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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."
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
> The thing is, they would be able to adapt because technology today continutes to make life easier
... but rarely easier. If you are the farmer who now has milking machines, you're probably thinking thats a heck of a lot easier, but not for those who are in charge of maintainting, inventing, supporting, selling, or purchasing the milking machines. And what can you do with your extra time now? Why, consume more! Buy more! Shop! Watch TV! All of which were invented pre-1950. :)
Context is everything. Its a moot point to say that you couldn't 'live' in 1950 for lack of all of today's technologies' convenience. Of course you couln't, you're too used to what you have now.
But to assume 'easier' is interesting, for I would argue that it was far easier to walk over to my neighbour's house and ask him for high lawnmower rather than buy a computer, know how to set it up, get an ISP, learn how to email, and email him. I'd rather say that technology today continues to make us lazier, when it comes to going out of our houses, or moving in a physical fasion. Name a technology today that actually makes the task it purpotes to do easier, from a comprehension of the steps to accomplish that task.
Think of an accountant from the 1950s that not only has to understand the principals of accounting, as he did before, but now has to know how to use Office 2000 and Excel. It saves him time in the long run, maybe, he has to invest alot more learning and application of knowledge in order to achieve his goal. And at any rate, there is a fairly widely supported theory that the time the use of a computer saves is recouped by the very same computer in learning and maintainance tasks.)
Chances are, all modern day technology does is let you do it all from one place, or faster, or cheaper
If something has never been said/seen/heard before, best stop to think about why that is.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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
It's really too early to tell what the impact of some of the recent innovations will be, IMHO. To me, the last line of the article is one of the most telling. Researchers are very close to building nanotech that supposedly will be able to perform any range of duties, including the ability to be injected into a living being to perform various functions. Others in the biotech field feel they are close to making a breakthrough with regards to the aging process, and let's not forget the amazing progress that has been made in fighting cancer etc.
Let's suppose that 10 years from now we look back at this article, when we have definitely discovered a method to extend life to 150+ years, have wiped out almost all known diseases, and have built the first fusion reactors. These advances wouldn't have been possible without the assistance of computers for process modelling and analysis. Then this article will look like a bunch of horseshit. For another example, we are on the verge of widespread use of fuel cell technology (if the megacorps allow it). This is a tech that has been around since at least the 1970's (from the space program and probably much earlier than that), but we've just recently made advances that make it efficient enough for mass use. Plus, the large corporations made precious little if any progress in furthering the energy efficiency of appliances (especially automobiles) until the governments of the world, especially the US, started to enact laws requiring it.
Let's also consider the advances such as splitting the atom that the article neglects to mention. Sure atomics research allowed us to make horrific bombs that can kill millions of people in a single enormous explosion (which ironically can also be considered progress), but it also brought an unprecedented era of world peace with only minor localized skirmishes - the large powers were held in check by the frighteningly horrible capabilities of these bombs. It also brought nuclear power, a somewhat dubious benefit in many respects, but it also has brought power to areas of the world where there were very few if any real alternatives to power generation, and it is relatively clean technology.
Another thing the author likes to overlook are the problems that existed in the first half of the century. Early in the 20th century the air in many major urban centers was so bad that trees wouldn't even grow! People died of exposure to the smoke and toxins belching from factories. I'm not trying to say that it hasn't gotten worse in some areas, but those areas are more densely populated than they were at the turn of the century. Furthermore, a great deal of that pollution can be attributed to automobiles which are continuously becoming less polluting. In general, environmental pollution is declining and the trend seems to be towards further improvements in this area.
One of the funniest lines had to be this one -- Notes economist Alan Blinder: "No modern IT innovation has, or I dare say will, come close to such a gain!" What an ass. First of all, the Internet has effectively accomplished something on the same scale. The telegraph was a simple point-to-point device that allowed communication between two people simultaneously. This was the situation until about the 1970's, when telephone tech advanced to party lines allowing several parties (say up to 10) to converse simultaneously. The Internet allows fscking spammers to send a message to millions of people simultaneously, also instantly, or thousands of people to chat in real-time, in text or voice. I hope this knob lives long enough to see the day when we break the speed of light and messages (dare I hope for matter also?) can be transported instantly across infinite distances. Am I dreaming? Maybe, but there are very bright minds working on this very problem (some believe they already have solved it), and yet what benefit does it confer to the average person? At the moment, none really. I can already send a message in seconds to the other side of the world, and that's the furthest that I could conceivably need to send it at the moment. But if we ever get off this big stinkin rock and start to colonize other planets, it would be an important advance indeed.
Finally, sometimes advances come in clumps rather than at a regular pace. Einstein's theories were all developed over a short period of time, and we haven't seen any similar advances in scientific theories since that time that could have such a direct and immediate impact on day-to-day existence. Quite the opposite of the author, I see new innovations and invention as very likely being just around the corner that could change my life and the lives of people around the globe just as dramatically as some of the inventions in the first half of the century.
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Slán leat agus go n'eirí an bóthar leat
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
I thought the article was pretty stupid, typical end of the year...no news...gotta blather about something negative.
Now the argument that not much happened between 100 CE and 1700 CE is just flat wrong. Off the top of my hungover head. Printing Press, Compass, Rockets, Gunpowder and Microscope are pretty important.
I'd say without the lightblub...advanced communications networks or gene therapy wouldn't happen. After all there is a LED blinking in that fibre switch that's sending the light down the fibre that gets these packets around.
I think that invention is moving along quite quicky, it's just that when you are so far advanced it's hard to make things really jump out. It's also hard to sit there as the advance happens and say...wow...that's gonna change the world.
When they sent the first email 30 years ago...did anyone there say...Wow...This is gonna change the world! Nope. When Chuck Yeager flew through faster than sound did anyone say...Wow this is going to change military aviation? Nope. It was just another day.
IMHO you can't sit there and say invention is slowing...or speading up...because invention isn't a finite thing that can be measured that way.
It's amazing how the first thought that pops into the minds of people when faced with the possibility of instantaneous teleportation is "wow, I can avoid the traffic going to work". It is incredibly shortsighted.
David Brin wrote a wonderful short story where he theorizes about a world where cheap, reliable teleportation was commonplace. Customs control is impossible, smuggling is rife, crime increases exponentially, police are powerless, war supplies cannot be stopped, privacy is destroyed, people visit the few last pieces of untouched wilderness in droves thus destroying it.
Teleportation would be the end of civilisation as we know it. For the previous person to equate it with something as trivial as the light bulb! I think you were incredibly restrained to not call him a freaking idiot.
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,
"The law of diminishing returns is gripping us?" You compare to sets of clock speeds and claim this means the end of history? Even if you were right about a slowdown (which I think you are not), it would not mean the end. Evolution seems to occur in spurts. If you are right, we are just not in one right now. /., yahoo, cnn and netscape, it is my site I find. No one else sees that exact same site. Site are learning our habits. I am finally starting to get spam about things I care about. Amazon usually makes pretty good suggestions to me. Computers are already building computers. Engineers use software to help design the latest hardware. Some parts of software are written by software itself with humans only guiding it to the solution. Society is also changing at a dramatic pace. Cultures shift and change in months instead of years, years instead of decades. Technology has lead this increase in the rate of change. Ideas now move great distances at swift rates. The readers of our posts live in many different places, with varying societies and cultures. As a young girl in Canada and an old man in China interact, they change a little bit. As they change they change the society and culture around them. As those cultures change, the world changes. End game? No, I think the game is just beginning...
Actually, Vinge has been right on. Take a read at the inventions of the year in Discover. Amazing discoveries in food, computers, physics, and about everything else will change the world around us in incredible ways. Technology is increasing at ever increasing rates. There are bumps in the road but it keeps moving. Continuous speech recognition is becoming a reality. I can call a 800 number and ask about movies, get the information I need, and never talk to a human being. Computers are interacting with us in more human way. Most tutorial programs now talk the user through the learning. As computer power grows, the little annoying paper clip will become your virtual personal assistant. It is happening already. Operating Systems and the software around them have become so customizable that each person's system is unique. They gain personality. I am not talking about wallpaper and screensaves, I mean the ways in which we interact. Web sites have moved from static digital representations of print to customized, unique, living, breathing swirls of personal information. When I visit
-- soldack
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"