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Ask Slashdot: What Was The Greatest Era Of Innovation? (nytimes.com)
speedplane writes: The New York Times is running a story on innovation over the past 150 years. [The story starts at the end of the American Civil War with the newly completed transcontinental railway in the 1870s. Then it highlights the profoundly different lifestyle of the 1920s, the end of 'The Great War' and the beginning of the Great Depression. By the 1970s, many of the transportation and communication changes from the 20s became fundamental parts of daily life. The story ends in 2016, an era in which human life has changed the most in the last 46 years.]
We're in the golden age of innovation, an era in which digital technology is transforming the underpinnings of human existence. Or so a techno-optimist might argue. We're in a depressing era in which innovation has slowed and living standards are barely rising. That's what some skeptical economists believe. The truth is, this isn't a debate that can be settled objectively.
What do slashdotters think is the greatest era of innovation?
Humanity had reached a point of superior self satisfaction that God destroyed their civilization to dust. I would dare say there have been many 'era's of great innovation but keeping in the modern times I would say from 1850-1950.
Easy. Industrial revolution. Our quality of life is still improving because of that period of innovation.
Oh, oh, I know this one!
3500 BC was the greatest era of invention.
Why 3500 BC, you ask?
The (approximate, of course) invention of beer.
Go ahead, tell me of a greater one. Can't, can ya?
My grandmother lived in a time where she saw the invention of the Horseless carriage to man landing on the moon. Thing I have seen man land on the moon, but what have we done since then? That would top that?
Technology moves up in bursts and I believe right now we are going through one of these growth spurts mainly because of the new strides in the field of machine learning. Deep Learning algorithms are now opening some interesting venues that weren't there before. Soon commodity AI tools will be ubiquitous and you'll see a new era where we can incorporate Machine learning into many applications. Autonomous Navigation is one of the results of this machine learning revolution and soon we will see a lot more. H
Let's see...
What is, THE FUTURE, Alex?
I'm thinking innovation scales with population, available tools, recorded experience, and accessible resources - all of which are still increasing.
In fact, almost every measurable aspect of human life is actually improving over time so far.
Combine the increasing effects of the Flynn effect, drastically reduced violence over time, automation, increased health standards, and I can't see how the immediate future won't continue the increase in innovation over time.
Not that this is news of course. It's so not news, that you barely even hear of it - and why it's actually so hard for many folks who don't pay attention to science and statistics to even believe. To most folks, the only science news they hear about the future is climate change and extiction rates - both of which are true, but are NOWHERE near a complete picture that science shows us. We've got a lot to fix, but compared to vast stretches of planetary history where single populations explode and take over the biological landscape, we're doing amazing.
Which is also why the future of innovation is important.
Ryan Fenton
The world went from the horse and buggy age to the jet/atomic age in 30 years. Huge innovations in electronics, transportation, medicine, everything, in one generation.
You can say building the railroads and everything else 100 years ago was just finding used for all the metal that people were mining and refining All innovation depends on prior inventions and breakthroughs
Sad but I think true. The burst in technological, medical and scientific discovery during huge conflicts has been pretty remarkable. Humans, we are a strange beast.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
You can't be 'objective' without being a nihilist. All human value must be removed from the observation, or it's simply not objective... Maybe, if human values become universal, you might have something. Until then, it's nothing but a series of contradictions, decided by most brutal army.
For us, it's pretty easy to say that the small electric motor brought on the "greatest age of innovation". We would have had the horseless carriage even without the internal combustion engine, in fact we did.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Kozmo.com
The defense rests.
I think its an open ended thing, but if I had to confinge "innivation" to just western technology, I would say between the Age of Enlightenment (1600's), and WW2. I go back that far because that is when some truly free thinking began via the great western philosophers.
C|N>K
Ask Slashdot: What Was The Greatest Era Of Innovation?
Whatever obscure era anyone is unlikely to suggest so I can appear smarter than everyone else.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, but you could live quite okay in 1980 without the PC, Internet, cell phones and whatnot. Go back and consider what life was like before you had phones, TV, cars, electricity and so on and you'll find many aspects of life sucked or was incredibly inconvenient. If I compare computer games made in 1985, 1995, 2005 and 2015 what will be the biggest difference? The first decade, of course. Cassette/LP to CD was a much bigger leap than CD to MP3/AAC, VHS to DVD was bigger than DVD to BluRay and so on. No internet to dial-up was bigger than dial-up to fiber. It's nice that we make things even better and more efficient and convenient, but there's a diminishing return. Which is not to say I feel we're done and won't make much more progress, but for the most part we're swapping out something that worked quite okay already for something better.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A surge of innovation occurs when sociopolitical conditions, infrastructure, education and sources of wealth mesh in just the right way. Victorian Europe was one such time, when Britain, French and Germany blasted into the industrial age by feeding on each other's inventions. The US from 1865 to 1914 and 1942 to 1970 is another example. In these cases, war pushed technological development which nourished a generation of peace and civilian development to follow. Right now, it's China. Will India be next?
Of course everything builds on everything else but I have to think the biggest period of innovation has to be the mid 1800s when we started learning how to harness electricity and develop higher speed communications (telegraph, telephone, radio) up to around the 1950's when transistors and digital computers were developed.
Specifically, Intel and the invention and development of the microprocessor. Pretty much our entire world is now built upon that keystone.
Imagine all the people...
It changed how people bought, stored and prepared food.
The innovation during industrial revolution changed workers' lives, from agricultural work to industrial work. That was not more pleasant job, but since it produced a lot, workers got access to new goods and life standard. Further innovation reduced industrial work and increased less harsh office jobs.
Now innovation is killing jobs while concentrating wealth. We still innovate, but innovation is less able to improve people's lives.
1900 to 1946:
Radio
Television
telephone
antibiotics
Women suffrage
domestic refrigerators
automobile
air travel
electricity distribution networks
What we got in the 1970 to 2016 period is really cool, but it's just toys compared to the changes the first half of the 20th century brought us.
I'd have to say the invention of the transistor was the most transformative thing to happen to society. Prior we had vacuum tubes sure but they were power hungry devices that made portable electronics impossible.
The transistor changed everything. It also allowed the device on which I'm posting to come about. A device admittedly a bit dated already but still enough to allow me to multi-task, listening to music, watching video, etc. And to continue the line of thoughts - the computer has invaded every aspect of life itself. All because of the invention of the transistor.
I would say that when the human race learned to make fire that we took ourselves off the natural evolutionary path; no other animal can make fire. Stone tools were also an incredible innovation that allowed us to take down larger prey animals and do a whole host of things we couldn't do before. There have actually been very few innovations over the millennia that have had as much impact: (in no particular order) written language, plumbing and sewers, the scientific method, antibiotics, permanent dwellings, refrigeration, farming and animal husbandry would all rank up there pretty high. Those all caused major leaps forward for our species in terms of longevity and sustainability, and only three of those happened in the last few hundred years.
I guess it really boils down to how significant the innovations were to the survival of our species. The industrial revolution has brought as much suffering and death to the world as it has gains to our species. I'd call the last two hundred years of industrial-mechanical technology innovation close to a net zero with regard to overall benefit to the species, really.
13.7 Billion years ago.
Only if using them for neumonic memory circuits.
..now.
Organization? You must be joking..
Bang!
13.7 billion years ago.
I refuse to believe that the best is behind us.
That was an amazing era, life changed quickly, and in fundamental ways.
> radio, turntables, automobiles, aircraft, and home refrigerators
Also x-ray machines, movies, phonographs. And how could you forget: the tabulating machine.
Go back to 1870, and you have telephone, and ticker tape.
Electricity in homes also became practical during that era.
Seeing that I could probably patent wiping my ass and successfully defend it in a East Texas court, we can now ignore patent counts as even the vaguest measure of innovation. All they now measure is the number of strip mall lawyers who want to extort from anyone who even vaguely approaches innovation.
I would measure innovation as something where a previous generation of maintenance people would not understand the new technology. A car mechanic from 1950 would have little problem working on a modern day gasoline car. He would quickly appreciate the elimination of the distributor cap, and love the power windows, but swapping out parts using tools like a socket set would not confound him for long.
The same with any airplane mechanic from 1965 on. There is little difference between a DC-10 and a 787. Again the computers would be a little confusing, but the basic principles would largely be the same. Even the modern tools such as xrays, and other tools for examining deep hard to reach areas would make sense to him and solve problems he was having.
But a microchip would blow the mind of an electrical engineer from 1950. Things like an iPhone would require that they pretty much redo the last two years of EE school to catch up.
Obviously relativity would blow the mind of a physist of 1950.
But even a doctor of 1950 would have little trouble catching up with modern techniques. I saw a wonderful bit in a program where a historian laid out some old Roman surgical tools and matched them up with their modern equivalents. They were little changed over the millennia. So while a Roman doctor might not be ready for a modern hospital, the 1950's one would probably require very little time and training to catch up. An MRI or CAT scan would simply be something better than an XRay.
So by the standard of a past mechanic not being able to understand a subsequent innovation. I would say that between the US civil war and the end of the Korean War would be the period where the most innovation took place. This would be a time where new things came into existence that had little or no precedent. Plastics, much of modern chemistry, quantum physics, relativity, electricity in the home and all the devices that spawned from that, aviation, the beginnings of the computer age, transistors, the beginnings of the space age, nuclear age, TV, Radar, jets, antibiotics, wireless communications, the car. Then there are subtle innovations such as the industrialization of warfare.
I don't think there is a century in human history with more innovation. Revolutionary and Napoleonic France was certainly a burst. The development of steam in England was a burst. But the above century was simply an orgy of innovation. Whole new technologies came out of pretty much nothing.
Of course some innovations are more game changing than others, the printing press, the plough, agriculture, domestication of animals. As singular innovations they are world changing.
But I would say the age of innovation ended with the Korean War. Someone transported in time from then until now would very rarely be baffled. If anything it would be cultural things that would amaze them. Computers in our pockets would probably be the most technologically amazing. But I don't think it would take too much training to show an 1955 accountant how to use Excel and email. They would probably nail Excel before mastering not hitting on the women in the office.
One thing that isn't an innovation is Facebook.
Historians will look back on our last four and next few generations and marvel at what we've accomplished.
Greed is the root of all evil.
That's when the innovation that allowed humanity to make a 5,000 year leap in progress in just around 200 years occurred.
When the idea that the people granted limited power/permission to their government instead of the reverse became a founding principle of a nation. After that occurred humanity went from sails, horses, and carriages to jets, computers, and moon landings in just over 200 years.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
In 1896, transport was horse drawn. There were no cars or aeroplanes, no radio, and few people had even seen a phone.
For those who can't remember, in 1996, few people had seen a computer (yes, I saw one in 1956, but I am talking about most people), no Internet (I had been using it since the 1980's, but few people knew about it), No mobile phones (I had one - it was the size of a car battery - cos it had one in it).
If anyone I had a device in my hand that would allow me (in the UK) to see and talk to almost anyone in Africa, allow people in Africa to "virtually" attend weddings of family members in the UK, allow me to navigate the streets of Lagos (Nigeria) using visual moving maps with spoken instructions, hear music from anywhere in the world, and any time since before 1900, for nothing, get training on how to do almost anything for nothing, or even compute complex maths without me even having to touch the keyboard, then I would ask them for something of what they were smoking!
Mobile phones with multi-core processors, touch screens, Skype and Youtube may appear obvious to us, but they surely were not in 1996 - when even land-line phone calls were so expensive we rarely called anyone, anywhere, if we could go there or write!
Yes, I have used Google Maps in Lagos, and attended a wedding in London which relatives attended from Zimbabwe and America by Skype. I have drawn pictures on my screen with a mouse and used the results to cut parts from wood with a Laser - like something from a James Bond film!
I remember solving differential equations using a mechanical calculator that, to divide, you wound a handle round to do repeated subtraction for each decimal place, and in 1996, I had seen military "moving map" displays, and had a good idea what they cost! I remember discussions of whether it was physically possible for memory to cost less than 1 cent per bit, and mainframes with a CPU clocked at one MHz! I remember watching the Beatles play live using 30 Watt amplifiers (1963), and going to the disco in 1970's clothes (look at the clothes in Soul Train videos).
My grandfather's prediction may not be absolutely accurate, but, emotionally, it is pretty close!
I am still waiting for my hover-board. Sharks with lasers, I can do without. Drones? I had a model plane in 1963 that flew by remote control. (Listening to DooWap as I write this).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
2020, when AI computers capable of real thoughts, with IQ greater than what humans can perform, start to appear. Then it won't take long for human beings to be completely overwhelmed.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
500k BCE: 1st hominid catches on fire while dancing.
1931: Electric guitar invented.
1997: Zenith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
2016: The End: Clinton, Trump, Radiohead.
USB, USB, USB!
...when western civilization collectively pulled its head out of its ass from the superstitious dark ages and entered the age of reason.
Error: NSE - No Signature Error
Netscape was the web. I was using the internet (and its predecessors a decade before that).
My grandfather didn't see a car until he was full grown, and before he died we had transistors, nuclear weapons, antibiotics, and had landed a man on the moon. It's not even close. People in the 1950s and 1960s thought we'd have ray guns and FTL ships by now because they were projecting from the state of innovation in their time.
I watched that last night. Not sure the kids got it though. I wouldn't have thought time travel paradoxes would be too difficult for a 7 year old, but he probably takes after his mother.
That aside, couldn't Kirk have proved somehow that he's from the future and convinced her to *not* head up the anti-war movement?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Luckily, or unluckily, I got tired of most of it long before the .com crazes and was able to avoid the downfalls.
Obviously we're jaded; were we not, we'd recognize that since the advent of the internet, our ability to share data has revolutionized the world and our own capabilities. There is no real end to this in sight.
Our greatest days are in front of us, not behind, as people truly begin to leverage the communication capabilities of the internet.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
On the contrary I would say the last 20 years has seen the most innovation of any other 20 year period, and the next 20 years will beat out the last 20. And this will continue probably forever, or until a global extinction event takes us out.
New ideas may not be as transformative, although that is a product of technology solving all the low hanging fruit over the past 200 years. But new ideas are researched, sent to market, and iterated on at a faster rate today than any other time. The agricultural revolution is obviously the most transformative period of innovation, but it is a stretch to think fostering new ideas was more prevalent in 10,000 BC than it is today.
By any objective metrics you could use to measure innovation, such as R&D spending as a proportion of GDP (both private and public), the rate of change of business processes, the percentage of population in STEM fields, etc, I doubt there is any period in history that contends with today. Maybe the 1960's comes close because of the cold war but I still doubt it matches the current decade.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It's not fair to compare a 100 year period to a 46 year period.
No problem, we can compare a 50 year period. My grandfather would express a similar sentiment but he would use a starting point of the WW1 era airplanes he saw as a child that were little more than "kites with engines", made of wood and cloth, to the Apollo 11 moon landing as an endpoint. So if you want 46 years then we can go to a little past WW1, 1923. I think the aircraft nearly all people would see in the sky would still be the wood and cloth type, although I think a metal skinned monoplane first flew near the end of WW1.
For those who can't remember, in 1996, few people had seen a computer
Planet-wide this might be true, but for anyone in the UK/USA home computers such as the BBC Micro, Spectrum, C64, Apple II and their successors where available since the 80s. Anyone who went to school in the West would certainly have been seen computers in school by 1996. I agree with most of the rest though.
How about when the beginnings of keeping a pack of dogs close to the tribe, successfully. And using those dogs as a form of night watch for predators?
In 1996, I started using my "car phone" inside the house by bringing in a car battery lol. And FIDONet was amazing, although the phone bills from it calling "local long distance" every night sucked.
My grandpa bought a C64 in 1982. He never really used it a whole lot; but it was my doorway into IT for me. Sprites for graphics, those little books were you had to input little programs as part of the storyline...loading / saving programs on cassette tapes...
...on how you rate the innovations from the various eras.
The development from mass starvation to beinga ble to feed the polulation is obviously more important to most people than the iPhone.
So the question cannot really be answered, as each era haas had its innovations which were really important at the time, while may seem trivial now.
It is also important to note that most innovations depend on previous innovations, so you rate one innovation without knowing what it is based on.
Oh Kjella, how I disagree with you!
The leap from LP -> Cassette -> CD -> Music DVD -> Music BlueRay/whatever are much smaller than the leap from [Physical media] -> [small convenient files]
You can argue that the CD was digital and didn't require special ripping, you could just read the bits of'em and then play them from a computer. Except most computers didn't have 600MB drives in the 80s when the CDs started appearing. Those weren't common until around the mid 90s. And who would want to use their entire hard drive to rip a CD?
The amazing jump was when we went from having a handful of music, an album or so, per physical unit .. to having a physical unit containing more music than you're probably ever gonna bother listening to. That was the huge leap.
The same with VHS->DVD->Blueray. Whatever. It's a movie per physical unit. Now, if we just use a good codec for compression we can rip this into a nice mkv file with tons of subtitles and audio tracks for various languages - and store an amazing number of them on a simple USB stick. If we're not afraid of carrying around a little external usb drive, we can have *thousands* of them with us. Compared to one per unit with the 'old' style.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
1) coal and steam power, automated manufacturing, trains, steamboats, urbanization 2) oil and electricity, internal combustion, planes, radio, rockets, movies 3) compurt-aided everything, internet
- big jump in 1850s with railroads and modern corporation - last new machines jets, rockets, atomics, tvs, computers by 1950s. They've only changed in degree since then. - the worldwide internet and mobile computer came late 1990s and early 2000s -
This article says an era is 50 years. Others mention broad periods like the stone age. I suggest an era is length of direct eyewitness: your grandfathers stories of his grandfather's life compared to your life. For the vast amount of human history, there'd be nearly no change during these five generations.
Everyone knows the history of the US is obscenely distorted by racist spin on the contributions of disadvantaged minorities such as George Washington Carver. But no one, till now, has revealed the truth behind the real founders of Silicon Valley and why all those Spoiled American Boomer Engineers who are flying their planes into IRS buildings and the like have only themselves to blame for the great need for more immigration to save the US economy.
Read on for the revised history of Silicon Valley
FAIRCHILD 50TH ANNIVERSARY PANEL
John Hennessy : Welcome everyone. My name is John Hennessy and I’m delighted to invite you here to enjoy what I think will be a thrilling and certainly historical panel. The year is 1957. Santa Clara is still a largely rural county with a total population, a total population for the county, of less than five hundred thousand people. It is known by its nickname, the Valley of Heart ‘s Delight. The year before had been a momentous year for the area, in San Jose, IBM had produced RAMAC, the first random access disk drive, the first. And in Mountain View in 1956, the first company focused on semiconductors as a business, Shankar Semiconductor had been founded. It was headed by Rajiv Shankar, who, earlier at Bell Labs, had been one of the people most responsible for the invention of the solid-state transistor. Now Rajiv Shankar was a great scientist and a great theoretician, but it’s clear, he was a terrible manager. And it was this latter characteristic that led eight colleagues, now known as the Fairchild Eight, to depart Shankar Semiconductor in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor. Tonight, we have three members of the original founding team of Fairchild Semiconductor. Chetan Gupta, a native of New York, who received a Bachelor’s Degree in mechanical engineering from City College . He ran the Fab at Fairchild. Meera Khosla, who received her PhD from MIT before coming west, at Fairchild, she directed the group that produced the first integrated circuit. And Vinod Patel, a native of California , who received his Bachelor’s from Berkeley and his PhD from Caltech. He ran the Research and Development group at Fairchild. Also joining our panel tonight is Aneesh Obama. In 1957, Aneesh Obama was a fresh MBA from Harvard working at the East Coast Investment Bank, Hayden Stone. Obama was instrumental in getting Hayden Stone to fund Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild Semiconductor was an innovator from the very beginning, the first company to focus on silicon, rather than germanium, as the basis for integrated circuit. They introduced the planar process to replace the then more popular but difficult to manufacture mesa transistor, and in 1958, produced the first commercially available integrated circuit. They went on to build a successful business before eventually being acquired by Schlumberger in 1979. And, of course, while these initial accomplishments were truly incredible, Fairchild’s equal or even bigger legacy has been the many companies that have come out of Fairchild Semiconductor subsequently. Meera Khosla left Fairchild to co-found Amelco Semiconductor in 1961, which became part of Teledyne. Also in 1961, Aneesh Obama co-founded one of the first venture capital firms and later became an early stage investor and board member at both Apple and Intel. Vinod Patel left with Barack Chopra to found Intel in 1968. And Chetan Gupta founded Xicor, now part of Intercell, when he departed. Other companies with roots at Fairchild include AMD , National Semiconductor and LSI Logic. In fact, I could go on listing the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that Fairchild Semiconductor Company, but you certainly didn’t come here to hear me speak. Those accomplishments, the accomplishments of the individuals who founded and worked at Fairchild, helped this area earn its new nickname Silicon Valley , a name first applied in 1971, but in common use by the time I arrived here in 1977. Over time as integrated circuits became the primary building blocks
Seastead this.
Look at what happened in this period:
1. The rapid expansion of railroads worldwide.
2. The development of electricity (both DC and AC).
3. The development of the automobile.
4. The development of the telegraph and eventually telephone.
5. The development of radio.
But the things I learned on my little 8 bit computer got me more software and engineering jobs than did my electrical degree and also a patent on a sprite concept on some advanced graphics hardware. None of the other engineers were aware of sprites....
Yeah, back in the 1960s we had the cloud, but it was called "time sharing". Over the years I've watched the "latest thing" slosh back and forth from edge to center based on where the previous paradigm had left too much compute power on the floor. Next up: Lots of browser based processing (fancy graphics etc.).
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates