of course, a person will have to go through quite a few more career changes over that period of time.
Then there is nano-tech. While it will not reach fruition by 2050, the ground work will be laid.
We'll see cheaper space flight perhaps accessible to the very rich that will make the Concorde look like a horse and buggy.
And I believe the Internet and computers have had a dramatic effect on product quality, delivery time, work-life tradeoffs, flexibility, ability to communicate way beyond the neighborhoods of the 1950s. I have a 1970 Datsun 240z, considered to be the hot car of 1970 and still a sought after collectors item. Compared to my 2001 PT Cruiser, it's no where near the quality or fit and finish even fully restored. While still fun to drive, it's much more dangerous, especially in bad weather.
Those innovations he mentions were critical in those periods. However, can't conclude that innovation has slowed.
I'd argue another hypothesis: innovation accelerates in war and slows in peace time and also moves in cycles of rapid innovation and then quality improvement and market penetration on "generational" boundaries.
However, the 1990s have proven an exception as the 1870s-00s did. Part of the generational cycle.
Aide: Grant drinks too much to command an army. Lincoln: Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals!
I don't remember where I read it (sorry - the only cite I can find is my own rather imperfect memory!) but several years ago, I read an article that stated that innovations follow an S curve -- periods of slow technological growth, periods of INCREDIBLE advancements, periods of slow growth. The slow-growth periods tend to be used to refine the advancements that were made in the fast-growth period.
A brief history of civilization: Ogg invented the wheel, his rival Grugluk discovered fire... then not much happened for a while... then the Greek civilization (Plato, Socrates, etc) -- there were incredible insights into mathematics, philosophy, the sciences, etc. Then there was a long period of slow technological growth, then the Roman empire (aquaducts, etc), then slow growth, then the Middle Ages (Chivalry, the Magna Carta), then little happened until Rennaissance (advancements in Art, Sciences), then the Industrial Revolution (steam power, etc), then the 20th century (flight, medicine, electricity, communications)
In my opinion, we are starting the top of the S curve -- slowing down of technological advancements, and refining the technology we invented in the past 100 years. We have invented new technologies SO FAST we have not had time to explore the ramifications of that technology. We are starting to advance society to catch up with technology now (Napster, IP laws, etc)
I predict the next 50 years or so will be used to smooth all the wrinkles in society caused by all this new tech. Then the cycle will start again.
I would like to add that not only has monetary capital been locked up, but intellectual capital has been as well. Companies like GM, M$oft, et al., all have you sign non-competition and IP rights agreements that usually last for the LIFETIME of the signee. While folks can say "well, not everyone does it" I would reply that "yes, everyone who can pay you does". Fortunately, a few companies and most universities have looser IP agreements, but even that is changing. Unfortunately, as the influence of peddling in the control of IP progresses, many businesses are being faced with having their own staff sign IP agreements similar to those of most megacorps just to do any business with the megacorps or their partners.
As a result, you can invent all you want, but don't expect to ever see your inventions make it to production under your own auspices. This tends to take the wind out of the sails of most would-be inventors. The rest of the independents who don't work for a megacorp (or one of their many subsidiaries, partners, or sycophants) usually end up getting squeezed out or bought out through other means.
New, useful, and innovative technologies are becoming more rare in their presentation. Note, I am not saying that they don't exist, but if someone were to come up with a high capacity motor that ran on ambient static electricity, three things would happen: 1) It would be produced, but say the person works for a megacorp that owns ALL IP the inventor makes, and even if they produce software, the megacorp now owns the engine. Engine never sees light of day. 2) It gets 'bought' by an engine producing company, because they have better lawyers. However, they could not create any incentive for the inventor, their own staff have a very limited investment in working on the project (because the staff won't own it either) and the engine never sees light of day. 3) The inventor produces the engine completely on his/her own, but federal regulators, used to dealing with a different way of doing business (say, IC engines instead of something they don't understand), squash any plans for selling it on the open market. The megacorp lab folks working for the fed's megacorp friends said it was dangerous, or a crock, or whatever it took to discredit the project. And that is usually enough to convince most feds of anything.
'Hail Eris, baby, hail Eris...pfffffffttt.' *cough* 'Yeah.'
--
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
In fact, in terms of principles of flight, it operates the same as the Wright Flyer. Different propulsion, and some differences in the detail, but they fly for exactly the same reason.
What we're left with since the 50's is incremental improvements (like from vacuum tubes to transistors to VLSI ICs). We're making stuff better, smaller, cheaper and more accessible, but nothing fundamentally new.
You could say a similar thing about Edison's time. Sure, he was a clever cookie, but I don't think he'd be filing as many patents now as he did back in his fertile time.
For a new "golden age", we need major new breakthroughs that start the innovation cycle afresh. Things that people first look at and say "now what use would that be to me?"
Examples:
IOW, things that start a fresh subject and put us at the "101" level.
What others can you think of?
Penicillin was invented in 1920's. It wasn't introduced or widely used until the mid 40s, when it was rediscovered by british army doctors...
As if every person everywhere at all times shares the same monolithic ideal of a "preferred lifestyle"?? That is, sad to say, hogwash.----> No, that's true
The preferred lifestyle for everyone is to have heat, clean and edible food and water, some sort of a cure if sick, and maybe some other things that I can't think of right off the top of my head. These are basic needs that are currently being met by so-called "modern technology". My heat is here now; I can maintain my house at a constant temperature using natural gas heating and by setting a thermostat. I don't need to bring wood in and light a fire unless I want to for "aesthetic reasons". Now, if I get a small nuclear reactor in my basement that provides heat, I will still set a thermostat and leave it alone after that. How it this fundamentally different from what I have now with natural gas? Either way, I am not spending my time and energy on chopping wood or carrying coal in a bucket, and my basic needs are being met.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Here's a fitting quote:
We might as well close the patent office. All that can be invented, has been invented.
- Charles H. Duell, 1899
He was the head of the US Patent Office at the time.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
The article's author misses the whole point: " ... And with computers, it is also possible that their largest benefits have already been realized..."
WHAT?! HA HA HA. The computer revolution is just
beginning, it still is in very, very early stages. I'd like to talk to the author 50 years from now, when he, having safely downloaded himself into a computer network, is designing his next young body from scratch, using the latest research in DNA.
Technology is used to solve problems. It only makes sense that people have worked to solve the biggest problems first. Now that the big problems such as plumbing and what-not are taken care of, the technology created today tackles smaller problems... such as inconvienience. To say that people today are less innovative than those from 50 years ago is not entirely true. I am willing to bet that if we did not have plumbing today, our engineers would think it up just as quickly as they did in the past. We should consider ourselves fortunate that we do not have this need anymore, and we should stop looking gift horses in the mouth.
What a crutch the "Oh technology *computers in general* are so helpful."
I was a network assistant at a school district for a little over a year and a half, the biggest gain I noticed the staff gained with using computers is they could look up a students schedule and know what class they were in at any time of the day. (That was mostly of benefit to the middle school and high school.)
Perhaps it was partly poor implementation and training, I know the first technology coordinator as he was called, I worked under there wasn't the most competent with tech. and helping the staff to learn it's uses.
Even still if email was down for a day or printing was screwed up (which was a common occurence in the early days, poor implementation again) they just did what they did ten years before and made phone calls, wrote down messages on paper, and took attendence by hand.
Sure it's nice, but is it a necessity? Compared to some things (cars, modern housing and the such) certainly not. A pc is just a smarter dummy box than a television. Cell phones are just annoying gimmicks and the internet is so fulla shit they don't even consider it a valid research tool for students at the schools.
To me it seems valuable to the geeks that keep making faster chips, bigger more complicated programs, and lots of money off it.
Though let's not forget the advantage of all this porn, eh? But I digress. Excelsior.
aztek: the ultimate man
No sig for you!!
That's a total strawman argument... i could easily skew it the other way by saying "instantaneous access to life-saving information is, in my opinion, more important than moldy bread."
2 1337 4 u!
But computers are used to save ressources - working hours of qualified human work. It's one of the scarcest ressources available. Computers are cheaper than human work.
So, the programs are so crappy because it's too expensive to create good programs (read: there's no short- or mid-term ROI that's demanded for most companies). It's more important to save the work of secretaries and other support staff than to give you some extra computer cycles more. Etc, pp.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
The thing that has to be noted is the difference between innovation and invention, that's what the article is saying. Invention is indicating that it didn't exist before in the span of human knowledge (or at least in the span of the inventor's knowledge), nor did anything similar. It is something that has no direct predecessor.
Innovation, however, indicates a refinement or improvement on existing inventions.
Yes, innovation was at a much higher level in the past 50 years than ever before, but how much of that was NEW? Bigger, better, faster, cheaper - yes, but actually new? Completely unseen before?
This article wasn't trying to say that inventions haven't improved faster in the last 50 years, but that the impact of those improvements has been minimal compared to the inventions from the first 50 years of the century.
Dark Nexus
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
D'oh!
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Slán leat agus go n'eirí an bóthar leat
Excellent point: All things are built on top of other things. Einstein said: "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants". Every advance in any endeavor that humans undertake is built on the previous work and advances that other people made, no matter how insignificant seeming.
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Slán leat agus go n'eirí an bóthar leat
I don't normally trash others' work, but this article on the rate and impact of invention in the first half of the century versus the second half cries for response. Bear with me while I lay some groundwork.
First, I question the implicit assumption that innovation can or should proceed at a uniform rate. Progress by fits and starts seems a better description.
Second, the author analyzes his subject in only a single dimension, which not only provides little insight but even misleads him to an incorrect conclusion. Each change can be placed in a multi-dimensional state space described by (at least) the axes listed below. Each axis has an effect on the change's overall importance. Each change should be considered with respect to:
- an innovation spectrum that moves from refinement to without-precedent
- dependence on an underlying infrastructure (e.g. telephone, electrical appliances, automobiles)
- new potential for future innovation, i.e. enabling technology (e.g. electricity and gene splicing)
- the scope of the parent problem that spawned the change
- the impact of the parent problem that spawned the change
- its efficiency factor (the time taken to travel to and from a place by aircraft as opposed to walking)
- its multiplication factor (e.g. My new steam-driven tractor gives me the pulling power of 18 horses. I can now pull stumps out of the ground directly without borrowing all my neighbors' teams. I think I'll clear a new field!)
- its "new ground" factor, i.e. its ability to solve previously insoluble problems (e.g. antibiotics such as sulfa and penecillin)
- its side-effects
Finally, the commentary. As an area matures, the changes begin popping up in a different part of its state space. The rate of radical innovation goes down. The rate refinement goes up. The impact of later changes is less than those of earlier changes, yet there remains a non-zero impact. We are in such a time now and have been for a while.
I believe we are now at the threshold of a new round of significant innovations. The enabling technology and infrastructure is computers, networking, and information repositories. It is complete enough to be useful now, and we are beginning to see paradigm changes based on it. E-commerce and teleworking are example experiments.
We see glimmerings of the next enabling technology. It is based on the biological sciences and genetic manipulation. I wonder where it will lead?
English -- gotta love it! / The engineers refuse to refuse the rocket until the refuse is removed from the launch pad.
Think of the changes between 100AD and 1700AD. Not very much. In the last 50 years everything from food to medicine to computers have improved at an accellerated pace.
Are inventions like the lightbulb any more important than advanced communication networks or gene therapy?
I guess it depends on who you ask, but I would argue that innovation is accellerating further and faster than ever before in the history of civilization.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Velcro was inspired by the way various seeds and cockleburrs attach themselves to animal fur via hooked spines. Velcro was a refinement of something that existed in nature.
Well, the "invention" of fire was a refinement of something that existed in nature, but I think most agree it was pretty significant.
Besides, "inspired by" is far away from "existed". The cockleburrs were not used for a velcro purpose before velcro.
Besides that, the zipper was invented before Velcro.
Not the same. Velcro can do what a zipper does, but the opposite is not true. Velcro is a lot more general purpose than a zipper.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Yes we tend to make incremental developments nowadays. Too many accountants drive the decisions of what will be made, and what not. The revolutionary doesn't seem to hold the chance of obvious profit - just refine the existing technological paradim. The biggest example has to be the existing GUI, transfer your wooden desk (with all its clutter) into a virtual desk.
The example of the Concorde is another example, no replacement is made because "it can't make money" - ignoring the opportunity to redefine air transport into something else.
A triumph of the lack of imagination.
However, saying the inventions of today are small is only a matter of perspective. I'm sure someone said the lightbulb "isn't much different from the gas lamp". At the time the full impact could not be felt - it takes time for society to shape itself around the new possibilities.
Fast forward global, pervasive, cheap, digital communications and it will shake society far more than the author seems to give it credit for. It won't happen overnight (society can only change at the rate of the individual), but change it will.
In short, yes innovation could work faster without the corporate parasites that infest most large enterprises, but significant change IS happening, and isn't likely to slow down any time soon.
As far as real effects on everyday life are concerned, the development of the contraceptive pill must go close to the most sigificant development of the post 1950's era. In one stroke, it made women's control of their own fertility easy, safe, and cheap and forever divorced sex from procreation. The social effects of this are still being felt around the world.
...and in it's wake, a world of far to sexually free women (sluts) and men (just as bad), the AIDS epidemic (did you know that promiscuity is a contributing factor?), and the infantile feminist movement. Don't forget, such a sweeping technology can have its downsides.I think that it is nto that our technology has no impact but that there is a growing problem of people not having all the money to get all these technologies. Light bulbs and sanataion are cheap. If we could get the other techs just as cheap then you might see that many people will have a use for the new stuff that we are getting.
The most important fact I think is missing is that most of those technologies when they first came out were luxuries and not ever one had them. Automobiles were extremely expensive until Henry Ford produced them for the average consumer. My point being is that in 50 years all the stuff we you today such as computers, cell phones, etc. will be intergrated into our lives and no longer considered luxuries by a basic need to survive in the world. That is why many business are trying to close what is commonly known as "The digital divide" so their products will be lasting parts of our society.
The thing is, they would be able to adapt because technology today continutes to make life easier. People from the 1900's would be able to adapt to life in the 1950's, but they would probably not like going back to the year 1850.
Similarly, I would find life in 1950 very difficult, but I bet I would fit right in with little adaptation to the year 2050.
char sig[120] = "\0"
There is something to the article, but the author's comment about the pace of innovation is off the mark.
The huge changes in the lives of normal people (normal people who lived in a few advanced countries, anyway) during the first half of the 20th century were all about the application of industrial-style automation to our daily lives. In other words, application of technology that manipulates the things of our world. By 1950 we'd pretty much done what can be done with motors, pipes, valves and lights.
The technologies of the second half of the 20th century (and many of the technologies of today) were about doing things with information and knowledge. What does IT do for us? It can't wash our clothes or mow our lawn, so what good is it? Optimization. Information tools allow us to find and exploit the slack in our processes and methods. They allow us to to incrementally improve and generally to refine all of those other tools that really add value to our lives.
Optimization is innovation, though its effects are more subtle and often percieved as reduced costs rather than changes. And if you think it hasn't done that, look around. Look at the cost of food in 1950 vs. today relative to wages. My Grandfather had to work for two hours to buy a dozen eggs. I have to work for about three minutes. We're both educated, well-paid engineers. The optimizations have made us wealthier, in real terms, rather than changed the way we live.
However, we should realize that the optimizing technologies that have affected us in the last 50 years are things like photocopiers, telephones and mainframe computers, not personal computers, cellphones and the Internet.
It's going to take time before this current crop of highly innovative technologies make a huge impact on our lives (well, for non-geeks, anyway), but have no doubt that they will. I believe biotechnology will have the same sort of impact that the industrial revolution had, and computers and communications technologies are fundamental to biotech (living organisms are so complex). The impacts on society of global, ubiquitous, high-speed data networks that can carry arbitrary content are going to be even more profound than automobiles. Look at that other article about the newly minted geeks growing up in rural Cambodia. In 20 years they'll be competing on a nearly even playing field with my children who are growing up in the upper middle-class of the U.S. Tell me that's not a change! Those Cambodian geek kids may have a computer before they have hot and cold running water, but once they get on the net and find out what's out there for them, don't expect indoor plumbing to be far behind.
No, innovation hasn't slowed. Most of the second half of the 20th century was about optimization and incremental refinement, but the technologies built in the fourth quarter of the 20th century are every bit as world-changing as any we have ever seen.
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Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Actually, most philosophers that you've heard of were wealthy by the standards of the time, or, at least, in privileged positions in society. Sure, many of them have renounced material wealth, but that's not the same thing as not being rich. A more enlightening question might be, "When's the last time you heard of a philosopher who was a menial laborer working in a dead-end wage-slave job?"
The question I believe you meant to ask is, "when is the last time you heard of a philosopher getting rich by virtue of his philosophy?" To answer that question, some cult leaders come to mind... there's always L. Ron Hubbard, if you want to call him a philosopher... various televangelists purport to be selling a type of philosophy... Most philosophers in this day and age, I suspect, are not recognized as such. But if you look for them you can probably find a few more.
I'm a philosopher, by the way, but I'm not rich. So I know what you meant.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Then the IQ tests would be re-normalized so that what "150" means today would mean "100". That's all. Well, in real terms people would still be a lot smarter on average. That at least seems like a good thing.
But if smartness is such a good thing, isn't it better to be smart now, when you have a real advantage over most other people? How many PhD's don't work in their fields because all the available positions are filled already? Now imagine competing not just against the few people with the intelligence required to get a PhD in your field, but with everyone on the planet with a 150 IQ who easily gets PhDs in whatever subject they happen to be interested in.
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxeley touches upon some of the problems that making everyone super-smart would have in society. Perhaps with the invention of AI-driven robots, we won't need "gammas" and "betas" to do the menial tasks in our society of the future, but if so, if we're all genetically engineered to be "alphas" we're going to need a lot fewer of us living on the planet. Global population will necessarily have to diminish, or else there will be massive unemployment, or else you'll have massive ranks of 150-IQ garbage men and burger flippers who hate their lives.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Yep. innovation is dead. Technology cannot progress any further. We are done. From now on Luddites rule!
You can't compare the last 50 years with the 50 years proceeding them in a easy and fair method? Why? because anything that happens 100 years ago has had 100 years to effect life.
I believe that the last 50 will revolutionize life where the previous 50 just made life better.
The point of this is "TIME WILL TELL"
The first part of the last centery was very big. I is hard to match. doctors have already have begn to see this happen we have not had any really big jumps like anti biotics. but with the new revolution in DNA we will see a huge jump in medicin. People in the futur will look at the time after the human genome as the start of moderin medicin, and look at the acompishment of people who discovered all of the calses and cures for desese in the last 100 years as almost super human for being able to do so much with so little. As for the next big step for computers is the ultra eficiant economy. With the advent of quantom computers just now being made public as well as a better understaning of how to use computers to increase eficiacy. We will more in to an economy that has almost no wast. We all will be able to see the end of hunger, poverty, and want of material things. This will all happen in the next 50 years. I will see it happen. This will be as big as anything before. The last 50 years will be seen as the time that made it happen. We are realy gearing up for it now.
AIDS doesn't just spread from sexual practices, but from intravenous drug use and blood transfusions. However once the blood transfusions path was brought to light, new screening methods kept the HIV infected blood out of the transfusion pool. Reducing the infection rate from intravenous drug use is a bit more tricky. You can educate about using clean needles, but any effort to supply clean needles runs into a big controversy. (The "do we support their habit by supplying them with the needles or encourage them to stop and stand by while they get infected" quandry.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
There are engines that are much more efficient than what we currently have; it's just that YOU don't know about them.
As was previously stated, "innovation" in the mind of the articles author is when society becomes widely aware of an invention and accepts it and uses it. There are a wide number of inventions from the early portion of the last century that I'm sure not too many people know about; just as there are many inventions today that those same people don't know about.
Given time, many of today's inventions will gain popularity and in some way effect our society.
I think that this article is pretty disappointing. There is no reason to think that technology is going trough a slowdown, we're actually inventing a lot of -new- things, it's just that these discoveries haven't had a use yet. To take the analogy that the article talks about....they say that during the 1900s people still had gas lanterns, no telephones and only the rich could afford cars. The thing is, electricty DID exist (but almost without any use), telephones EXISTED AS WELL (yet again, nobody had found any real use for them). If you'd had asked someone during that time about those things, they would just say those inventions are useless. 50 years later, everyone knew that electricity, telephones and cars where long-lasting inventions that had great use. We are now faced with the same dillema...nobody really cares about the "Internet Revolution", NASAs new Ion-Propultion/Plasma-Propultion engines, Bell Labs' recent DNA-Motors, or new WAP-Enabled cell phones. This is because we tend to see the world from a very short-minded, short-sighted perspective. But in 50 years, I'm sure that gene splicing, DNA motors and other such inventions and techniques will deeply influence our world.
...while the tech innovations of the past 50 years may be less significant than those of the 50 years before that, I think it's premature to assume that the overall pace is slowing and that there's less to be discovered. I agree that basic sanitation and such is more universally important than cell phones, but just think of some of the things which we as a society have not yet even considered. Maybe in 50 years AIDS and cancer will be non-existent. Or maybe we'll come up with some sort of Star Trek transporter. To say that inventions from 1900-1950 are more important than ones from 1950-2000 is a fair statement. To say that we've invented all the important things we, as a society, need to invent is foolish.
Just because there don't seem to be many changes in day-to-day life wrt what you needed to do in the 50s doesn't mean that there haven't been changes. And these changes are for the good and will only get better.
Harriet can now do what she wants to do - socially, our acceptance of women in the workplace, and the social world has changed considerably. She can run for political office, and in some parts of the world, she can vote.
Ozzy can decide he doesn't want to devote the remainder of his life to a single company - he can change jobs easily. He can even leave Harriet knowing that she could take care of herself quite fine. That pressure alone could drive people to drink - which is what they did.
The kids have more openings available to them than they'd ever have (even being boomer kids - man that bunch is spoiled). Never before could they relax knowing that the world is not on the verge of a major war.
Both Harriet and Juniorette would appreciate advances in feminine hygeine products - with or without wings.
Don't forget - these people would be leaving an era of constant threat of warfare, the McCarthy witch-hunts, extreme limitations on free speech, and a good chunk of the population (not in their neighbourhood) could not even sit at the front of a bus or use the same water fountain.
And the key factors here are technology changes, communication opening up ideas amongst people, and a good economy. And the only way to acheive this technology is through automation and technological advances.
Blathering has now ended...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Computer assistance is harder to notice -- with computers, doctors are able to give faster and better diagnoses and catch problems before they are otherwise apparent. To me, that is every bit as revolutionary.
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The statistics quoted in the article were attempting to make the case that the 95% efficiency gains in the hospital's work probably only resulted in a 5% improvement in your lifespan. That was the whole point of the article. Not "Technology is slowing down" but "Technological improvement is giving diminishing returns to the average human being."
He's got a pretty decent argument, it seems to me.
It is not THAT difficult to compare the essentially arbitrary innovations the average individual has been exposed to in the last 30 years and the radically new innovations that were occuring between 1900-1930. He admits that current technological innovations may, in the future, radically change society. He admits that there are a few exceptions to the trend (GA grains, the Pill, etc). The guy even uses the oft-misquoted "average lifespan" statistic correctly. It's a solidly-argued, statistically well-informed case that this guy is making here. I don't see how you could reasonably disagree, for the time being it looks like he's right.
I don't even see a specific objective or subjective qualitative or quantitative argument made here.
While gross statements like "the wheel had more impact than the transistor" are pretty unwieldy, it seemed like the original article did a pretty good job of identifying some specific, objective measures for the "impact" of technology (lifespan, etc). In terms of subjective measures, the "time-travelling Ozzy and Harriet" was a pretty good hypothetical situation, and I feel he is absolutely correct about it: Ozzy and Harriet would feel much more out of place in 1900 than in 2000.
That's a speculation at this point, kind of like moonbases were back in 1960.
I though he said this exact same thing in the article. A currently-emerging technology may eventually have a profound impact, but as of right now most of the innovation of the past 50 years has been largely redundant in any measurable sense.
How superficial the article is, you can see from its concluding remarks.
For such a superficial article (keep in mind it was intended for a popular audience) he already mentioned virtually every objection that I have heard voiced here on Slashdot. Give the guy a break, he doesn't really draw any definite lines in the sand but rather identifies a general trend. And he definitely has a point.
For some reason (techno elitism???) you are over-reacting to this article. While he certainly lapses on some points, the fundamental argument the guy is making, that technological advance over the past 50 years seems to be giving diminishing returns, is more or less right on.
Where would modern society be without the laser and the IC? Not to mention the incredible impact the previously unknown field of molecular biology is having on medicine as well as politics. The advances in the field of chemistry have been equally rapid. NMR, GC-MS, polymer science etc. have had a huge impact on modern life.
The author himself admits this in the article: those things have certainly had a huge impact on modern life. However, I think it's fairly non-contraversial that the measurable gross impact of all of the things you have mentioned taken together is still less than the measurable gross impact of just the internal combustion engine, penicillin, telephone, broadcast, and trans-continental flight.
Scientific advances come in the form of fabrics with undreamed of mechanical properties (Aramid etc), drugs that work at an extrodinary level of sophistication, instruments that can image the processes occurring in the body in 3D with molecular discrimination level without using damaging radiation, etc.
You have not shown any evidence that even a single one of the advances you have mentioned has fundamentally altered the daily life of the average individual. This is because for the most part they haven't fundamentally altered our lives. Not in the way that mechanical appliances, automobiles, and penicillin did.
the first world wide satellite television broadcast included the Beatles singing "All you need is Love".
I think it's fairly obvious that the transition from "broadcast" to "global broadcast" is not as society-changing as the transition from "no broadcast" to "broadcast."
Of all the articles I have seen posted on /. this has to be the biggest, stinkingest crock of all.
That is a massive and unfair over-reaction. A lot of people here seem to have misread this article, misinterpreting the author's argument, or reading sensationalist implications into it that the author never made, or making counter-arguments against it that the author himself mentioned in the damn article. This author openly admits the level of generality he is indulging in, has the decency to point out some exceptions to his generalizations, and provides backup evidence for his points (something YOU never did in most of your objections). Give the guy a break, by any objective measure it's a good and fairly correct article.
The Green Revolution wasn't an innovation, but the effect of an innovation. The technologies of the Borlaugian approach to agriculture were developed mostly during the 40's and 50's.
on the other side of the coin, those that *are* released are repressed, regulated, and patent-courted out of having a positive influence on society because of loss of profits, etc etc etc. it's a familiar rant on slashdot, and it's irritating to me to see the lack of 'inventiveness' (pardon the pun) blamed for a lack of societal impact - i blame society's fear of change, and corporations' fear of losing the almighty dollar.
That is absurd. You can't compare them; you're talking about technological innovations, all of which are different, and therefore not comparable. Humans are always looking for analogies, and there are no good ones for those timeframes; everything can be argued. I myself believe that the Internet has had the biggest impact of any innovation in the last millennium. But other people could say that no, electricity has, because without that there could be no Internet.
Aciel
aciel@speakeasy.net
Stop and think. What is this world we're dreaming of. Are we ready for "nanotechnology"? Kurzweil or Joy. what can further the population of this planet?
To everyone here posting about the fact that this article is obviously wrong because of the huge impact that computers have had on everyone's life (even ignoring the obvious bias of the readership):
Computers were an invention of the first half of this century.
Sorry, I had to get that out.
At any rate, the basic principles of modern computer architecture, the foundations of computing science, as well as the first working computers were all products of the 1930s to 1950s (with apologies to Mr. Babbage)
Now, can we discuss the relative merits of any really new technology?
- cicadia
Living better through chemicals
The Chinese had an incredibly advanced civilization thousands of years before the United States existed and while the people of China may not be free at this time you take a great deal of liberty if you pronounce them uncivilized. Many of their customs are far more civilized than those in the US. Don't propagate the ignorant American sterotype, we don't need it.
One finds parallels in medicine as well. Things have slowed down since the discovery basic sanitation, anesthesia and understanding of human anatomy. While medical knowledge continues to expand, it won't have the broad, far-reaching implications for everyone that thoroughly cleaning surgical equipment did.
That depends on how you measure the impact. While it might be true that (to use your example) no single medical innovation benefited as many people as cleaning surgical equipment did, what has happened is that innovation has become more specialized. On the one hand, operating-room sanitation benefits everyone who has surgery. On the other hand, mammography benefits only those women who have breast cancer. AZT benefits only those who have AIDS. Photorefractive keratectomy benefits only those who have certain vision problems. In vitro fertilization only benefits women otherwise unable to conceive. Etc. Etc. Add up the impact of all the niche innovations, and it'll be a fairer comparison.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
The article states the life expectancy of Costa Ricans is about the same as the US (and hence the rest of the developed world). So what does spending 18 times as much on health care buy us, a very slightly longer life and a lot of extra complications.
Complications such as:
- The super virii that are immune to all antibiotics because our "refinements" have been way over used by a pill popping quick fix culture.
- The dangers of missusing cloning IMHO outway any benifits that the technology will bring. Once the gene is out of the bottle there's no putting it back, people with money and power WILL misuse it.
When it absolutely positively has to be there.
Its ridiculous to try and compare advances in technology in terms of their success. Yes, the invention of the lightbulb has transformed society, but so has the computer, the internet, and a whole host of other technologies too. One simply can't compare them together. One cannot say the light bulb was a more important invention, because at the time it transformed people's lives. But my computer and the internet has transformed my life, and it has also transformed the business world of today. It's impossible to say which was the better acheivement. All great inventions have had a fundamental impact on the way society works. However I don't think we can claim one is better than the other- for successful modern living, we need both equally.
Well User #266026, besides the fact that the "non-whites and Jews" aren't going to LET the half-wit wonder-bread "nation" exterminate them or anyone else, your solution would leave you with NO technological innovations because the world would be completely at the mercy of an evolutionary glitch with the proven inability to reason. A lost world of carnivorous marshmallows with mayonaise for brains wacking each other over the head with their ignorance.
Velcro was inspired by the way various seeds and cockleburrs attach themselves to animal fur via hooked spines. Velcro was a refinement of something that existed in nature. Besides that, the zipper was invented before Velcro.
Perhaps,but far more likely is the butterfly effect -- we really can't tell how a change is likely to affect the long-term health and social factors of billions of people, so it's better to play it safe.
Rockwalrus
The sleep of reason produces monsters -- Francisco Goya
Good point its called determinism. it's how are brain works.
Of course inventions of a half century ago were broader and more world-influencing than modern ones. The further back you go, the bigger the impact of a discovery, simply because there were still big things to Be discovered.
Go back to the dawn of human intelligence and you get the biggest discoveries/inventions of all time.. fire, language, shelter, the knife, etc.
That's not to say, of course, that there's nothing big left to invent.. the computer's probably as big as electricity was, even if electricty did lead to its invention. And then there's genetic engineering and quantum mechanics.. which don't do a whole lot now but have huge implications.
So all in all, I don't think it's fair to say that technological innovation is less important, or even slower. It's just that there aren't as many big, obvious things left to find.
See Sig append. Append Sig, append. Good Sig.
If fear and greed are the two advancers of technology, 1900-1950 was marked by fear (war) and 1950-2000 was marked by greed (peace). As for advances that undeniably improve the human condition, they're always a rare comodity.
Most advances from 1950-2000 hit near the top of Mazlow's Pyramid, but from 2000-2050 they'll definitely hit the base. Biotech is going to improve crop yields, change the biosphere, increase lifespans of un-engineered humans by 10-20 years, and create whole new races of beings.
So, electronic bill paying and shopping are good because you can work longer hours? Or perhaps because you can do it from your desk and feel a less pressing need to get home?
Well, the rolling back of the 40 hour work week is certainly an arguable "benefit of technology". (And probably contributes to more of the recent "productivity gains" than any tech has directly.)
I can almost see the argument that electronic services give you more time to spend with your wife/kids/friends/whoever, but the cynical side of me thinks that it really just frees up more time for media consumption.
different people, countries, genders, races, species all come together via today's technology. digital phones, the mangled internet, satellite technology has just begun to expand our horizons and let us connect quickly and inefficiently to answers, while things like plumbing and lightbulbs are more into who we see and smell every day.
baselines are set, and expanded upon. true that without the invention of light, fiber optics would be a bit tougher, but without that internet, we'd never have a chance to discover the secret monitor glow attribute that allows us to live 100 more years.
the same thing annoys me with calanders. people tend to compare the months and days, because they look the same. little annoying squares on bigger squares on squares of paper. we should use timelines.
I never really thought of philosophy as just fatherly advice. Philosophy has improved my ability to critical thinking, to form meaningful arguments designed to draw a difinitive conclusion and not for argument's sake, to question things without blindly accepting, and to make sound judgements of for myself of what perceived right and wrong really are.
I'm sorry but these are not things that my father taught me. His failing, perhaps, but that is the intent of the philisophical studies and it's related fields of logic and ethics.
These are skills that I wish more people had. I also think that we are suffering because there is no value placed for these skills in our present society. These days, it seems that you're only valued if you can make society money, not make society better.
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
Somethings doesn't improved much in the last 50 years. Ask your mom how much time does she take to clean your house. It probably takes more or less the same time even with the help of machine. The transportation of physical items also doesn't change much in this two decades, you still need many hours of flight to go from one point of the earth to the opposite side. Interesting, right? It seems that most effort are put in the computer industries while other really important stuff are left behind.
"Today I pay my bills online in seconds. I manage my budget in minutes. I can plan my week in minutes. I am many times more productive than I would have been without those technologies" The point is that this isnt actual production in any meaningful sense of the word. Nothing is created, merely time shifted around - therefore productivity - the amount of output produced by a given input of resources is not increased. Admittedly the whole information revolution can be used to reallocate resources so that productivity is increased - going to the cheapest supplier for instance. However this is not happening yet. Innovations such as spreadsheets probably havent reduced the number of people working producing estimates and such. Instead more people they produce even more elaborate models and constructs which bear little relevance to reality. These are really of little use except to ill informed executives who use them to cover their backs. If these models were so good then why are dot coms dropping like flies ?
I wanted a funny
Except, have you looked at one of those expensive '50's thru '70's-era encyclopaedias? They are much better than the crap that is now served up online. I regularly consult the Britannica my girlfriend bought in 1982, despite its obsolence -- if I wanted one, and I could afford it now, I couldn't get it updated. They are out of business. Encarta is a sad joke by comparison.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
A modality is lever or handle for affecting the world. The light bulb, the steam and IC engines, the atom bomb (of course), penicillin and related antibiotics, and X-rays were all new modalities.
Computers, interstate highways, broadband internet access, and waterproof paint are not new modalities, they are merely better expressions of things that existed before. Even a very broad expansion -- as from the dirt roads of 1900 to the road system of 2000 -- does not a new modality make, because it constitutes an obvious and natural progression.
Look at the sea change (literally) between 1900 and 1930 due to the invention of radio. In the matter of a couple of decades sea travel went from being a thing of great mystery to an ordinary affair, simply because ships could maintain contact with land; the Titanic debacle was so profound partly because it occurred on the cusp of this revolution, and it had a lot to do with the draconian radio laws we've lived with ever since.
For a great thought experiment in what the next great modality might look like I recommend David Brin's novel Earth which was originally intended as a 50-year forward look but was published almost 20 years ago. It's still a great read and gives one a very good sense of perspective on both future predictions and past performance, especially now that we can see where Brin's predictions have started to fail (and, in all fairness, how he in his afterward predicted this failure).
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Only with the transition from a life of hunting, gathering and scavenging (yes, that too!) did the rudiments of "civilization" begin to emerge. Annual crops like wheat and barley needed long-term tending, necessitating fixed settlement. The carrying capacity of given areas of land exploded, making possible first villages, then small towns and later the first cities. The larger settlements made possible a division of labor without precedent in human history - farmers, merchants, artisans, soldiers, administrators and the like.
Vast hierarchies emerged, of a sort men had never before seen. Divine kings and high-priests replaced the chief-hunter or shaman of yesteryear. Slavery and state-building, in the form of monuments like ziggurats and pyramids, came into being. States were born of the ambitions of rival rulers, and with these new states, vast wars, permanent standing armies, and notions of nationalism and ethnic rivalry.
The complex new social structures gave impetus to the drive to record all sorts of information that was necessary for administrative efficiency - the quantity of taxes levied and paid, the amount of grain harvested, the number of adult males available for military service - and from this sprang the second most important invention of all time - writing. (It is interesting to note that the first attested usage of writing, by the Sumerians, was for the recording of contracts by administrators and tax collectors.)
I'm convinced that patents are harming us. Everyone seems to think patents are getting dumber and dumber, but has anyone really considered what we're doing? Rather than creating new, innovative ideas, we're patenting everything that already exists. I think it's time the patent office made some big changes. Because, the more you look at it, the more you realize that patents are not serving their intended purpose -- preventing people from stealing *new* ideas. Rather, they're stifling competition by making it illegal to breath unless you pay someone royalties. (Okay, that's still a few years off.)
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suwain_2
A good example of someone being quoted out of context. At the time he said this he was asking congress for more money and actually stated "Some people think that everything that can be invented has been invented. This is not the case." He thne wne in length to explain why he needed more money.
Innovation is getting faster, not slower. However, the impact that it has on our day to day lives is less. Which is a greater leap, from a 486 to a Itanium or from a car to an airplane? It depends on your perspective. The airplane is not much more technologiclly advanced than a car (I'm talking about early airplanes, not modern airmpanes), but the Itanium is several hundred times smaller, faster, and more advanced than a 486.
So then, it would be a bigger leap from a 486 to an Itanium than from a car to an airplane?
No. What can you do with an Itanium that you can't do with a 486? NOTHING. All that you can do is do calculations faster. What can you do with an airplane that you can't do with a car? For one, fly to places that would be impossible to reach on the ground. Move millions of people around the world in hours instead of months or years.
So, I end this comment like I end most of my comments, with the answer "no... but". It is not innovation that is getting smaller but the impact that it makes.
AC1: war speeded up technology
AC2: what does WW1/WW2 have to with things like lightbulb/sanitation/plumbing?
SM: war was possible because of them
AC2: hmmm sure, but that's irrelevant in discussing the article . my point remains: war did not speed up the discussed technologies.
Well, he didn't exactly say war was possible because of them -- he said Hitler was the first to make use of such technologies. And Hitler was a key player in (correct me if i'm wrong) World War II. And i never liked history too much, but i'm quite sure there was another rather large skirmish prior to World War II...
(I can't honestly comment on whether his statements are accurate or not, but your logic against them is certainly flawed.)
Every technological improvement mentioned by the author (the internal combustion engine, the light bulb, the electric motor, the telephone, the flush toilet, refrigeration, cathode ray tube) was developed in the 19th century. The fact is that it took decades for new technology to change the lives of the general public.
Consider the cathode ray tube (CRT), the guts of the television. J.J. Thompson invented the CRT in 1897, but it was not until nearly 30 years later that the television was invented. However, as Mr. Longman pointed out, it was not common for families to have a television in the 1950s. It was not until the Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960 that it became clear that the nation had changed due to television. This is a time gap of 6 decades from invention to revolution. Why is he expecting a shorter time for the transistor (invented 1948) or the integrated circuit (invented 1957)?
He likes to discuss time and efficiency as tests for new technology. Specifically, the telegraph reduced the time to send a message across the Atlantic from weeks to minutes. The telephone, another of his favorites (he used words like "deprived" and "stifled" to describe a house without one), fails this test. To be fair, the reproduction of a voice at the other end is amazing, but does not make for significantly faster communication over an automated telegraph (one that translates the morse code into letters typed on a paper tape). Why does he speak so highly of the telephone?
The problem with this article is that Mr. Longman is not well educated in technology. Mr. Longman incorrectly identified the time period in which most of the technological improvements mentioned were invented. He failed to mention the transistor or the integrated circuit. His test for "super-inventiveness" was not applied fairly to all technologies mentioned.
Why did Mr. Longman write this article? How did it get published? It is a hodge podge of pseudo-fact mixed with a contemptuous nostalgia for the days when we had an infinite supply of fossil fuels, the population explosion was a good thing, cigarettes had essential vitamins and nutrients, and emphysema was a part of growing old.
In the long run, the differences that we see between radio & the internet will not be so dramatic. Telegraph,radio, video, internet, etc are ALL parts of the "information revolution". The Biggies? cheap power/electricity. movable type, the germ theory. internal combustion.
Probably about none of it.
If you disagree, provide some examples.
Hay thar.
Lifetime non-compete agreements are illegal.
However, a person can not work for Microsoft or GM and then transfer intellectual property developed while on-staff at a competing concern.
Usually there is a period, up to several years, when one's employment options are further restricted, but not a lifetime.
However, you're welcomed to believe whatever you want, if it reinforces your arguement.
Hay thar.
How can it be said that recint, past 50 years, "inventions" and advancements aren't as significant as a septic tank? The problem is that the artical looks at things to generally. Just looking at computers alone you can so many changes to... life really, that have been done in the past 50 years. Just look around you and try to find something that computers haven't effected in some way. Your desk? computers in manufacturing, and probably in the shipment and advertising and selling of it. Your TV... well just look at your TV now and what it would have been 50 years ago. Perhaps it's true the they're not so much inventions but improvements on things. But that doesn't make them any less significant.
-- Never monkey with another Monkey's monkey
Yeah, tell that to all the people in third world countries. Who cares about them! Honestly, when are whites going to realize that the best course of action is to exterminate all the primitive non-Whites and the Jews and use their lands as lebensraum for the Master Race?
For those of you interested in this problem/situation, I whole heartidly recommend a book called "the axemakers gifts" I forget the name of the author. The book deals with the subject of responsibility with new technology, are we as "axemakers" responsible for giving someone an axe and they consequently going out and loping their hand off? Another good book on the Subject is "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffel I believe, he takes the concept of a person going into a sort of shock when they visit a new and totally foreign culture. He examines the issue that more and more technology is changing society in such a way that some people are finding themselves in completely different world. A Brave new world indeed... .
Firstly, I must stress that I am not denying that technology will advance. I am saying that, for the next couple of hundred years at least, it will not affect our lives in any radical way. In one hundred years the lifestyles that people have will be much the same as what they have now. They will still drive cars about, eat normal meals made in cookers and kept in fridges, work doing much the same sort of jobs (although on a macroscopic scale there may be some new industries), go and watch films, sporting events, etc etc. This is the way that people like to live, and this is not going to change beyond getting easier and cheaper - but again, we have the diminishing law of returns.
But wtf is with equating that with the end of history?
History is about events and advances in society. I would say that the increasing comfort around the world has meant that there really is less history going on. What will a history book in 100 years say about the 1990's? A few minor brush fire civil wars by 20th Century standards, improvements in communication (but nothing as radical as the telephone - diminishing returns again) and that is about it. The end of history is a social phenomenon, and we can actually watch it happening. Everything is becoming more and more homogenous all the time, and this means that there is less conflict (not just in the physical sense, but also the conflict of ideas and ideaologies) and so less things happen.
Did scotts really live that much differently than canadians 100 or 200 years ago? I don't think so.
Here I am not talking about technological differences, but social ones. 100 years ago Scots were very different to what they are now. If I were to speak to a Scot of 100 years ago, I would find it difficult to understand him, due to the amount of local dialect and slang at that time, which is now being replaced globalised English. Scotland is rapidly, in the cultural sense, becoming a place just like any other. And don't forget the demise of religion, old superstitons, modes of thought and so forth, which are also being replaced by the global consensus.
Very interesting this argument, anyway.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
Well, I would say that people can only increase their needs so far. Once you have the ability to manufacture anything, anywhere for almost no cost, then I don't see how things can really change thereafter. We haven't got that far yet, but the interesting thing about the article was that it points out that lifestyles really haven't changed in the last 50 years. I don't see them changing all that much in the future either (lifestyles, not technology) because we are absurdly wealthey on a historical scale. I have a better lifestyle than a medieval King, i'm sure. Just how gluttonous can people become? There has to be some limit.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
The invention of the wheel revolutionised the world a lot more than the invention of the transistor ever will.
And when I say revolutionise, I mean revolutionise peoples lifes. I mean it in the social sense. And your last comments are, it would seem to me, supportive of my view! Yes, you are quite right that the Chinaman and the Canadian interact - and after they have done so, they are a little more similar. We can see globalisation all around us! I'm Scottish, and live in Maine, but I don't have any trouble understanding the locals nor they me. I bet the same would not have been true, or as true, 100 years ago. And as everything becomes more similar, there is less reason for dispute - The End of History.
Also, I don't think that this is a permanent state of affairs. In the very deep future, things will probably change radically. But for the next two or three hundred years I don't see our society and Culture changing much at all, really.
But then, I really am talking in the dark, hehe.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
For a somewhat deeper analysis of the same question, see Does the 'New Economy' Measure up to the Great Inventions of the Past? Robert J. Gordon, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2000. I think that he and the US New ariticle are right that the period from 1885-1905 was phenomenal, and the inventions of that period had much greater impact on ordinary life that what we have seen in the last decade. But then again, just as electricity created the base on which most subsequent inventions were created, computers create the base for much of the innovation we will see in the future.
Right!
WORD!!! It is difficult to compare todays inventions with yesterdays. Compare the plow to the lightbulb for that matter. Eating and not vs. light and dark.... which is more significant? And, which one has had more time to prolifigate? This article is a trip down "half thought out idea" lane.
The new innovations are made to make our lives more comfortable, and give us more pleasures. And thats not something, the figures show us.
The innovations give us what we are willing to pay for. How large percentage of people are getting something just for living longer, or producing more or just having fun.
The change from 40's is substantial in where the money moves, the entertainment. Have you even considered comparing, the movies about aliens and space in 40's with 90's B5? I think you may find somedifference in quality. What about food, you get it cheap, easy, and fast. You don't have to spend so much time cooking it. What about if you wanted to see the Great wall, or the Pyramids, in 40's probably, in black and white movies is only way to see it. But in 90's you could travel there, and see your self. What about computers, and automation, it has given people more time to spend in entertainment. And created new forms of entertainment. The key what people have got is new forms of entertainment. Since most of their other needs have already been taken care of.
But in the end. How can we measure the entertainments.
Who is more happier, the guy in 40's who comes from heavy work, to home, he has dinner waiting for him, and after dinner, he still has great time making love with his wife,after telling his kids a great story.
Or the guy that come in home in 90's that has his wife sitting in coach telling him "help your self." and after eating the microwave meal, watching TV at same time his son and dotter comes to ask him to drive them to their hobbies. He comes back to home, waches TV, gets his kids out of hobbies. Then watches little more TV with the family. Gets to bed with his wife makes a suggestion that is denied because wife doesn't feel like it because she needs to get up early to work. That just because they need to pay for their new forms of entertainment, or their expensive houses.
JollyFinn.
- The fun is subjective matter.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
The academic paper by economist Robert J Gordon, "Does the 'New Economy' Measure up to the Great Inventions of the Past?", that the article refers to, is available on the Northwestern University site. The main text is in a 165 KB PDF file.
> Like, switching from nomadic hunter-gatherer to agriculture and animal husbandry is a small technological change
No. For agriculture and animal husbandry, you need the right species in your environment to start with and thousands of years of domestication. All our major food sources have been domesticated milliena ago and comprise only a handful of different species. Even with today's knowledge, experts find it next to impossible to find a new plant or animal for major food production instead modifying the old ones.
> but a huge change in standard of living
Well, yes, but not in the way you were indicating: agriculture actually *worsened* the standard of living, as has been found by comparing bones of agriculturists to those of hunter-gatherers. What agriculture did was to allow more people to live in the same area and the existance of specialists like rulers, warriors and priests who did not have to work for food. With greater numbers and better organization, such societies replaced the hunter-gatherers, although those lived better.
> and a huge decrease in risk
No. Living close to many other people and animals increased the risk of catching a disease. Lots of people died before our ancestors developed immunities. However, with the diseases and immunities together, they conquered almost all the rest of the world. By far most of the natives of the Americas, Africas ond so on died of the germs brought to them by Europeans. Columbus was a walking biological weapon.
> Then, industrialization [...] wiped out the need for 95% of our population of factory workers, creating the service economy of today
Industrialization created the need for factory workers, it was automization that wiped it out.
> so, the benefits of innovation today only seem to be small, while the innovations themselves are far bigger than they've ever been.
One could argue that this is the point the article is making: we need to put more and more resources into an innovation to have the same benefit from it. The danger, therefore, is that we are stuck on a plateau: pumping all we have into improving technology, yet gaining next to nothing from it.
Many people living today grew up when a 50-100 mile car trip was something you packed lunch for and spent a day on, not an hour's jaunt costing only a few dollars in fuel. Some of this is due to the fact that we have much better cars these days; a lot of it is that the automobile became pervasive and heavily affected the way society functions.
Telegraphs and telephones are nice, but the form they were in in the 1950s is completely unlike the way modern communications allowed me to leave on a week's notice to spend a month literally on the other side of the planet and not just be in touch with everyone (friends, family, coworkers, random forum participants) so seamlessly that they never had to realize that I wasn't at home. Within 3 hours of getting off the plane, I was sitting in Taipei listening to a radio station at home, answering email and chatting with my roommates, just as we normally did when I was working late and, thanks to IBM.net's generous roaming policy, this cost me a grand total of $0.00.
Similarly - a random individual from the 1950s would be familar with the word "nuclear" but I think perspective has dulled that authors view of how strange that was to all but a few physicists. There's a difference between making a [primitive] bomb and the sort of applications which have become available - nuclear medicine anyone?
And then you get to medicine. Again, while there may be some similar terms, the effect is completely different. Consider the commonplace things - restoring vision, cosmetic/reconstructive surgery, reattaching limbs or organ transplants - all of which are completely unremarkable. There's a major shift in society between the time something becomes possible and heralded as an amazing event and the time much better versions are available everywhere and at a fraction of the cost.
(Note that I'm excluding genetic engineering from that list, as I don't consider it to have reached anywhere near full potential yet. 10 years from now, one the other hand. . .)
Lastly, consider the shift in computers. Yes, the word existed but it's only been in the last decade that they've become pervasive. It's not a case of being used in a few high-end fields like engineering; increasingly it's a fact of life for anything beyond menial labor. There's also a considerable difference between a large company using an early mainframe to store billing records and my being able to carry around many orders of magnitude more power and capacity in my shirt pocket, where it's used to store notes and pull things off of the web. Initially, computers just replaced manual filing systems - there was no equivalent of what can be done today - searching a global network, controlling just about any device, video/audio editing even at the level of even 405 the movie ($10K to do what simply wasn't possible 20 years ago?), all of the different data visualization / manipulation aids, etc. The word "computer" is involved but it doesn't mean what it did then.
No...all that is left is to make major changes like before.
As the article said, the light bulb lengthened the day for many people.
Right now I spend 1.5+ hours on the road a day coming and going to work. Why can't someone innovate a way to cut out that time and make my life better - teleport me, beam me up. Or at least let a central system drive all the cars so you don't have idiots cutting in and out slowing traffic.
Sure, it may seem like far-fetched stuff. But at one point, so was sending power through a small wire for light, sending your voice down the phone, and flying.
And given the troubles with landfills filling up, I don't think we've mastered sanitation yet!
Interesting observation, but I think you're cause and effect are a bit off. I don't remember the exact dates, but there was a period rougly around 68-76 where the death penalty wasn't available in the US due to supreme court rulings. That changed in the late 70's.
;-)
Try again.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Sometimes innovation seems to slow when it's not actually slowing. I.e. if many people are deep in the midst of major research whose results are coming out TOMORROW, it may look like nothing is happening.
:)
Be careful not to fall into the rut that this poor guy did:
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
-- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
What a tool.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
The situation may be different in the US, but considering that the US spends about twice the proportion of its GDP on health for about the same life expectancy I doubt it.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Essentially all the components of videophones have been assembled, all that we need is to agree on some standards and wrap it up in an easy-to-use package and we'd be there.
One question that hasn't been answered is whether people actually *want* videophones. Given that the components described above have been around for at least 2 years now, and there hasn't been an explosion in their use, perhaps not.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
As far as real effects on everyday life are concerned, the development of the contraceptive pill must go close to the most sigificant development of the post 1950's era. In one stroke, it made women's control of their own fertility easy, safe, and cheap and forever divorced sex from procreation. The social effects of this are still being felt around the world.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Everytime, my grandfather would counter them by " yes, but they shit on the snowbank! ".
--
--
The fundamental question that should be asked, and the question that the journalist addresses, is the ACTUAL affect these innovations have on real people, not the amount of effort, resources, complexity, intelligence, coolness, etc. in the innovation at hand. Likewise, if some technology is merely an academics vision, but cannot be successfully manufactured at an affordable cost, it simply has no effect on people. It may be revolutionary to scientists at the front, but it is not to the average person. If can really deny that the amount of change from 1900 to 1950 in the average persons life is less than from 1950 to today, then you might say this article is a "crock." You, however, are simply not doing that.
Your entire entire argument consists of the fact that you think today's technology is cooler, more complex, or whatever. You say farm work is more productive today than it was 50 years ago? Certainly. But does this automatically mean it's more important than the lightbulm? Not if you look at it objectively. Look at the harder economic measures of productivity. If you were to look, you would indeed discover that the gains at the first 50 years of the century make the gains of the last 50 look downright childish! Similarly, the average life expectancy has not improved nearly as dramatically in the past 50 years as it did 50 years before that. Put simply, if you are a middle class American, your life is not all that different from your parents or grandparents on the aggregate, insofar as technology goes.
The fact that you and so many other slashdot readers are so myopic as to think that your precious technology is more revolutionary than what your parents or grandparents had is precisely what makes this article so worthwhile. The biggest "crock", in my opinion, is the fact that so many pundits proclaim the internet to be the single most (or one of) revolutionary innovation of the century.
If you want to say that the internet, or whatever technology, is too new to be evaluated and is GOING to have a revolutionary impact, fine, but be clear that it has not happened yet. Furthermore, be aware that you may well be wrong that it will even dramatically change most peoples' lives. History is littered with many incorrect predictions.
Most of the important political and organizational
came into importance in the 19th century:
the nation-state based on linguistic groups,
democratic-republics,
socialism/communism,
the limited-liability stock-holder company.
The 20th century has been elaborations of these.
Another way to look at this are what is being
predicted about the future, in the media, at
world fairs and the such. Up to 1970 or so
people prediction mechanical wonders like new
vehicles, space travel, appliances, etc.
Then as new age technical pesstimism set in,
the view switched to touchy-feely stuff like
ecology, psychology, and biology. The Disney Epcot
dome ride epitimizes this view. Since the
personal computer in the 1980s the future now looks at networks, virtual environements,
supercomputing, etc.
The future is "more of the recent past".
Nothing is created in a vacuum. There are no unique ideas or inventions---everything is dependent upon what preceded it.
1) There is a bit of evidence of a pre-historic epidemic of something rather like AIDS. I'm not sure of the details, but it has to do with some DNA (possibly inactive) that's a part of the human genome.
2) A major cause of the spread of AIDS is the improvement of the transportation system. It has made effective quarantines essentially impossible. It was once relatively common for folk to be isolated from everone else (e.g., on a ship) for several months before reaching a new country. Several smallpox epidemics were nipped that way (well, AIDS takes longer to become symptomatic, but diagnosis is possible after only about a month or two [sorry for ignorance of details]). Of course, the same strategy didn't work so well with yellow fever or malaria, but biology isn't the same as transportation.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sure, "Ozzie and Harriet" had a car, and traffic wasn't as bad -- of course not everyone could afford a car, and if as many cars were on the road then as there are now, the environmental impact would be devastating. Same with safety -- we take seatbelts and airbags for granted, not to mention safety glass etc.
Computers have fundamentally altered nearly every aspect of our working lives. Sure, most people don't have computerized homes, but what about the office? Would 'Ozzie and Harriet' have been able to figure out how to start a robotic production line? Run an MRI? Operate a call center? Analyze financial data in Excel? Do any of a thousand things we take for granted now. If not they'd have a hard time getting a job.
Digital storage has fundamentally changed the ability of businesses and consumers to disseminate information. For example, in 1950 you could buy an encyclopedia set -- typically this was very expensive. Now you get an entire set of encyclopedias on a CD-ROM costing almost nothing. The Internet has accelerated this; company and governement websites offer information that used to require phone calls, or snail mail requests.
Materials have dramatically improved since the 50s. Sure, some of these were invented by 1950, but few if any were in widespread use: Saran wrap, teflon/gore-tex, carbon fiber/composites, a multitude of alloys, polyester.
Radio phones existed in the 50s, but it's hard to compare that to the ubiquitous cell phones and pagers of today. Lasers have allowed such medical refinements as laproscopy and vision correction.
This article seems to point out the painfully obvious -- the 'low hanging fruit' of technology has already been picked. It's difficult to conceive of a fundamental improvement to the automobile that is workable -- personal aircraft? computer control? teleportation?, likewise with home appliances. Future improvements will usually be marginal, but who knows -- maybe transmutation is just around the corner.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
In agreement with you, I would go one step further. I think that innovation is still present, and is as strong as ever, but people just don't see it anymore. We have the foundation laid down for impressive things, but how those things are handled, that is where the innovation is occuring.
Look at how long it takes to get a CAT scan back compared to just a few years ago. Also, the resolution of CAT scans. You have been able to get information off of the Internet for a while now, but machines now have an uptime of months, if not years, thanks to innovations in server uptime. Things are moving along just as fast, and affect people's lives, but it is all behind the scenes.
I also agree about the timing and format of the article. Reminds me of some of the doomsday Y2K articles that hit just before the new year last year.
Bryan R.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
India is both free and civilized. That doesn't give them a large GNP though.
Technology of the past fifty years is just as innovative as it ever was, if not more. And that happens any way that you look at it.
If we analyze the impact in terms of the quantity of innovation, hands down, no comparison, 1950-2000 wins. The great number of fields which were not only innovated but invented during that time period is dramatic. Entire fields of study were created and largely mastered during the period - jet engines, communications theory, solid-state electronics.
If we look at quality, we need to consider the sum of these innovations. One area that we must consider is that of medicine. Sure, the introduction of penicillin in the 1920's was dramatic, but more dramatic than the polio vaccine? Or the eradication of smallpox? Or the introduction of cardiac defibrillators? I'm not so sure.
And we must surely consider the technology innovations which allow the technologies developed in the first half of this century to proliferate around the world. Technology innovation isn't merely about inventing things, it's about inventing new ways to make and integrate them into our lives. The Phoenecians discovered purple dyes, but it took a German chemical engineer in the 1800's to find a way to allow us to mass manufacture it.
This article is just more of the boring, short-sighted, nay-saying stuff that US News always cranks out. It's pretty boring, because if you consider the reality - that innovation comes in many forms, none better than any other - then you realize that innovation continues at the same pace as it always has
The ability to create is a fixed part of human nature. At most, the increased world population means that innovations are increasing, not decreasing. Silly article.
X-Rays also -- back then, they saved a huge number of lives by allowing better care of all fractures. In the past few decades, more precision and CAT scan technology have allowed better treatments of teeth and less life-threatening injuries. But the overall benefits from the early X-Rays were more massive than the current gains -- even though now we sleet the body with much less radiation and get the images faster and with more detail, the basic benefit of knowing exactly where the bone is broken is not much greater than with the first X-Rays.
Once upon a time man lived a harsh life dictated by harsh conditions. Along the way some particularly bright people found ways to create artificial light, refrigerate food, prevent polio, etc etc. The phenomenally high standard of living which we enjoy today is the result.
I think it is unfair to say that the pace of innovation is slowing down. It is more accurate to say that the areas where innovation is occuring are not ones which have the kind of impact upon everyday life that the light bulb did.
Then of course there is the factor of diminishing marginal returns. The invention of the light bulb was groundbreaking, refinements in its design are much less so.
Also there is the of how many people really understand the innovation which is currently happening. If the discovery of the structure of DNA can be compared to the discovery of fire, the mapping of the human genome is equivalent to the splitting of the atom. Within a few generations genetic diseases will be a thing of the past. Imagine if the average person had an IQ of 150 instead of 100. Imagine if there were no stupid people. There is no technical reason why this cannot be achieved through genetic engineering. The elimination of stupidity would do more to make the world a better place than just about any other single thing I can imagine.
But I'm getting off track here. If anything the pace of innovation and its breadth have increased, not declined.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Dumb article. They completely missed the fact that society has momentum...and thus, what affects people in everyday life always lags the current edge of technology. And as technology increases that lag gets worse. In 1900 there was almost no infrastructure in America. No highways, few if any phone lines. In the last 100 years we've paved a million miles of road, laid phone lines everywhere and put satellites up for an orbital information infrastructure. And they're *good enough*. Although today's technological innovations could do marvelous things, what we have now is good enough for the average man, and there's no pressing need to spend the money to upgrade them. The fiber optic lines in laboratories could give full video to everyone in america...but the existing twisted pair is good enough for most people. (Still, in some locales even that is being upgraded.) We could have supersonic low orbit transports to go from New York to LA in 30 minutes. But the upgrades to airports would be expensive, and the current system is good enough. LEDs are advanced enough now to replace all of our lights at 1/10th the power, but what we have now is good enough. Society isn't ready to upgrade the old for the new. Only when something drastically new comes along, with it's own killer app, does society wake up and progress. The internet is the killer app that will upgrade our telecommunication infrastructure. More will come. But technological innovation (which is increasing exponentially) does not correllate with cultural progress...which so far appears almost glacially slow. :/
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
In the same way that steam was once the principle area of technological innovation, that iron was, it's possible that silicon has peaked. Fine. Everything has it's day. Maybe optical computing will the the next nexus of technological innovation. Or biology. Or something that we cannot imagine.
At one point just after the turn of the last century, there was a call to shut down the patent office because "everything that can be invented already has" (now we have different reasons to want to shut it down!)
That's why it's called "innovation"...because it's stuff that we don't know about yet. This article, if the writer is unlucky, may one day have the same sort of notority that Vannervar Bush had with his vision of a few huge computers, with acres of vacumn tubes, cooled by Niagras of water.
What we have now is nothing compared to what we will have soon.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
This guy must have never talked to any of his older relatives and compared notes with his younger ones. /.'s readers. My whole science was just forming. Computer science means as much to me as physics to a rocket scientist. The author talks about marginal gains in communications. Marginal? It once would have cost me hundres of dollors to interact with someone a half a world away and hours of research to find people there that are interested in what I am interested. Computers and the Internet allow me to communicate to anyone, anywhere, for viturally no cost. I am easily able to find people like and unlike me and exchange ideas. The Internet is at least as revolutionary as the telegraph. It breaks down barriers in unbelievable ways and allows ordinary people to band together in extraordinary ways. Take Linux. This phenomenon would never have occured without the power of the Internet to spread ideas across near infinite distances.
/. and think of its humble beginings. I also find it beautifull that this technology has given us nerds, geeks, and other outcasts a place to find peace with like minded people. How many lives have been totally changed by this technology? I have wanted to be a programmer since my first TRS-80 Model III. This shaped my entire life in truly deep ways and still does today.
For one thing, the author throws away the importance of computers and the internet. I find this unbelievable. I am a computer scientist, as are many of
Computer science has created whole new sub-cultures. I find it amazing to look at
He marginalizes the amazing gains in medicine. I am sure the author would not feel this way if he saw these "marginal" gains save his loved one's lives, as I have. How many of us know someone who would have been dead if they had their heart attack 50 years ago? This is marginal?
He talks about a slight gain in productivity. Strange, the Greenspan's biggest reason for the rise of the stock market is increases in productivity, especially due gains in technology. I guess Allan doesn't know what he is talking about. Today I pay my bills online in seconds. I manage my budget in minutes. I can plan my week in minutes. I am many times more productive than I would have been without those technologies. The gains in computing speed made the impossible a reality with the Human Genome Project. Productivity is not measure in word processors. My mother is an accountant. Ask her how much time she saves with spreadsheets and databases over pen and paper. She once told me, "Thank God that when I have to do the books, they are not really books anymore!"
He completly ignores changes in society. While still not totally free, information is far less censered than in the 50s. We find Nick at Nite quaint, not because of it's acurate portrayal of 50s life but it's portrayal of silly 50s TV standards. Today, we can find information about many things that were hidden in the past. Sexuality is much more open today than it was 50 years ago. While it still has a way to go, the treatment of minorities is much better than 50 years ago. They are protected by laws that give the same chances a white male as in the workplace, at the bank, at school, and in the media. Women no longer are stuck at home in the "Mrs. Cleaver" role and now the Beave has friends that are Blacks, Latinos, and Asians of various orignal nationalities. These changes have huge ramifications on the world we live in.
Progess shouldn't be measured in blenders and cars. We may be unhappy that we don't have HAL, personal rocket packs, flying cars, and PanAm flights to space but there has been a lot of progress in the last 50 years.
-- soldack
While many great things happened in the past, great things are happening today and will happen tomorrow. The best is always yet to come.
-- soldack
It is actual production. I go to work and can create more of my final product (in this case software) because I spend less time managing my time. At home I able to accomplish more because the things I need to do take less time.
Spreadsheets have reduced the number of people required per equal unit of work. There are still a lot of accountants, money managers and such because there is more work to do. These "more elaborate models" enable people to properaly and quickly plan their finances and move on to other productive activities. I used to write stock option and bond software. Did this eliminate the need for a trader? No, but it allowed him to make better, faster decisions. This let him produce more in the same amount of time and effort.
Coms are dropping because they were not using the data produced by these models. Data that indicated that you have to make a profit to stay in business.
-- soldack
I guess that my feeling is that this argument can be applied to anything. All things are built on top of other things. It is easy to argue that the things at the bottom are the most important because they made all else possible. I guess when it comes down to it, the most influential thing to ever happen occured many years ago: The formation of the universe and life itself.
Of course, I am in the dark too...monitors make great candles!
-- soldack
Now what does the author use to measure past innovations? Mainly two things, there's a long rant about how life expectancy doesn't double every fifty years (to calculate the population of earth in 200 years time is left as an exercise to the reader, hey 200 years would b your life expectancy anyways). But mainly "productivity" is employed to measure innovation. Ok then the assembly-line was the most important invention of the millennium and thats it.
..." yet the automobile brought some fundamental changes to our society. Note that this is not the combustion engine, but one of it's applications that made the change here. And it's effects on society were not predictable (or at least not foreseen) before.
I think we'll need the next fifty years or so to evaluate the inventions of the previous fifty years, their effect on our personal life and our society. It's like saying after the invention of the car "Ok, another way to move someone from point A to point B, so what's new? Trains do this already, and riding is only a bit slower
Another example is telecommunicartions: it was used already for telegrams, and for sure there were some changes already, at least the news was faster, but what really affected most people was the advent of the telephone, the possibility to call aunt mary just to tell her what a horrible day it was.
In the same way we can't even begin to evaluate what effect the technology developped in the last fifty years will have on our society. What will be the paramount application of the internet making it's way into history books fifty years from now? The free exchange of opinions in forums such as this? The incredible new ways of marketing products via the internet? The "global village"? The total loss of privacy?
The real effects of semiconductor technology on society just begin to become obvious, about fifty years after its invention. And only a fool can expect to see the impact of the internet on our society a few years after it's available to a significant number of people worldwide. The possibilities inherent in genetics are barely recognizable right now. Even something less newsworthy right now, like solar energy, might bring fundamental changes fifty years from now by allowing "third world countries" to become "global players".
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
"They will still drive cars about [...]",
walk, horse, car -- transportation
"eat normal meals made in cookers and kept in fridges [...]"
prepared food - fridge is this generation of advancement, the next is genetically engineered food
"work doing much the same sort of jobs (although on a macroscopic scale there may be some new industries) [...]",
true, but it ignores the shift to service jobs where education is needed. In the 40's and 50's you could get a job with little skill out of high school and be almost guaranteed employment. In the future people will almost certainly need some kind of post secondary education to fill any job that isn't simple assembly line or simple service.
"go and watch films, sporting events, etc etc"
Well yeah. Sports have existed for thousands of years, various dice, card whatever games etc. If you categorize all entertainment as the same thing and say it won't change for sure. Are interactive video games different from other types of entertainment? I'd say yes. Yeah, we've pretty much explored all different types of passive and interactive entertainment, but I doubt they will stay in a static state. But based on your argument something like dice and tekken tag tournament arent much different. Entertainment is entertainment. It doesn't matter if it's more life like or engrossing or is better at telling stories.
"What will a history book in 100 years say about the 1990's"
What do history books say about countless decades in the past millenia? Evolution can be punctuated. Science is punctuated (i.e., one discovery can trigger a string of discoveries that results in it being called a period of enlightenment etc). One thing's for sure though - scientific discoveries in the past century grew exponentially because we have a lot of scientists in academia and corporations who are there because they have resources because of capitalism which is because of the industrial revolution. Is 1990 - 2000 really that bad? It only brought biotechnology and bio engineering companies, Microsoft, a refined personal computer, internet to the masses, tons of new consumer electronics, the end of communism, the birth of the wto, probably tons of medical advances I can't think of at this moment etc.
"but nothing as radical as the telephone - diminishing returns again"
I think you're mistaken. The telephone allowed for the large chain and then the multinational company - but email has really changed corporations. No more stupid memos whatever and you can reply at your leisure and both communicators dont have to be communicating to each other at the same time. Even if it was a diminishing return, it's not like it is insignificant.
Um, people becoming culturally and socially homogenous does not equal the end of history. I do not know how one logically follows from the other. Furthermore you could make a similar argument that within the british and roman empires it was the end of history because people were becoming socially and culturally homogenous - like it is a bad thing. Becoming socially and culturally homogenous does not mean the end of intelligent though and it does not mean the end of history.
"not just in the physical sense, but also the conflict of ideas and ideaologies"
I disagree. In the united states specifically people are divided politically. Its culture also breeds a type of individualism that causes one to question idealogy and authority. Compare it to (not sure if this is changing) japan for example where the social payoff comes from avoiding 'no' answers and shoving things under the rug and just shrugging off government corruption. The 80's and 90's by the way brought a shift in employment where people have much more mobility - which of course also brings insecurity and easy termination. It arguably created a population with more anxiety than the two previous generations.
"Scots were very different to what they are now"
Yeah, but compare canadians 100 years ago to scotts. I'd guess not that much difference. I dont know scottish history but Im guessing they were just getting into the industrial revolution like everyone else. If not, maybe they stayed in pre-industiral revolution a little longer than their english counter-parts or whatever. But so what? I still dont see how people becoming more homogenous, specialized, etc as equated as "the end of history". I think the opposite is the truth: higher quality of life, more mobility - as in you get to choose what you do given an education, etc
"Scotland is rapidly, in the cultural sense, becoming a place just like any other."
So is everywhere else. First the english took over half the world, then america became a world superpower. The language of business is english. If they are being replaced it is because said cultures are inferior - at least in a business sense. Instead of war and the spread of religion we have business and mass media and entertainment. As an aside, I also dont buy the argument that it dumbs down the population. Access to material that will result in intellectual enlightenment is more readily available than it was in the past. There are some compelling anti-consumerism / anti-advertising propaganda arguments, but either way I don't think there is any doubt that this is superior to previous methods.
In conclusion, "the end of history", in my opinion, is doublespeak which means you do not like the *change* that is happening which results in homogenous culture. Globalization is a force of change which has many negative and positive side effects. The next decades will see us ironing them out. Potholes in the road are IMO, definite.
Hello, in 1900 some people believed there was nothing left to discover in physics.
Anyone who thinks something similar about any technology obviously is so disconnected from said fields that they have no idea what they are talking about. Take cognitive science for example. 20,000 neuroscientists are busy today unlocking the secrets of the brain. In 20 years the domain specific knowledge in cognitive science today will seem pathetic. Coupled with other advances we will have exponential growth in knowledge and capability.
500mhz is utterly pathetic for many of the problems we wish to solve.
"The thing is, we have now solved all the major problems that we face as a species - food, shelter, warmth, health"
Yeah, tell that to all the people in third world countries.
Secondly, just because the average person has inched up on maslows hierarchy doesn't mean "the end of science" or the "end of technology". Civilizations fall and time doesn't stand still. New problems, and reincarnations of old problems will come to be.
"But how will it affect me? Not at all, I'll wager"
Um, the cure to cancers, aids, technologies to lengthen life? Hey, they might not affect you because you'll be either dead before said technology comes to exist, or the opposite, already born so you would not be eligible for DNA re-engineering. Future generations however, will not witness the end of science or the end of technology.
Actually, your point is well taken with respect to the space program, but a few trips to the Epcott center in Florida shows we also thought we'd be being served by robots by now. Telephones should be video-telephones. Meals prepared by a single machine. Yaddayadda.
And I don't disagree that today, we are capable of supporting our own invensions, but I dont think we're too far off from the scale of complexity I was trying to describe (50-100 or so years off).
If something has never been said/seen/heard before, best stop to think about why that is.
"Old man yells at systemd"
With respect to our dwindling rate of innovation (which I will attempt to confirm), you can read all about it in a facinating book called "The End of Science".
But just to take a historical approach, all innovation has come in 'spurts'. Use of tools, and then the transition from using various sorts of metals for those tools were all intersperced with fairly significant gaps of time betwixt those innovations.
ICs, while developed 'after' the 50 years in questions, depended on scientific innovations made before 1950. See: History of the Transistor. Lasers were conceptualized before that. As for the gent who asked 'where would we be without the IC or the laser', I can answer only with: still in cars, still with telephones, still with television. NOT with the internet, NOT with an extra 10 or so years of life expentancy (under which the assumption that medical advances do indeed represent benificial innovation is arguable, as a beating heart seems to be more important that healthy and happy emotions in today's value system), and not with video games, chat boards, an online world community (which really only includes those with access to computers). While the technology world has improved, tweaked, and unarguably changed our social existance over the past 50 years, our quality of life, and almost anything you do that doesn't involve a computer relys on scientific principals that were theorized long before 1950 rolled around. Note that it took Einstein, centuries later, to come up with something better than Newtonian psysics.
Also note the 60s/70s views that we'd all be living on the moon by now. Clearly, optimism was high regarding the continuation of technological innovation, but what people forgot to take into account was that the research currently on the bleeding edge is so complex to maintain and manage that we may in fact come to a point where we are simply incapable of comprehending the scope of a given application or technology, and whereby a group of people large enough to work on it will die before they are able to complete their work; ie, innovations that are so complex that we simply are unable to attain them.
If something has never been said/seen/heard before, best stop to think about why that is.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Yes, but far more important than mere nutrition or sanitation, our modern computers will enable our capitalist ruling class to finally achieve their centuries-old dream of enslaving and monitoring everyone on the globe!
OK, so the Panopticon prison is really an old idea, dating from the end of the eighteenth century. For that matter, Lucian, in ancient Rome, invented, but could not implement, the manned Lunar expedition... But Bentham's panopticon originally was applied against the inmates of a single penetentiary, not the population of the whole planet; and with the limited technology of his time even that was practically impossible to implement. No longer! The millenium is in sight!
One might argue (if one were unafraid to be labeled as a Kommie subversive) that such a scheme is deeply immoral. Arguments such as that, however, have never restrained any ruling class ever. Besides, we know that the one and only moral imperative that counts in this world today is that one which demands, "greater, and greater, and ever greater returns for stockholders".
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
As it said, cars were around in 1900, but only available to the very rich. Things like electricity had to be physically brought to people's homes, as did running water, which takes time and a lot of money. Not much point having an indoor toilet if to flush it you had to bring in a bucket of water from the river.
We have our basic needs fufilled pretty well now. Food, clothing, shelter, medical care. These are not our primary focus anymore. I think gene mapping is remarkable, but we won't know the real benefits of it for decades. Same for the net, or computer technology in general. In the developed nations, we are focusing on being more efficient, not on reinventing the icebox. Aside from the advances in sanitation and refrigeration, we have been intent on giving ourselves more free time.
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Things that have changed have been refinements of those, mostly for the sake of entertainment. No matter how glorious the Internet becomes, it won't impact my life as much as not having to to bring in water from a river.
One finds parallels in medicine as well. Things have slowed down since the discovery basic sanitation, anesthesia and understanding of human anatomy. While medical knowledge continues to expand, it won't have the broad, far-reaching implications for everyone that thoroughly cleaning surgical equipment did.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
What happened when the folks at IBM started playing with digital logic? They "learned" that the world would need 10 "computers" TOTAL
What happened when main frames came about? People said that they should close the patent office, becuase there was nothing left to invent!
WHat happened after Newton died in the Physics world, almost nothing for 400 years.
What happened in the late 1600s when the black plauge began spreading? People were sure the world was ending.
The point is, The human race as a whole seems to have this painfully fatalistic attitude, which does nothing but impeade progress. In this century alone, the major advancements, (Quantum Physics, The information age, etc.) all occured when people DOUBTED what their "elders" taught them.
It seems society as a whole has this bullshit idea that older people are just plain superior to younger people. Not to say that they aren't wiser, but if they are it is NOT because they are older. When we look at what is "taken forgranted," we find that there are often faults with it.
The idea of science is that it is OK to disagree. In fact, it is your duty as a scientist. You should DOUBT everything, until you have seen data that suggests otherwise.
--Alex the GNome Fishman
The simple fact is, the benefits of Cell phones, PDAs and 900 mhz CPUs are limited so far as the average consumer is concerned.
Running water, sanitation and medical aid have tangible benefits, like longer life span, increased health and reduced BO.
Most of the major "We need this to survive" itches have been scratched already. Until we develop telepathy or Star Trek style travel technology, there will not be any major, life altering changes, just incremental upgrades to what we already have.
What do computers give you? Frustration every time it crashes (Unless you're running BSD or BE, then you're frustrated by file format incompatibilities with the other OSes, but I digress) Most users don't care about computers beyond word processing. More advanced users care about spreadsheets e-mail and web surfing. In the end, only Ubergeeks like my fellow SlashDot readers care about computers beyond the basics.
Most of the technology that's been developed in the last 50 years involved the creation, manipulation and transfer of information, that's just not as vital as being able to see well after the sun goes down.
There's also the infrastructure issue. With a few government subsidies, even rural areas could get connected to the phone system by building a few buildings and digging some trenches, but running clean line for DSL and installing the hardware at the various offices disturbs existing infrastructure. Someone's phone access might be disrupted, and the technology just doesn't offer the massive benefits that the early land lines did.
Adding a GPS system, cellular emergency call button and map database to cars will do more for the mass consumers (Once the technology is wide spread and inexpensive) than the latest and greatest VooDoo chip or Load Balancing innovations in MS-Windows 20xx.
We'll never have the flying cars that have been promised since the 1930's because the infrastructure to support them would disrupt commercial airlines. Until we run out of oil, we'll never have Ethanol, Natural Gas or other alternative-fuel cars in nationwide use, because the infrastructure to support them (Refuelling stations, repair centers, dealerships) is too expensive to justify the trouble and cost for most consumers, and even then, they'll just be a tweak to existing technology.
www.matthewmiller.net
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I beg to differ from the article submitter.
Hundreds of millions of people have been saved by technology. Look in any hospital: would it be there without computers? Probably. Would it be even 5% as efficient? Absolutely not.
While I agree computers have made hospitals more efficient, I think that 5% is way off. I don't think hospitals are taking care of 20 times as many patients or processing them 20 times as quickly as they used to. Actually, while office automation has improved efficiency in the workplace, I don't think it's by quite as much as a lot of people seem to think. People are working longer hours than they used to, and the efforts of millions of IT workers are needed to develop and maintain this automation. I'd think the typewriter and telephones were more important innovations in term of the workplace when they came out.
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I beg to differ from the article submitter.
:) ).
Hundreds of millions of people have been saved by technology. Look in any hospital: would it be there without computers? Probably. Would it be even 5% as efficient? Absolutely not.
Let's look at the computers which analyze patient data. They do it in three dimensions, point out warning signs, etc. All of this is stuff that humans cannot do! Computers can investigate images at much higher resolution and spit out every single warning for doctors to look into further.
Some people may say refrigeration was more important than computers. It was a prerequisite, but not as important. It saved the lived of about a million people (rough estimate) and before true electronic refrigeration, we've had iceboxen for the past 40,000 years. Refrigeration might've helped keep meat fresher, but computers save hundreds of lives every day and also are *fun* to play on. Refrigerators are not fun to play on, no matter how hard you try (don't, please
Any magazine who runs an article like this is obviously just going for the shock factor. "Hey, news is slow today! Let's run some fuzzy article on why technology sucks!"
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Tonight on Fox: Deadliest Executions Part XVII
This post, like the article itself, seemed to me to have a curious myopia: The assumption that things we see now are all there is, that desires, motivations, and valuations somehow are static.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Sarcasm aside, I think that the original poster, and the current one, are missing a crucial fact: "Incremental" changes can precipitate revolutionary shifts. For example, as an educated, middle-class American, I have the reasonable expectation that I will never face starvation. So in one sense, no technology ever could "more solve" this problem.
Why do I have that expectation, though? In part because the advance of technology has created a demand for scientifically trained people and I happen to be a science teacher. Advances in productivity have given us enough leisure to make my job feasible. And beyond that, the IC and the computer have revolutionized my job, making it more meaningful and fulfilling for me and my students (I hope), who now have access to modes of knowing and thinking not available before.
If all you care about is the ability to satisfy the fundamentals (food, shelter, etc.) and you won't accept that making these more widespread counts as "major", then yes, I suppose you'll have to conclude that modern tech won't satisfy those needs any more than previous tech. Of course, the "previous tech" is not steam engine and fertilizer. It's wheel and agriculture... there's been no "progress" for 20,000 years.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I'm sorry, you're wrong.
The single greatest invention in the history of mankind was agriculture.
Without that, we'd all still be spending our lives grubbing for today's food, playing hunter/gatherer and being not much more than really bright chimps.
Agriculture changed everything about being human. It made the development of civilization possible, by allowing people to live in larger groups. It enabled everything which has come since.
Not that it has necessarily been a good experience for everyone involved...
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
Ah, but I have to differ with you. Not to take anything away from those grand engineering projects, but:
Concorde has been surpassed by a number of aircraft (although admittedly none of which are passenger aircraft).
SR-71 is a grand old piece of equipment; I've been in the Dryden hanger with two of them, and it was an unforgettable experience. However, do you really think they'd have been retired without a more-capable replacement? ;)
Apollo 11; while a very functional design, the Apollo spacecraft is far from "matchless". We haven't gone back to the Moon (which deeply saddens me), but present-day manned spacecraft (X-38, for one) are being designed with much greater understanding than Apollo -- even if they don't have the same mission.
Hydrogen Bomb -- those were re-engineered continually, with better tools as time went on. The last ones designed were far more sophisticated and capable than the first ones -- and now we can simulate the bomb pretty effectively in a computer, without even building it.
Your statement is misleading, I think; the Eiffel Tower is grand, as is the Statue of Liberty. They haven't been duplicated since, but does that mean their engineering is unsurpassed? Hardly... Back then, we just lived with less-optimized hardware.
Your computer couldn't be even designed and built with that level of computer support, you know.
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
So do the designers and builders of the Egyptian pyramids, for an equivalently-majestic example.
Your point would be?
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
Plumbing didn't take care of basic needs, it refined them. We've had means of waste displosal before the 20th century, outhouses and such, modern plumbing just made it more convenient.
I think if you're going to start arguing about basic needs, at the extremes you can say once we had women to fuck and meat to eat, our needs ended there something thousand years ago (male perspective obviously). Everything since then has just been a refinement of those two goals.
Plus innovation might have unseen consequences, like the printing press, which started with bringing the bible to the masses, it eventually also brought them cheap education and information. It has permanently changed the way governments act. At the time, it probably just seemed like a refinement of hand lettering, much like the internet seems just like a refinement of commercials, newspapers, and people on streetside soap boxes. With any luck, it'll become something greater than that.
-j
When the needs are great, small technological improvements generate great benefit. Like, switching from nomadic hunter-gatherer to agriculture and animal husbandry is a small technological change, but a huge change in standard of living, and a huge decrease in risk.
Then, switching from a preindustrial to a postindustrial society was a huge technological leap, but not as incredibly noticeable in society: civilized before, civilized after.
Then, industrialization not only wiped out the need for 95% of our population of farmers, it eventually wiped out the need for 95% of our population of factory workers, creating the service economy of today where most people are working on jobs that were inconceivable to hunter-gatherer (you answer phone calls to support people who answer phone calls from people who need insurance to protect their vacation homes?)
so, the benefits of innovation today only seem to be small, while the innovations themselves (reading the whole fucking human genome, for christ's sake) are far bigger than they've ever been.
This is just silly. I don't think anyone would argue that the pace of innovation has increased the last 50 years. But how do you compare relative importance? Answer: you can't, and this is why.
Which is more important: the invention of fire or iron tools? Clearly the answer is fire, not only because it is clearly more important, but that you can't have iron tools without fire. This is a simple example, but take any innovation today and you can trace back to an innovation before it. This means (by definition) the innovation before it is more important because you need it to bootstrap the later innovation.
Therefore, by definition, all earlier innovations are more important than later innovations, and thus comparing eras is meaningless.
Now, that doesn't mean you can't compare individual innovations, just not eras.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The greatest, single most important invention in all the history of mankind was the invention of railroads, some 150 years ago.
I have to disagree with you on that. While the railroads are unquestionably a watershed event in human history, I have to say that the invention of the printing press has to take the award for "most important".
Nothing really significant was invented after 1950...
Velcro. :) Think about it -- what was velcro a refinement of? There were absolutely no temporary fasteners like it, short of tying two strings together.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
My father told horror stories of the foot-pedal powered drill his dentist used. And he had horrible, horrible teeth, all of his molars were either filled or capped, and he was religious about brushing. My mother's not much better. I've had one cavity in my life, and I have friends who have had none.
In fact, the innovations of the second half of the 19th century, had significantly more impact than the innovations of the first half of the 20th century. Let's see, there's the railroads, the self contained cartridge, the revolver, the repeating rifle, the machine gun, electricity, the light bulb, radio, photography, the automobile, the department store, the vacuum tube, the automatic pistol, armor clad warships, the submarine, and robotics just to mention a few. And let's not even talk about the first half of the 19th century, the move from an agricultural society to and industrial society.
Penicillin (1929) was, in my opinion, more important than today's ability to display patient data "in three dimensions"
Is 1900-1949 really better than past 50 years? The jury is still out, so to speak, as evidenced by the number of US executions since 1930.
Looks like between 1930 and 1949 we were going hog-wild on executions. Average nearly 150 a year. Lots of people whacking each other. Nothing better to do.
But then TV came along. By 1968 people found watching Star Trek and Green Acres and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom much more amusing than whacking each other. No executions for capital crimes between 1968 and 1976.
Then Disco came in 1977 but only a few people whacked each other over it. It wasn't until the advent of 100+ channel cable in 1984 and the crappy shows that came with it that people started losing interest in the tube.
The Internet has really fouled things up. In the last five years more people have been executed than in the entire period from 1962 to 1994. Probably from people whacking each other while waiting for their files to download. Have you ever heard "You've Got Mail!" played backwards?
I'm hoping that ubiquitous broadband will bring television to the Internet and reverse this trend.
From reading the article, I tend to agree with the author's contention that the pace of innovation has been slower since 1950. However, I think this has much more to do with the relative difficulty of the problems we face than any "dissipation" of the spirit or intellect of modern culture.
Let us take a few of the examples in the article, starting with the Concorde. Sustained supersonic flight is a very difficult problem requiring exotic and expensive materials, fuels and aerodynamics. The Concorde is a 25 year old hotrod, and was never an economic success. Designed in the early '60s, the all titanium SR-71 Black Bird costs a million plus dollars per mission to fly, and remains the fastest thing on Earth to this day. Speeds above mach 3 require the development of even more amazing materials. CHEAP hypersonic flight (as in non-military, commercial flight) is much more difficult still. These problems are more difficult in principle than those faced by the Wright brothers.
The development of antibiotics was a huge breakthrough in medicine, as was the invention of modern anesthetics. The microbe has largely been defeated for the moment. Major medical problems that face us now are viruses like HIV, prions (e.g.. Mad Cow disease), fungi, and things like asthma, Alzheimer's etc. These diseases operate on a much smaller, subtler and more fundamental level, and require a qualitatively different knowledge of biology than did Smallpox.
Living and working on the Moon permanently is a different proposition than sending three men there for a few days. One can compare this to the difference between a polar expedition and an oil rig in the Arctic ocean. There is nothing on the Moon right now that justifies the effort.
Modern technology and modern convenieces are unavailable to the majority of humanity not primarily due to politics,but because they are expensive. "Power too cheap to meter" is the concept we are presently in search of. Maybe hydrogen fusion and room temperature superconductors can make this a reality.
These problems are fundamentally more difficult than the major inventions and discoveries of which the author speaks, and can only be accomplished using the technology we now have as a starting point.
So there you go. The problems facing us today are of a fundamentally different quality than the ones already solved in this century, particularly up to 1950. Just as the explosion of technology in the first half of the Twentieth Century depended on advances made during the last half of the Nineteenth, I think we have been building the tools for the explosion of the next 50 to 100 years. Computers and the Internet may not change the human condition as much as the electric light, but I bet they make possible the research that creates the next major breakthrough.
The Phantom
Brought to you by the Invincible Chordate Pikaia Commemorative Society.
Now wait a few years and you will see some interesting things. We already see the reactions of businesss to the increased communication abilities given by the internet. Non-Compete and Non-Disclosure agreement are in part a result of workers abilities to shop the world for employment opportunities. "Copyright protection" is the result of content providers inability to accept the fact the instant content access dilutes the value of a single work. How much is one work worth when thousands can be accessed in seconds. Increased competitition lowers prices.
Add DNA research, advance transportation techniques, advances in particle physics ...etc into the equation and we haven't seen anything yet!!!
Women are the ruling class. Guys who don't like it should get a sex change. But I don't want to be a lesbian.
I would disagree with that. Once basic needs are fufilled, u can move on to grander things. But beyond that, the author of the article is wrong in other ways. Cars, lightbulbs, and telephones were all invented in the 19th century and made cheap enough to use in the early twentieth century. I don't know how this is any worse than what the author complains we're doing in the late twentieth century. Indoor plumbing actually goes to Ancient Rome, and was only implemented in the early 20C. Also, he neglects that with certain things once invented they become moving targets. For instance, the first penicillin resistant germs appeared in the 1950s. Incredible innovation is required to stay ahead of these critters. Also, the average person in the 1950s would not have recognized references to computers. I also fail to understand how more bang for the buck (with computers) translates into less value. He also underestimates modern medicine. For instance, anti-psychotic and anti-depressant medications. They allow millions to live happier, fuller lives. There's a pretty big innovation. Also,with regard to spaceflight, that's a cheap shot. The '50s propaganda was overblown.
Well, that is the most utter hogwash. Instead the opposite is happening. The law of diminishing returns is gripping us - the jump from 500MHz computers to 1GHz computers will affect me much less than the jump from .5MHz computers to 1Mhz computers ever did. We see this effect in every area of our lives.
Technology is approaching its end game. The End of History Socially, Culturally and technologically is upon us gentlemen.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
An excellent point. Many people in this world have a completely different perspective on life than than average slashdot, internet savy person. Once you can pretty easily aquire all of you basic needs like food, water, and shelter, everything else is just icing on the cake
The really interesting thing to speculate about is this; What advance in technology would be equivalent to the advances that were made in the early part of the 20th century?
IMHO, a few likely candidates for this would be an improved method of travel (instead of a 6 hour flight to europe, a 30 min. trip instead) and advances in genetic medicine (artificially express genes in our bodies to heighten intelligence or protect ourselves from disease).
The author may be correct in his observations about the direct visual impact of most major improvements in technology, but I differ. He has failed to take a more fair account about the increase in population and the blatant fact that many of the other innovations from the turn of the century were accomplished by non-scientists. Most of the great promises of the early to mid 20th century have not come to pass. We do live longer, healthier lives and live amidst most of the fruits of technological innovation. No great change in our fundamental sciences has occurred in a long time. Now snmall changes do a nd continue to happen, but to expect such widescale, fundamental changes in our lives is grossly unfair. We make do with smaller gradual improvements in our gadgets becuase, that is what we expect. The sciences improve our live in such a pace as to be appreciable and soft. New drugs, new therapies don't have as much of an affect on us as the most basic innovations of medecine (sanitation, penecillin)would have on an isolated tribe in New Guinea. Today we live in virtual ignorance of the what we have accomplished because we have the benefits and the stress of these technologies. Pollution(smog), Carpa-tunnel syndrome(work injury), population increase(baby boom) are the same as it was 50 years ago. Any benefits of new tecnologies gets immediatly absorbed into the background noise of our everyday lives. Yet with out all of it, we would be more polluted, sick, shorter lived, and stupid. It is not fair to compare the lives of people who went from basically nothing to the basics of technology and then expect the improvements of our time to have the same impact on us. That is bad historical observation(but then I am not surprised as Americans know diddly-squat about history). The phone and fax were invented when the telegraph was developed because they are just innovations of the same basic principles. Television is just the logical result of photography and sound and radio inventions. Fridges were invented as a way to cool food, yet we have had canning for 200 years, ice houses for centuries, salt and smoke houses for centuries as well. Computers are the logical result of mechanical adding machines(Descartes made one)and digital-counting, as well as electronics. The difference engine was almost accomplished during the victorian era and were used to program on punch cards that created CHADS and were fed into electronic readers. The 1890 census was accomplished in this way. The problem is that people excpect progress. Our kids are expected to do better than our parents. Wes uffer from this silly notion that progress has to happen or we just stagnate. So our popualtion increases, our ecosystems disappear, our heritage of resources gets wiped out, all in the name of progress. We are so stupid.
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
Typical artical, typical responses. So here's my typical response, colored by my participation in the SCA and having read way too much Darkover recently... *grin*
:)
The apparent speed of "technological innovation", its impact on our lives, and whether or not this new technology is a positive thing...this is all purely in the eye of the beholder.
Society's still got the same basic problems it's always had. People still need food, shelter, some degree of climate control, and currency to pay for these things. Parents still want their children to be educated (one way or another), and kids still want to rebel. People for the most part still want to look attractive by the standards of the society at the time, to find an appropriate partner or partners and reproduce, to defend themselves against actual or perceived attacks (by other people or by "natural" forces), to have someone cure them when they're sick, to feel like a part of something larger than themselves, all that good stuff.
There are always society-threatening problems out there -- the crazy king/dictator/rebel leader in power over there who might be coming over *here* if we're not careful, the religious extremists telling us to "convert or die" (yes, this still exists pretty overtly in some places, and it exists in the US in a *slightly* more subtle form), the scary celebrity who is a "bad influence" on the young (Beethoven, anyone?), the "modern woman" who just won't behave, the "deplorable" state of education, the scientific discoveries that create ethical dilemmas for society...none of these complaints are new. The specifics change, the general pattern does not.
The WAY in which we do our work might change, and the specific hazards that are likely to kill us might be different, but most of us still spend a great deal of time working inside or outside the home, spending time with our (biological or chosen) families when we can if we aren't fighting with them, figuring out how to feed and clothe ourselves and maintain the roof over our head, traveling from one place to another, and fighting off death as long as we can.
I've read articles from the 1500s complaining that the "true meaning of Christmas" has been lost. I've read about Plato's attempts to censor certain types of music. In the grand scheme of things, people will always be people. Today's technology, whatever it is, will always be a solution only to yesterday's challenges -- today's challenges will always demand tomorrow's technology, which in some cases might be a return to something "forgotten" (herbal medicines anyone?) and in other cases might well be something we couldn't even conceive of today. We may have eliminated smallpox, but now there's AIDS to worry about. Food might seem to be "safer" now, but what of the constant scares regarding salmonella and exposure to pesticides? Wrist damage from carpal-tunnel syndrome might not be as life-threatening as injuries sustained by farmers or miners, but it is still threatening to the livelihood of someone who types or works on an assembly line for a living. And of course, there still ARE farmers and miners, who still face hazards that most of us with our desk jobs don't think about much.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
This kind of argument can be taken further and further.
Isn't a car just a horseless carriage? Your logic can be followed to indicate that the real inovation was pulling a box on wheels with an animal and putting people in it. Cars were just an improvment. The no car to car is bigger than a better car thing can get silly. It all depends on how you describe a car. Is it a box on wheels that carries people? Then the car itself was just an upgrade from the horse drawn wagon. When you look at the effect that having all the vehicles in the country using clean, renewable fuel would have on our environment, you understand why this is a major innovation indeed. The technology will not just change cars. It has the potential to change our society. If cars are no longer reliant on fossil fuels than what about power plants? Many still burn dirty coal. What about home heating? Oil and gas rule there. The automotive industry can drive society to better ways of doing things. That is a major shift.
You make it sound like AIDS spread because of bad medicine. It really spread from a lack of safe sex practices (even though there already were other STDs) and problems with blood screenings. I think that AIDS treatment is a major inovation even though it is a younger disease. Africa is being ravaged by this disease. If they can get the price of current treatments down and get them distributed, millions of lives and the fate of an entire continent could be changed. I think that ranks.
Granted, the battle with lung cancer in paticular is not going well. But doesn't that make the treatments forming that much more important? Here is an example of a new treatment. One of the major reasons why this cancer in paticular has become such a killer is wide spread smoking. Around a quarter of college kids smoke. I watched my grandmother die of emphysema from smoking so I am pretty sensitive to smoking related diseases. I only wish this type of cancer got the same focus as others. I know women that will never miss a mamogram but will continue smoking. The battles against some cancers as gone better, though. What makes a Lance Armstrong so special is that his case shows how one can beat types of cancer once known as death sentences. It's an insult to the thousands of doctors and scientists that have worked hard to beat these killers to ignore their work and accomplishments.
-- soldack
This included doing literally tens of thousands of pages a day markup-style word processing for which the supercomputers weren't particularly well suited.
Today, I carry at least 30 x the CPU processing power of those supercomputers. Along with more disk space and a network interface (100 Mhz Ethernet) that was probably more than the aggregate networking performed at that University.
Am I even doing 1/1000th of the useful work with all this power? Sure, that computing power was so precious that the staff at the University worked hard to keep it at full utilization at all times while my laptop sits idle most of the day, but that's kind of the point.
Sure, distributed.net and the like try to use all this unused potential, but we're still nowhere near as effective with our resources as we once were.
I realize that there are excuses. When resources are so plentiful, we tend to get wasteful, but shouldn't we be more mindful of using our resources more effectively? It's not just my laptop. But even the servers of 10 years ago to shame, especially in price/performance, but are we really doing that much more with them? Or have we built up layer upon layer of abstraction, middleware, DB Servers, etc. to more than exhaust the advantages. I know that the users (remember them anybody?) are not really much more effective with today's applications than with the character mode applications of ten years ago. In most cases, those character-based applications were more responsive than the applications we're rolling out today.
Sometimes, I think we've long since passed the point of diminishing returns with computing technology. We're applying more and more power to get far fewer incremental improvements.
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Much like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
-no broken link
Yep, so did mine, thirty years ago. And the closest I could get to 'em was the window through which I passes the card deck... Today, I have three computers sitting on my desk, and I use them all in different ways -- but I use them directly.
Twenty years ago, engineers wrote proposals and reports longhand, and made rough sketches and graphs; secretaries typed them; draftsmen and illustrators did pen-and-ink renderings of the graphics. The engineers proofed these and redlined them, and the corrections were often done directly on the originals. Design work was mostly hand-work, with lots of extrapolation and interpolation of graphical data; the few computer runs were expensive in both time and dollars, when they were done at all.
Today, the engineers write their proposals and reports on their desktop computers; edit them there; produce the graphics there and refine it themselves; assemble the graphics and text into a final document; and generally print it out themselves, unless they distribute it electronically -- which they also do themselves. And the bar has been raised for the final product: corrections-by-hand aren't acceptable, and the graphics really need color. The engineering itself involves multiple iterations, with much (even most) of the detailed design actually being done on computer models instead of physical prototypes. And the engineer does most of this work directly, too, unless they truly need a supercomputer run.
It's gotten to where I can work as a single individual and replace an office full of support staff -- which is exactly what I do. Is that wasteful of computers? I don't think so, even though one of my computers basically acts as a file, fax and printer server for one person. It's worth what it costs me to use it for nothing else... it keeps the load of my workstation, and saves me the few minutes a day that it cost me over a few months to buy.
The other point I want to make is this: the analysts who say productivity isn't going up with computer use, are are missing the points I've made above -- particularly the one about the bar being raised.
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
When compared to other studies, technological advances rocket ahead of our gains in philosophy, ethics, sociology, political sciences, and other areas of human endevour. Why is this? Well, probably because technology brings money and power while the other studies are useless to businessmen. After all, when is the last time you heard of a rich philosopher?
Don't get me wrong, I work with technology and I love those little gadgets more than most people. But since I work with technology I get to see how these wonderfull devices are used.
We have all this potential now to communicate ideas, to share knowledge, to educate. We have devices that are supposed to free ourselves, to make the most of our time, to improve our lives. What does that technology really do? It improves bottom lines, it ties us to the desk, forces us to work longer hours even when at home, it takes us away from our friends and families, forces us to constantly focus on learning about technology instead of about each other and how to better society.
We humans are so good at creating things, at innovating. Yet we are so horrible at dealing with ourselves and learning about how to control the things we create. It is not technology that I fear, it is the human capacity to do harm with technology due to a lack of control. So we race ahead to invent new things but refuse to reinvent ourselves and our society. Is this the best course for us?
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
The greatest, single most important invention in all the history of mankind was the invention of railroads, some 150 years ago.
150 years ago, for the first time in history, it was possible to transport quickly large quantities of merchandise, food, and people over long distances on earth.
The average speed of land transportation jumped more than 15fold, as trains were able to crisscross countries at speeds 15 to 20 times of the usual stagecoaches, trucks or canal boats which were then the norm.
Food could be readily transported from one place to the other to avert famines; the famines that occured thereafter were political in nature, not because food could not have been brought.
For the first time in history, people did not face the prospect of automatic starvation if their crops failed; they could resort on the supplies from elsewhere.
Railroads could supply the needs of ever-growing cities, such as New-York, London, Berlin, Paris or Chicago. Hitero, the size of cities was limited by the same factor any living organism was limited in size: by it's food supply.
It's not for nothing that, around that time, people embarked into railroad building with a quasi-religious fervor.
No, the greatest inventions occured between 1850 and 1950. After that, you only had refinements of existing stuff. Nothing really significant was invented after 1950, except perhaps, DNA genetic engineering.
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No, not exactly. This isn't quite as much a measure of innovation, as it is a measure of revolution. Though the CAT and MRI scans may prove life saving to individuals, on the aggregate the sum of all these recent inventions simply has not had as great on an effect on society as have some earlier innovations. Life expectancies have not, contrary to popular opinion, improved that much in the developed world. Quality of health has not improved that much either.
The question is the net effect and the author answers quite well. It's not disparaging the science of today at all. The article does not say that today's scientists are stupid, lazy, incompetent, underfunded, etc. The article merely puts the benefits of today's science into historical context, and addresses the thousands of internet and technology pundits in one fell swoop.
The media and a great many pundits have been waxing ecstatic about how revolutionary computers and the internet have BEEN (or will be in the very near future). The problem with this kind of talk is that it distorts our thinking and our priorities.
For instance, I never hear the end of the so-called "digital divide." A day never seems to go by when Al Gore, or some other politician, is talking about how we need the internet in every classroom and village (in Africa or what have you). Well as a matter of priorities, basic sustenance, health, and literacy are far more important innovations that have yet to reach these same people. Yet our American domestic policy, insists on spending countless resources today on a "revolution" that is certainly not yet revolutionary. Whether it's going to be revoltionary at all is debatable, but to spend hundreds of millions of dollars networking and providing soon to be obselete computers at great cost is foolish at best.
Similarly, we saw, and still are seeing to some extent, billions of dollars being ponied up for the "internet revolution" though the infamous Dot Coms. Meanwhile other technologies have suffered from lack of funding. For instance, I personally know a few biotech and medical devices companies that had a very difficult time getting capital from venture capitalists and the like, because they were too crazed over Dot Coms. More real dollars have been spent on these Dot Coms than so many other proven revolutions... So yes, not only is this an interesting question, it's a relevant one too. It's a matter of priorities and clear thinking.
Nor does this mean that, since all "basic" needs have been meet, nothing more dramatic can be done. Life expectancy can be increased substantially--medicine is still quite primitive. Issues like traffic jams can theoretically be resolved. AI can be invented (theoretically). Etc. etc. etc. All these things can be HUGE benefits for society that can be _felt_ by the common man--even if he is ignorant as to the reasons. It simply has not happened to as great as an extent in the past 50 years as it was in the 50 years before that.
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You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
To fully understand the impact of today's society, we must wit another 50 years. Light bulbs were amazing when they were produced, but how many people had one in there house and used it to its full potential? The same goes for computers. They're "amazing" for the commonfolk, but when will it integrate and become second nature in their lives?
Some of the biggest technologies will most likely include e-mail and the web. Yes, the web is far too over-hyped, but it does offer a very large net of knowledge. 50 years ago, you could walk into a library and find a small assortment of knowledge, but if they didn't have what you were looking for, you were up a creek unless you had a lot of time on your hands. The web changes that (or more correctly, will). Simple things like forums or mailing list archives of accumulated knowledge will be the most useful, but thats only my prediction. (Those things are new inventions. A central repsoitory of conversation has never before been attempted. If any conversations were ever recorded in any way (meeting minutes, etc), they were usualy stuffed in a big filing cabinet and never were shared).
That isn't to say that there aren't problems. The article points out correctly that preventive healthcare and public health is much more important to increasing life span than other medical advances. And economic opportunism and vested interests may well keep inventions from reaching their true potential for decades to come.
How superficial the article is, you can see from its concluding remarks. While Thomas Edison was cleary important in popularizing and marketing inventions, much of what he was successful with had been invented many years prior to him--including the light bulb.
You can't say, "1 Ghz Pentium 4's" aren't as important to society as the lightbulb, and expect to sound profound.
The reason the 'historical' inventions were so much bigger is because we are only talking about the big ones.
Right now. Computers vs Radio. Which is more important in day to day life? Fast Forward 100 years and lets see how bit of an impact the Internet (or rather instantaneous and persistant global communication) had on society.
This article is fine in that it cuts away some of the hype, but the 'big' inventions of today are just as big as the 'big' inventions of yesterday, (even if the small inventions aren't.)
It is apparent that some authors consider only those things that they have day to day direct contact with. Any depth of knowledge as to the technological underpinnings of a society seems to have escaped the purview of a modern liberal arts education.
/. this has to be the biggest, stinkingest crock of all.
The fact of the matter is that the discoveries of the past 50 well surpass those of the previous 50. Where would modern society be without the laser and the IC? Not to mention the incredible impact the previously unknown field of molecular biology is having on medicine as well as politics. The advances in the field of chemistry have been equally rapid. NMR, GC-MS, polymer science etc. have had a huge impact on modern life.
Not only that, but many of the inventions the cited (automobile, sanitation, lightbulb, etc. were made BEFORE 1900. In some cases CENTURIES before! The ROMANS had indoor pumbing fer crissakes).
Not only that, but it refers to failures in urban planning in the US as evidence of lack of innovation. We, I think if he were to travel on the high speed rail systems of Europe or Japan, he might realize these problems are POLITICAL, not technological.
His argument regarding productivity is nonsense too. Look at the percentage of farm workers in 1950 vs. today. Or the average standard of living. Bullocks I say!
The fact is that this article misses the point completely. Modern technology has surpassed the obvious day of the stinking, belching machine, and moved on to the much more rewarding realm of the molecule. Scientific advances come in the form of fabrics with undreamed of mechanical properties (Aramid etc), drugs that work at an extrodinary level of sophistication, instruments that can image the processes occurring in the body in 3D with molecular discrimination level without using damaging radiation, etc.
HELL, the first world wide satellite television broadcast included the Beatles singing "All you need is Love". Now we bounce signals around the globe without even considering the magic involved.
Of all the articles I have seen posted on
I'm busy making some of our wonderful techie toys, and certainly am not complaining about the graphite knee brace that lets me ski. But let's not kid ourselves: my parents and grandparents changed the way we live in utterly profound ways, and it's going to take something on the order of matter transmission to come close.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
He takes inventions made in the 19th century (light bulb, AC power, automobiles, indoor plumbing) and counts them as 1900-1950 inventions because they were made generally available then, but counts inventions not made generally available until 1950-2000 (television, antibiotics) as 1900-1950 inventions if they were first created then.
Then, inventions from 1950-1980 (the Green Revolution, the word processor, the jet passenger plane, spacecraft, satellites) are not counted as "modern" innovations, despite the fact that the article starts by comparing 1900-1950 to 1950-2000.
Finally, older inventions like the telegraph are compared to modern ones like the Internet.
So, this guy gives us an argument that actually reads, "the inventions of 1830-1980 are more important as a group than the inventions of 1980-2000, so we've stopped innovating".
Wow, how profound. I can probably give a good argument that the inventions of 775-1830 AD (a time period similarly 7.5 times longer than the later period being compared to), including the transoceanic ship, the gun, classical physics, calculus, and the moveable-type printing press, were more important than the innovations from 1830-1980.
And, of course, the 7.5-times-longer time period from 7100 BC to 775 AD saw even more important innovation, seeing the invention of animal domestication, agriculture, the wheel, standing armies, writing, etc.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"