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."

Comments

It's called "Perspective"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Another Utterly Idiotic Article

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

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 /. this has to be the biggest, stinkingest crock of all.

Re:Another Utterly Idiotic Article

[the eric conspiracy]

This article is about the average person.

If you want to talk about the average person, you have to be very careful. The average person is a sustenance farmer in China who has no access to electricity, and does not own a telephone. The biggest things that have affected his life are programs of mass immunization, education in basic health care and sanitation, and better flood and land management practices.

And yes, these have occurred in the past 50 years, not in the time prior to 1950.

For the doubters

[overshoot]

For those of you who think that our advances are as important to peoples' lives as our grandparents' advances, I offer the following:

• When my grandfather was a child, transportation was horse, train, or boat. When he turned fifty and I was born, it was trains, cars, and airplanes. It's still cars and airplanes.
• When he was a child, long-range communications meant paper, at most by telegraph. When he turned fifty and I was born, it meant telephone, radio, and television. It's still mostly telephone, radio, and television.
• When he was a child, middle-class families in the USA routinely lost several children to whooping cough, diphtheria, scarlet fever, etc. None of the families I knew as a child did. Logarithms don't count.
• My grandfather had smallpox scars. I have a smallpox vaccination scar. My children don't -- because smallpox is gone.
• Nobody in his town had indoor plumbing. Nobody in mine didn't.
• As a boy, he read about automobiles. Before he died, he watched Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the Moon live on TV. My kids watch reruns of Apollo 13.

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.

Re:Without Doubt, Yes.

[soldack]

"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.
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 /., 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...

Shifting the goalposts...

[Throw Away Account]

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.