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A very common problem I've seen on these boards with evaluating technological innovation is that when an innovation is first created, it hasn't spread yet and thus has minimal impact, and by the time it's spread and has clearly made a big impact, it's 'in the past' and doesn't count as a current innovation anymore. Basically it's nearly impossible to evaluate how impactful cutting edge innovations are, because cutting edge means they're recent and haven't had time to do much. Like let's look at something that's cutting-edge today:quote:Multiple sclerosis (MS) happens when the body’s immune system learns to attack its own nerve fibres in the same way that it learns to attack invading pathogens. Nobody really understands what causes this misplaced learning. But Dr Burt’s idea did not depend on knowing that. He just wanted to wipe the memory out, in the way that the memory of a vaccination is wiped out by chemotherapy. By 2009 Dr Burt, now at Northwestern University, in Chicago, had proved that his treatment worked in patients with the most common form of the disease, relapsing remitting MS. The treatment involves using lower-dose chemotherapy to kill the white blood cells that are responsible for attacking nerve fibres, and then rebooting the immune system using stem cells collected from the patient before treatment began. Obviously an awesome discovery if it works out. But assuming that it does end up successful, by the time this kind of treatment is common, it will have been many years since it was invented. Cars were transformative, but it took decades from when they were invented until most families had one. Note that even the Model T, when it was first released, cost 40-50% more than average income for a year. That means the equivalent price today relative to personal income would be like $40,000-45,000, not exactly what most of us would call affordable. And cars had already been around for a couple of decades at that point. Cicero fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jan 28, 2016 |
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Jan 28, 2016 20:50
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silence_kit posted:Most of the time discoveries in condensed matter physics have to actually matter to society to earn a Nobel. And in a lot of those cases, those contributions weren't fundamental physics advances, they were more like chemistry/material science advances, like with Charles Kao proposing the idea for fiber optics by recognizing that if you were to make glass very pure, it could be very transparent to infrared light. Or Shuji Nakamura perfecting the metamorphic epitaxial crystal growth of gallium nitride to enable efficient blue light-emitting diodes. I'm sure those in high physics scoffed and said that those scientists discovered no new physics when those awards were announced.
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Jan 28, 2016 21:26
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Cicero posted:A very common problem I've seen on these boards with evaluating technological innovation is that when an innovation is first created, it hasn't spread yet and thus has minimal impact, and by the time it's spread and has clearly made a big impact, it's 'in the past' and doesn't count as a current innovation anymore. Basically it's nearly impossible to evaluate how impactful cutting edge innovations are, because cutting edge means they're recent and haven't had time to do much. Yeah, and I think that's actually a consequence of the modern mindset. Like the first modern automobile was made in 1897, but it wasn't until about 15 years later that Ford started doing his assembly line, and even then it still took a lot of time before cars were really ubiquitous. That's roughly the same timeline as mobile phones today*, but people think that very little has changed in that interval. *At least for phones that are smaller than this: 
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Jan 28, 2016 21:27
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^^^ Doctor Spaceman posted:So basically you're talking out your arse. Seems like that could've been sarcastic.
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Jan 28, 2016 21:54
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Just out of curiosity, I'd like to see a comparison between the net GDP impact of electrification vs. that of personal computing. Like, it'd be easy to quell this argument if you could get raw data to see just how much the GDP changed after electricity, or internal combustion, or any of those early Industrial Revolution inventions, and compare it to more modern advances.
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Jan 29, 2016 02:12
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Batham posted:To the guy who's 30 years old and "didn't see much change in his life", did you never play video games or something? Or listen to music? Did you not notice anything about the screens you're looking at? Never read up on medical progress? Like gently caress, even how far prosthetics have progressed is mind loving blowing. How about cars? Have you stepped into a newer car the past 20 years? Or even the past 5 years? What are your measuring points for progress? I think you're referring to me. Progress in video games isn't exactly life-changing, though. It's neat, but it's not exactly like going from horse and buggies to cars and airplanes in one's lifetime. When I was a kid, the Super Nintendo was the most advanced home console. Now it's PS4 and XBox One. That's kinda neat but it doesn't revolutionize the world. Medical progress has been pretty stagnant in my lifetime, too. Now people are talking about stem cells, growing new organs and tissues from scratch, gene therapy, and even crazy poo poo like extending lifespans and giving ourselves cybernetic implants. I don't think any of that is going to happen, though. Wasn't it Nixon who declared a War on Cancer? And here we are. There's been some progress but it seems kind of step-by-step, little by little. I remember hearing about how drug development has gotten harder and more expensive. I honestly don't expect anything too exciting to happen in my lifetime, medical-wise, and I've still got 40 to 50 years left to live (optimistically).
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Jan 29, 2016 03:00
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The medical experts of the time thought cancer was caused by a virus and we could develop a vaccine for it like polio. We've since learned that 'cancer' isn't a single malady but is instead your own cell biology going haywire due to a variety of environmental and genetic factors. The investments made became the foundations of molecular biology.
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Jan 29, 2016 03:09
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silence_kit posted:Particle physics and astrophysics are "high physics" though, and are more prestigious than the more practical fields like condensed matter physics. You'll be eating these words when it turns out we all live on the boundary of a 4+1D topological superconductor.
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Jan 29, 2016 03:16
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Blue Star posted:I think you're referring to me. Progress in video games isn't exactly life-changing, though. It's neat, but it's not exactly like going from horse and buggies to cars and airplanes in one's lifetime. When I was a kid, the Super Nintendo was the most advanced home console. Now it's PS4 and XBox One. That's kinda neat but it doesn't revolutionize the world. It's gotta be sad to be 30 and already so jaded.
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Jan 29, 2016 03:27
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Blue Star posted:I think you're referring to me. Progress in video games isn't exactly life-changing, though. It's neat, but it's not exactly like going from horse and buggies to cars and airplanes in one's lifetime. When I was a kid, the Super Nintendo was the most advanced home console. Now it's PS4 and XBox One. That's kinda neat but it doesn't revolutionize the world. Why do I get the feeling you don't actually pay much attention to the field of medicine
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Jan 29, 2016 03:30
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DrSunshine posted:Just out of curiosity, I'd like to see a comparison between the net GDP impact of electrification vs. that of personal computing. Like, it'd be easy to quell this argument if you could get raw data to see just how much the GDP changed after electricity, or internal combustion, or any of those early Industrial Revolution inventions, and compare it to more modern advances. Is GDP a sufficient quantification to measure the change in people's quality of life ?
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Jan 29, 2016 03:54
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ReadyToHuman posted:Is GDP a sufficient quantification to measure the change in people's quality of life ? Median income might be more meaningful. Ideally it would be median hours worked but that assumes people have a choice and are not forced to work part time. I think energy consumption was used as a metric for technological advancement for a time but that has remained stagnant on a per capita basis for a long time as appliances and cars got more efficient.
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Jan 29, 2016 04:17
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This is the stupidest proposition ever. In the 1970s, designing something as simple as a cylinder head could take you days just to draw the blueprint. If you made a mistake, say forgetting to take part of it's intended shape into account when drawing it from some sides, you would have to start over. Then you would have to wait maybe a month for the machine shop guys to grind you one. Then you would test it. If it did not work as expected, you would have to quite literally go back to the drawing board. Because of this, the sheer cost of developing replacements meant that passenger cars were using only slightly modified engines from the 1950s and 60s (Ford windsor, Chevy small block, A-series etc) into the 1990s. This was true of literally everything. Integrated circuits were done on paper. Crash safety was developed by people throwing cars off cliffs and going "oh well, I guess we'll do better when we replace this model in 5 years". It's now 2016. We have extremely fast computers with bitmapped displays everywhere, even in children's bedrooms. Engineers can design and run test simulations of hundreds of iterations of their projects without going further away from their desks than the coffee machine. Every few years engines are obsoleted, because the rate of development is so high. 35MPG has gone from average to incredibly poor over the past fifteen years as Ford just shat out a 125hp/l engine the size of a pencil sharpener. I now, for some reason, own a machine that runs UNIX. That's a mainframe operating system used by scientists. This machine fits in my jeans pocket and I use it as a camera because a real camera would cost more money. Technology is not declining. For it to decline we would have to go backwards, we would have to trade our LCD tvs for CRTs, replace our gas boilers with coal fires. Technological decline is a loving stupid thing to suggest is happening. Our technological development isn't even stagnating. It's massively accelerating.
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Jan 29, 2016 04:20
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mobby_6kl posted:^^^ This graph is related to something else going on product life cycles, they are short as poo poo. The whole supply chain, from raw materials to point of sale of a new product, is incredibly compacted now. Inventory depreciates for most final products shockingly fast compared to historical time frames. This is across most product classes too. Got to get your poo poo designed, produced, and transported quicker now to be competitive. Then it goes stale/out of style/ obsolete quicker than ever before.
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Jan 29, 2016 04:45
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HorseLord posted:This is the stupidest proposition ever. Oh yeah, the large advances in quality control is another major shift in the past 50-60 years. Back in the day they didn't "make things better", they just hoped and prayed that they could catch all of the defective ones before they left the factory. These days you can have fine tuned control over your manufacturing process and make it so that even though there are defects, they're extremely minimal (in the single digit parts per million or billion range).
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Jan 29, 2016 05:16
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silence_kit posted:Some physicists spend their entire careers building refrigerators to cool things down to temperatures which are small fractions of a Kelvin so that they can study what happens at such low temperatures. Turns out that normal people on Earth at about room temperature don't really care about what happens at milli-Kelvin temperatures, and they don't want to pay for the cost of the refrigeration. What's going to hold back scientific progress isn't those egghead ivory tower physicists who think they're better'n'me makin' a frigerator to get down to temperatures noones ever heard of when 40 degrees is enough to keep my beer cold. If anything holds back 21st century science, it will be idiots who think we should hold our research priorities hostage to what bigger idiots like Sen Tom Coburn (R, OK) "want to pay for"
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Jan 29, 2016 05:35
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That has always been the problem - the President can't just say 'I'm giving scientists more money to research biochemistry' he has to promise a cure for cancer.
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Jan 29, 2016 05:39
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VitalSigns posted:What's going to hold back scientific progress isn't those egghead ivory tower physicists who think they're better'n'me makin' a frigerator to get down to temperatures noones ever heard of when 40 degrees is enough to keep my beer cold. Yeah fuckin idiots holding to the democratic process If only we had an ultra-rational dictator to force us into the future
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Jan 29, 2016 05:47
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Cicero posted:A very common problem I've seen on these boards with evaluating technological innovation is that when an innovation is first created, it hasn't spread yet and thus has minimal impact, and by the time it's spread and has clearly made a big impact, it's 'in the past' and doesn't count as a current innovation anymore. It's possible (though expensive) today to drive your collision-sensing, auto breaking autopiloted car to work, where you'll collaborate with someone across the globe, make changes to a document without having to physically create revision after revision, edit a video in a few hours, check on the UPS guy delivering a package remotely with your IPdoorbell, check traffic and make on-the-spot GPS assisted changes to your route, and arrive to a freshly cooled home because your Nest remembered that you get there around 5:30 so it started cranking the A/C at 5:15. FilthyImp fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Jan 29, 2016 |
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Jan 29, 2016 05:50
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FilthyImp posted:make on-the-spot GPS assisted changes to your route gently caress yeah, this. My wife and I were just talking the other day about how amazing it is that over our lifetimes roadtrips have gone from pulling out an atlas to plan the route to printing out mapquest directions to printing out slightly better google maps directions to using google maps / apple maps on the phone to using waze / google maps equipped with waze reporting for real-time changes in your route based on local traffic conditions. Saves a little time on my daily commute and a ton of time on road trips. loving futuristic.
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Jan 29, 2016 06:25
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Fojar38 posted:Yeah fuckin idiots holding to the democratic process If the public trust and democratic will don't exist to create or sustain such an agency because of widespread ignorance about science, the solution to that is education, again not dictatorship.
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Jan 29, 2016 07:08
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A caveman posted:Well, yes. This "wheel" is certainly an interesting device, and many people have them, but they have not changed our lives in a particularly meaningful way. The ivory-tower intellectuals spend time and taxpayer dollars devising rounder wheels out of exotic materials for no purpose other than to secure research grants - but the wheel has not revolutionized our lives! My cave looks very much the same as my grandfather's cave, and he was around for the development of fire. Ah, fire! Now there's a technology for you, boys. I tell you, the whole of human history can be divided into pre- and post-fire eras. We simply have not developed anything as impactful and life-changing for the average man as a roaring cave-fire. The conclusion is inevitable, gentlemen. We're in an age of technological decline!
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Jan 29, 2016 08:41
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silence_kit posted:Most of the time discoveries in condensed matter physics have to actually matter to society to earn a Nobel. And in a lot of those cases, those contributions weren't fundamental physics advances, they were more like chemistry/material science advances, like with Charles Kao proposing the idea for fiber optics by recognizing that if you were to make glass very pure, it could be very transparent to infrared light. Or Shuji Nakamura perfecting the metamorphic epitaxial crystal growth of gallium nitride to enable efficient blue light-emitting diodes. I'm sure those in high physics scoffed and said that those scientists discovered no new physics when those awards were announced. What makes you sure about this? I'm actually a physicist and I'd never even heard the term "high physics" until your post, so I'm almost certain that you just made it up. Did you think that "high energy physics" is just energy physics but where all of the researchers are really smug? Is your stepdad an astrophysicist or something? What would cause you to even write something like this. silence_kit posted:I'm not intimately familiar with the history of the steam engine *cough* or the history of scientific progress in general, really, but  anyway I guessquote:Providing like a one part in a million correction or whatever (I've heard that the correction due to special relativity and the correction due to general relativity have opposite signs and thus partially cancel lol) to GPS calculations of position is the only real application of relativity that I have ever heard trotted out. An understanding of relativity is a necessary foundation for a ton of discoveries, especially in quantum mechanics. Countless modern marvels that you take for granted every day were made possible by an understanding of special relativity
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Jan 29, 2016 09:52
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Everyone else in the thread brought up GPS several times but what a lot of people don't realize is that you need relativity for an absolutely insane number of things. We'd be hilariously less advanced without an understanding of it. Goodbye medical imaging, nuclear power, everything that uses a laser, etc.
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Jan 29, 2016 10:02
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Blue Star posted:I think you're referring to me. Progress in video games isn't exactly life-changing, though. It's neat, but it's not exactly like going from horse and buggies to cars and airplanes in one's lifetime. When I was a kid, the Super Nintendo was the most advanced home console. Now it's PS4 and XBox One. That's kinda neat but it doesn't revolutionize the world. Yeah, a politician declaring war on an entire class of diseases doesn't really accomplish much, especially coming from a guy who kept trying to slash research funding to the bone. That's not really a meaningful point, though. What is meaningful is that cancer survivor rates steadily rise every year thanks to medical advancements that you believe aren't happening. Step-by-step, little by little progress is how technological development and scientific research has always occurred. People like to look at the big dates of "discovery" and "invention", but those dates were always predated by years, decades, or even centuries of slow, agonizing effort.
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Jan 29, 2016 10:16
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Blue Star posted:I think you're referring to me. Progress in video games isn't exactly life-changing, though. It's neat, but it's not exactly like going from horse and buggies to cars and airplanes in one's lifetime. When I was a kid, the Super Nintendo was the most advanced home console. Now it's PS4 and XBox One. That's kinda neat but it doesn't revolutionize the world. Are you loving kidding me? Cancer death rates after 5 years are plummeting and we're just getting started with immunotherapies. When I had a Super Nintendo my dad died of leukemia and doctors couldn't really do much. Five years ago my father-in-law had a really aggressive tumor killed with Gleevec, which by oncology standards is the Model T of cancer therapeutics. Drug development is harder and more expensive because it's doing more. It takes an average of 2.3 billion in R&D and 10 years to develop a new drug these days, but when it comes down to things like defeating type two diabetes, it's a drat bargain. Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 10:26 on Jan 29, 2016 |
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Jan 29, 2016 10:17
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foobardog posted:As I've said in another thread, this is not small potatoes. Ordering stuff online is huge. Being able to produce your own media and reach an audience like youtube "stars" is huge. Platforms like Bandcamp are huge. gently caress, we all have GPS units in our pockets and can be reached at any time. That's huge. No, Youtube and Bandcamp aren't huge. What a dumb statement.
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Jan 29, 2016 10:25
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Batham posted:To the guy who's 30 years old and "didn't see much change in his life", did you never play video games or something? Or listen to music? Did you not notice anything about the screens you're looking at? Never read up on medical progress? Like gently caress, even how far prosthetics have progressed is mind loving blowing. How about cars? Have you stepped into a newer car the past 20 years? Or even the past 5 years? What are your measuring points for progress? I don't know if this is addressed in the book (it isn't addressed in the review), but there is a difference between types of scientific progress and advances. There are scientific advancements which allow for massive changes in the structure of the economy, by increasing productivity dramatically, reconfiguring what work is, and opening up a plethora of new avenues for employment, and scientific advancements that … don't. There are technologies that change the fabric of society, the way we are organized (usually because of their relationship to economics).. and technologies that don't. That a technology doesn't change society doesn't mean that it didn't take effort or that it doesn't represent scientific progress. It just means its effects on everyone's lives are minimal. Video games are a good example of that. Regardless of the size of the videogame industry, they are largely unimportant and trivial. They are a leisure activity which people do in their spare time. The large-scale technological progress that people are saying has stopped is the progress that creates the spare time that you use to play video games. We haven't quite had that yet. Supposedly it's coming, which is why there's threads about how 'everything will be automated' often. But it hasn't happened. Advances in medicine are obviously much more important than video games, but it's difficult to see how these advances will reconfigure economic and social life anytime soon. Certainly it's difficult to see how they will exponentially increase the economy's productivity. Advances in medicine can improve human labor, but we're doing quite well there already, as a vast chunk of people make it to retirement age and can be 'productive'. People being retired for longer isn't going to necessarily be a hugely positive change for society (it's already kind of a problem). The person who is 30 years old and hasn't seen much change is mostly correct. I am 30 years old too. If I look at my father's life, it's fundamentally not that different than mine. We both grew up with no expectation of dying as children, we both went to school and then college. We do more or less the same thing (do calculations). We have weekends off. It's essentially the same life. There are differences, of course. Technology has advanced a lot. What he had to calculate using an enormous computer, I can calculate in a personal computer. I have access to tools that he didn't have. But it's tools to do the same work. Pedro De Heredia fucked around with this message at 11:23 on Jan 29, 2016 |
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Jan 29, 2016 11:09
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Pedro De Heredia posted:No, Youtube and Bandcamp aren't huge. What a dumb statement. In the last 25 years we have gone from pretty much nothing to three billion people in constant communication with each other and youtube, twitter, etc. is how it happens. Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter were all launched (pretty much) between 2004-2006. In a decade or less they have had a serious impact on politics, education, science, and armed conflict (for better or worse). Like, Instagram by itself isn't a vehicle of revolution or whatever, but collectively these things have absolutely changed the daily lives of the vast majority of people in the first world, and a very quickly growing chunk of the developing world. I agree that becoming a popular entertainer on one of these services is neither here nor there, though.
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Jan 29, 2016 11:19
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Pedro De Heredia posted:I don't know if this is addressed in the book (it isn't addressed in the review), but there is a difference between types of scientific progress and advances. There are scientific advancements which allow for massive changes in the structure of the economy, by increasing productivity dramatically, reconfiguring what work is, and opening up a plethora of new avenues for employment, and scientific advancements that … don't. There are technologies that change the fabric of society, the way we are organized (usually because of their relationship to economics).. and technologies that don't. That a technology doesn't change society doesn't mean that it didn't take effort. Good thing advances made in robotics and automation in the past 40 years are going to reconfigure social and economic life then eh?
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Jan 29, 2016 11:19
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Also, economies have become much more diverse in the last few decades and big technological innovation are less likely to affect a diverse economy all at once. In the 19th century almost all labour was about performing simple, repetitive manual tasks. Now we have all kinds of jobs, jobs like sandwich artists, dog stylists or feng shui consultants. Now, if you have a breakthrough in the sandwich artists industry, like for example a sandwich that can spontaneously self-assemble itself within seconds and without human involvement, the dog stylist is not gonna profit from that in any way!
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Jan 29, 2016 11:34
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Onion Knight posted:In the last 25 years we have gone from pretty much nothing to three billion people in constant communication with each other and youtube, twitter, etc. is how it happens. I don't really agree. I don't think these things have had a very serious impact. Certainly not economically. I could say the same thing about cable television and no one is going to hail that as a technological and social breakthrough. The internet is incredibly useful and can increase productivity, but a fair amount of change had already happened because of the telephone, radio, etc. And those technologies are old as hell. Youtube is a great example because the vast majority of Youtube stars, as you mentioned, can't make a living off of Youtube. They can't. They are producing no value (in their content) and they are not receiving money from their work. So their ability to fundamentally alter their life because of this technology is practically non-existent, in the long run. So it isn't really important. A change in daily life isn't "how you spend the time you have where you don't produce economic value for yourself or someone else". Pedro De Heredia fucked around with this message at 11:40 on Jan 29, 2016 |
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Jan 29, 2016 11:38
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Pedro De Heredia posted:Youtube is a great example because the vast majority of Youtube stars, as you mentioned, can't make a living off of Youtube. They can't. They are producing no value (in their content) and they are not receiving money from their work. So their ability to fundamentally alter their life because of this technology is practically non-existent in the long run. So it isn't important! Which is true of the majority of musicians and other artists. That, obviously, doesn't mean that musical instruments or paint isn't important inventions.
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Jan 29, 2016 11:40
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If you compare your life to your dad's life and think to yourself "yeah this is the same, nothing really significant was created between 1980 and now" then you just aren't paying attention.
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Jan 29, 2016 11:48
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Pedro De Heredia posted:A change in daily life isn't "how you spend the time you have where you don't produce economic value for yourself or someone else". Actually it seems like the exact opposite of that would be true. If it used to take me 1 hour to walk to work, but then I get a car and and suddenly it takes me 15 minutes to drive to work and I spend the other 45 minutes reading a book or doing other leisure activities, that's a pretty substantial improvement in my daily life. Commuting and reading a book are both activities that produce no economic value. Do you really consider activities to be only worth doing if they produce economic value? Is your free time really worthless to you unless it's spent churning out a profit? That sounds like a boring, awful life, and also what economic value are you generating by posting?
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Jan 29, 2016 11:58
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Blue Star posted:Medical progress has been pretty stagnant in my lifetime, too. Now people are talking about stem cells, growing new organs and tissues from scratch, gene therapy, and even crazy poo poo like extending lifespans and giving ourselves cybernetic implants. I don't think any of that is going to happen, though. Wasn't it Nixon who declared a War on Cancer? And here we are. There's been some progress but it seems kind of step-by-step, little by little. I remember hearing about how drug development has gotten harder and more expensive. I honestly don't expect anything too exciting to happen in my lifetime, medical-wise, and I've still got 40 to 50 years left to live (optimistically). You're a moron. Some of the stuff you're talking about is theoretical, other bits of it has already happened. We have already grown and implanted artificial bladders. Sure, the bladder is an extremely simple organ, but that's the entire point - it's a first step. And that happened a decade ago. Even then, growing a custom organ to order isn't the holy grail we're looking for because you can't mass produce them and people who need organs often need those organs immediately. Ideally, we'd have organs that could just be pulled off the shelf and implanted into people who need them (and before you ask, yes, people are working on that). We've gone from mechanical heart valves to better mechanical heart valves, to tissue heart valves that were nothing more than the aortic root of a pig, to custom-made tissue heart valves made out of the pericardial sac of a cow's heart, to heart valves that can be delivered via a catheter in the span of about fifty years. We've actually been progressing at a rate where by the time a patient would need a new heart valve, they're already two generations of heart valve past the one they first received. And, because I know you're not familiar with how the medical industry works, it takes around 10-15 years for a product to hit the market. The other thing you probably missed is the last part of what I said - a transcatheter heart valve is one that is delivered through a catheter. This means no open heart surgery. We can actually operate on your heart without cracking your chest open. You can call what we're doing in this field step-by-step and incremental progress, but what's actually happening is that each new generation of heart valve broadens who can receive a new heart valve. Every improvement hits new patient populations and helps new people live longer, better lives. The biggest breakthrough so far is the transcatheter heart valve, which lets us operate on people who are too sick to receive a heart valve in any other way. Medicine is doing some absolutely amazing things, and heart valves are just one example of the amount of progress we've been making. Stuff is changing incredibly quickly (especially accounting for the 10-15 year lead time before technologies hit hospitals) across just about every aspect of medicine.
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Jan 29, 2016 12:26
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Pedro De Heredia posted:I don't really agree. I don't think these things have had a very serious impact. Certainly not economically. I could say the same thing about cable television and no one is going to hail that as a technological and social breakthrough. The internet is incredibly useful and can increase productivity, but a fair amount of change had already happened because of the telephone, radio, etc. And those technologies are old as hell. This seems to me an extremely myopic view of what constitutes an impact! A change in daily life is absolutely more than "do you have a job that didn't exist before [technology x]?". Do you think the economic impact of Youtube starts and ends at how many dollars are paid to content creators? Do you think the social, political, and psychological impact of Youtube and technologies like it is negligible or non-existent? Do you believe the internet occupies the same socioeconomic space as the telephone? How would you describe the economic impact of the internet? Cable television aside, would you admit that television in general was a technological and - especially - social breakthrough that fundamentally changed the way humans interact with culture, at least in the developed world? QuarkJets posted:If you compare your life to your dad's life and think to yourself "yeah this is the same, nothing really significant was created between 1980 and now" then you just aren't paying attention.
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Jan 29, 2016 13:09
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QuarkJets posted:Actually it seems like the exact opposite of that would be true. If it used to take me 1 hour to walk to work, but then I get a car and and suddenly it takes me 15 minutes to drive to work and I spend the other 45 minutes reading a book or doing other leisure activities, that's a pretty substantial improvement in my daily life. Commuting and reading a book are both activities that produce no economic value. My point isn't that activities are only worth doing if they produce economic value. My point is that technologies that directly or indirectly result in massive increases in productivity and quality of life have a much greater potential for causing wide-ranging changes in society and life than technologies that don't. A lot of the technologies that people are mentioning in this thread don't really result in a massive increase in anything, and a lot of them do result in massive changes to society but people are focusing on silly aspects of them instead. Your earlier paragraph is a good example of this. You talk about the automobile, an incredibly important invention, and talk about it in terms of how it reduces your commute, which gives you time to read a book. Then you say commuting and reading a book 'produce no economic value'. You might as well have said the car is good because it protects you from the sun. The automobile is incredibly important economically and socially, because of transportation of goods and people, and since it is a personal vehicle its prominence results in enormous changes in both the city (because it is now organized around movement of cars instead of pedestrians) and outside of it (people can now live considerably farther away from their work, which leads to different distributions of population and things like that). Anosmoman posted:Which is true of the majority of musicians and other artists. That, obviously, doesn't mean that musical instruments or paint isn't important inventions. As a response to my point, this ends up comparing 'paint' to 'Youtube', which isn't a remotely good comparison. The music industry and entertainment industry have grown partly because of technology, because it gave the ability to record and broadcast performance, and eventually to create it from scratch. The internet as a distribution channel is certainly influential in the music industry and entertainment industries, but other technologies were more influential (so influential that they basically created those industries). The point of the original article is that current technology hasn't created changes anywhere near as big as older technologies, which is definitely true for music and performance. Pedro De Heredia fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Jan 29, 2016 |
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Jan 29, 2016 13:27
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Excuse me, but what did your fire exactly improve? Sure, cooked mammoth is tastier than the raw one, but would you call it truly paradigm - breaking? Four hundred moons ago, chief Gog promised we may eventually be going to make better tools using fire, but have you seen any real improvements? Last I heard, people from the neighboring tribe started to make boats from burned-out tree trunks, but they are too dangerous and prone to faults to become something more than expensive toys for people with too much free time. The things that really changed our lives were rocks and sticks. All those newfangled things you call advanced - flint knives, clubs, flintstones, fishing rods - are only incremental upgrades of these two earliest tools.
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Jan 29, 2016 13:54
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QuarkJets posted:Everyone else in the thread brought up GPS several times but what a lot of people don't realize is that you need relativity for an absolutely insane number of things. We'd be hilariously less advanced without an understanding of it. Goodbye medical imaging, nuclear power, everything that uses a laser, etc. Why do you need relativity to understand imaging and how lasers work? I realize that the following thing I'm about to point out is not totally relevant evidence, but Shuji Nakamura, the Nobel Prize winner I mentioned before, is often credited for demonstrating the first blue semiconductor laser. He has a Masters-level electrical engineering education and probably was never taught special relativity. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Jan 29, 2016 |
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Jan 29, 2016 14:51
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