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QuarkJets posted:Reducing the time that it takes an individual to wash clothes doesn't usually provide economic value to anyone, so your example fails your sniff test. For the vast majority of washing machine users, it's purely a time-saving device so that they can have more leisure hours. Clearly, using your own examples, the economic value generated by a device should not be the sole criteria by which we should judge its impact on the world. Yes it does provide economic value. No it wouldn't really be an oversimplification.
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Jan 30, 2016 16:18
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Wipfmetz posted:I still love my shiney new volkswagen which gives me the feeling that I could actually survive formerly lethal or crippling car accidents without any serious injury. How are you liking the fact that your car probably lost a large portion of its value from the diesel scandal, even if it's a gasoline car? Here, Volkswagen GTIs are being sold with $2000 worth of incentives now. GTIs!
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Jan 30, 2016 17:59
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foobardog posted:This is what I must say in defense about my comment on YouTube stars/Twitch streamers, etc. It's not that you didn't have ways to broadcast over the Internet earlier, or to have wide ranging communication, but now that it's so easy that random children can do it with little investment, if any. Those aren't technological changes, though. Those are social, economic, or engineering changes. For example, widespread availability of wireless broadband-speed internet is why YouTube exists now and not two decades ago when watching a video meant downloading a blurry 2MB RealMedia clip the size of a postage stamp. But broadband was around then, and so were both wireless networking and internet over cellphone signals - the reason it's widely available now and not then is because of decades of infrastructural investments and cost reductions, not because of some big technological breakthrough. Those investments and improvements are absolutely very significant, sure, but the question of the thread was about technological change. The fact that it takes time, refinement, and infrastructure for new technologies to go mainstream doesn't really make the results of that iteration into new technological discoveries in their own right.
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Jan 30, 2016 19:24
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The refinement from one-off multimillion-dollar prototype to mass-market, reliable products is part of the technological advancement process. Modern cable internet is way more advanced than a T1 line, and the fact that normal people can afford is is part of the reason why.
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Jan 30, 2016 19:27
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Pedro De Heredia posted: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. You can now buy a tablet for a few hundred dollars that's faster, has much more memory, runs off a rechargeable battery, and use it to play Candy Crush while on the toilet. I think the real problem is that people are just becoming so used to things changing all the time that they don't even notice the revolutions that are going on around them.
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Jan 30, 2016 19:34
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Woolie Wool posted:How are you liking the fact that your car probably lost a large portion of its value from the diesel scandal, even if it's a gasoline car? Here, Volkswagen GTIs are being sold with $2000 worth of incentives now. GTIs! Woolie Wool posted:The refinement from one-off multimillion-dollar prototype to mass-market, reliable products is part of the technological advancement process. Modern cable internet is way more advanced than a T1 line, and the fact that normal people can afford is is part of the reason why.
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Jan 30, 2016 19:37
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Main Paineframe posted:Those aren't technological changes, though. Those are social, economic, or engineering changes. For example, widespread availability of wireless broadband-speed internet is why YouTube exists now and not two decades ago when watching a video meant downloading a blurry 2MB RealMedia clip the size of a postage stamp. But broadband was around then, and so were both wireless networking and internet over cellphone signals - the reason it's widely available now and not then is because of decades of infrastructural investments and cost reductions, not because of some big technological breakthrough. Those investments and improvements are absolutely very significant, sure, but the question of the thread was about technological change. The fact that it takes time, refinement, and infrastructure for new technologies to go mainstream doesn't really make the results of that iteration into new technological discoveries in their own right. Cost reductions are very much technological changes because they often involve different processes. Your definition of new technology seems to be "something that's never done before", but that's hilariously reductive. The difference between broadband 20 years ago and now, for example, is roughly equivalent to the difference between lead-acid batteries and the battery in your mobile phone. To call them the same technology is disingenuous.
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Jan 30, 2016 19:42
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Woolie Wool posted:The refinement from one-off multimillion-dollar prototype to mass-market, reliable products is part of the technological advancement process. Modern cable internet is way more advanced than a T1 line, and the fact that normal people can afford is is part of the reason why. This is basically my response. You mention engineering changes as something separate from technological changes, and I don't think you can. Inventors and researchers discover technologies but engineers take it that extra path to make it useful. The technology for the Internet was around in the 60s as ARPANET, but its rise to importance came in the 90s as the platform was extended to make the Web. Or more stark, the Wright Brothers flying in 1905 is interesting, but it's the work to make it more commonly available over the 30s and 40s that made flying part of society. As a stretch, because I know it's not how most people consider technology, and perhaps because I play too much Civilization, I think social, political, and economic systems are also technology. Consider them the software of human society perhaps. Basically, organization of economic actors into a functioning system often takes novel thought and implementation of physical systems. Marxism, for example can be seen as a refinement of liberalism, which was a consideration of the flaws of mercantilism. I know that's it's a stretch, but these systems seem so important to us, but after overlooked because they are like water to fish. And leisure is cool and good, and honestly the drive should be do more with less work so we can sit around and be lazy. Leisure makes workers happier, which make them more productive. It provides time for other pursuits that may produce benefits. Quite a few advances were found as part of someone's side work. Leisure rules.
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Jan 30, 2016 19:56
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I work every day with guys from California from my office, a bar in Virginia (or possibly bed if I don't feel like getting up and putting pants on yet) and spend the spare minutes between tasks where I'm not actually busy speccing out parts for machines you'd have needed a multimillion-dollar factory to produce 20 years ago but I do in my basement for fun. My boss is actually only about 40 miles away but we've met in person like twice because why bother. But yeah nothing big's changed about the way we do work since my dad was my age and people still couldn't figure out how to synchronize two clocks if one was moving, where's my flying car dammit  A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Jan 30, 2016 |
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Jan 30, 2016 21:12
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asdf32 posted:Yes it does provide economic value. No it wouldn't really be an oversimplification. Welp I guess all of the other factors that led to the rise of the 2-income household can be discarded then, turns out all we had to do was invent the washing machine
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Jan 30, 2016 21:32
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QuarkJets posted:Welp I guess all of the other factors that led to the rise of the 2-income household can be discarded then, turns out all we had to do was invent the washing machine you're kind of unqualified to participate in a talk about work or technology if you can't figure out how shaving hours off the time spent on a recurring task by a working-age adult in every household is economically significant just because for you that adult is your mommy who cleans your dirty drawers for free
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Jan 30, 2016 21:36
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I am fairly certain that even 40 years ago it would have been inconceivable that the sons of the working middle class would lead electronic lives of leisure so utterly sybaritic that many think work and economics are things that only really happen in, like, a steel mill.
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Jan 30, 2016 21:50
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QuarkJets posted:Welp I guess all of the other factors that led to the rise of the 2-income household can be discarded then, turns out all we had to do was invent the washing machine The washing machine (and other household technologies) obviously didn't directly and exclusively lead to the rise of the 2-income household, but I don't think it's exactly stretching to say that they allowed it to happen. Their invention wasn't the only thing necessary for the change to occur, but it's hard to imagine that change occurring (or at least occurring anywhere near as quickly) without a basis in technology that accommodated it.
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Jan 30, 2016 21:57
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:you're kind of unqualified to participate in a talk about work or technology if you can't figure out how shaving hours off the time spent on a recurring task by a working-age adult in every household is economically significant just because for you that adult is your mommy who cleans your dirty drawers for free Since you're a bit slow, let me make what I'm doing more clear. I personally agree that washing machines provide economic value to the people that use them. I'm pointing out that Pedro has made some false assertions and that he has now accidentally contradicted himself: 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". Pedro De Heredia posted:A common example is the washing machine as a stand-in for domestic devices in general. You don't have to consider human beings 'industrial robots' to know that domestic work is work. It requires a lot of time and energy, and it is necessary. A combination of technologies that dramatically decreased the time and personal effort required for domestic work had a huge effect on life, since they meant that "running a household" was no longer a thing people needed to dedicate enormous amounts of time to do, and thus they could live their lives very differently. It's incorrect to claim that a change in daily life only comes from changes to time spent producing economic value, it's incorrect to claim that leisure activities don't produce economic value, and it's contradictory to say that a device that mostly increases available leisure time (which has 0 economic value, according to the incorrect terminology used here) also created a change in daily life.
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Jan 30, 2016 22:03
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Bryter posted:The washing machine (and other household technologies) obviously didn't directly and exclusively lead to the rise of the 2-income household, but I don't think it's exactly stretching to say that they allowed it to happen. Their invention wasn't the only thing necessary for the change to occur, but it's hard to imagine that change occurring (or at least occurring anywhere near as quickly) without a basis in technology that accommodated it. No worries, you and I are actually in agreement: it would be a gross oversimplification to say that the washing machine and devices like it were all that was required for the 2-income household to become commonplace, but these kinds of devices were definitely enablers.
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Jan 30, 2016 22:07
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never call anyone else slow again, you drooling goddamned moron:QuarkJets posted:Since you're a bit slow, let me make what I'm doing more clear. I personally agree that washing machines provide economic value to the people that use them. I'm pointing out that Pedro has made some false assertions and that he has now accidentally contradicted himself: QuarkJets posted:Reducing the time that it takes an individual to wash clothes doesn't usually provide economic value to anyone, so your example fails your sniff test. For the vast majority of washing machine users, it's purely a time-saving device so that they can have more leisure hours. Clearly, using your own examples, the economic value generated by a device should not be the sole criteria by which we should judge its impact on the world. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 30, 2016 22:21
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lol it's either just research and lab experiments with no impact on real life or just engineering and not real technological change
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Jan 30, 2016 22:57
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We must abandon the bourgeois decadence of high energy physics research and relativity in favour of what really matters to people's every day lives, making more money here and now.
Pussy Cartel fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Jan 30, 2016 |
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Jan 30, 2016 23:30
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Pussy Cartel posted:We must abandon the bourgeois decadence of high energy physics research and relativity in favour of what really matters to people's every day lives, making more money here and now. I mean unironically but only narrowly so.
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Jan 30, 2016 23:54
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The biggest barrier to scientific progress seems likely to be widespread poverty and unemployment blighting the coming generations due to the effects of scientific progress on the availability of paying work. The solution, as always: 
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Jan 31, 2016 00:02
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Nessus posted:The biggest barrier to scientific progress seems likely to be widespread poverty and unemployment blighting the coming generations due to the effects of scientific progress on the availability of paying work. The internationalists of 100+ years ago have been proven very correct - but they're all dead and buried so they can't say 'We told you so.'
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Jan 31, 2016 00:16
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ReadyToHuman posted:Is GDP a sufficient quantification to measure the change in people's quality of life ? Yes You realize Paul Krugman, the guy who wrote the article in the OP, is a liberal, right?
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Jan 31, 2016 00:35
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Dirk the Average posted:You're a moron. Well that hardly seems necessary.  But going back to the topic: have you guys heard of something called a complexity break? It's something I've heard of but i can't remember where. But the idea is that, the more we discover about the world, the more complicated everything gets. So it becomes harder and harder to make more breakthroughs and discoveries. That's why everything is slowing down right now. One example I saw was about the human genome. We sequenced the genome...and it turned out that just sequencing the genome isn't enough. The genes turned out to be more complecated. And then there's Moore's Law: it used to be that we could improve performance by shrinking the chips down and putting more transistors on them, but that can't be done anymore. What's left? Nothing, really. We've taken computers as far as they can go. I think this may explain why we don't see any aliens out in the universe. Because they inevitably run up against hard physical limits to progress so they can't "advance" beyond planetary limits and go to outer space.
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Jan 31, 2016 01:22
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Blue Star posted:it used to be that we could improve performance by shrinking the chips down and putting more transistors on them, but that can't be done anymore. What's left? Nothing, really. We've taken computers as far as they can go. This isn't true.
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Jan 31, 2016 01:23
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Blue Star posted:Well that hardly seems necessary. Moore's Law was never actually a law, and no one ever said that simply sequencing the genome would actually accomplish miraculous things all by itself.  Maybe you should stop making definite statements about things you don't understand at all.
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Jan 31, 2016 01:50
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icantfindaname posted:You realize Paul Krugman, the guy who wrote the article in the OP, is a liberal, right? Did not realize this was Krugman. He should stick to economics. He's basically complaining we don't look like the Jetsons, without realizing how grounded in mid-20th century life such a view of the future was. Blue Star posted:But going back to the topic: have you guys heard of something called a complexity break? It's something I've heard of but i can't remember where. But the idea is that, the more we discover about the world, the more complicated everything gets. So it becomes harder and harder to make more breakthroughs and discoveries. This is not necessarily true. Yes, attempts for given models to explain phenomena by simply extending it or making exceptions makes things complicated. But the advance is often found not by adding more details, but finding a simpler model that does a better job at covering all phenomena. While it is disappointing that quantum mechanics doesn't work for macro level physics, and that drives the search for a unified theory, it didn't need to cover them to be useful to technology and further research. The best example is the insane little adjustments that had to be made to circular and earthcentric models of the solar system that all just went away when Copernicus and then Kepler suggested, hey maybe the Sun is in the center, and maybe the orbits are elliptical. It is also super important to be suspicious of mainstream media accounts of technology because while the scientists involved often make it very clear the limitations and caveats of their research, journalists like a big story that makes it sound like we have everything all tied up, and post-scarcity is around the corner. Additionally, pressures for interesting results often favor discoveries that then turn out to not be as strong on investigation, rather than consistent reconfirmation of earlier results. Blue Star posted:And then there's Moore's Law: it used to be that we could improve performance by shrinking the chips down and putting more transistors on them, but that can't be done anymore. What's left? Nothing, really. We've taken computers as far as they can go. What's next has been multi-core systems, where multiple CPUs are available. It's of diminishing returns for average users, but for any serious computation, it stands to be great. The other aspect has been that instead of making new, fancier chips, the cheapness of current hardware and the improvement of virtual machines allows for models like cloud computing, which while definitely filled with buzzwords and problems, can be very useful for small to medium businesses. When it comes to games and things, it may get to the point where the information sent over the wire is big enough and fast enough that you don't need to have a strong computer yourself, you just need a box that talks to a strong computer. It's moving back to the original way computers worked, where computing power was not owned personally, but was available for use like a service. You just had a dumb terminal that you used to access the real computer. Blue Star posted:I think this may explain why we don't see any aliens out in the universe. Because they inevitably run up against hard physical limits to progress so they can't "advance" beyond planetary limits and go to outer space. There's a simpler and more depressing explanation. Space is too drat big. The chance that there is other intelligent life is pretty much 1. The chance that there is other intelligent life that has advanced to the point that they could communicate or reach us and are close enough to do so is much smaller.
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Jan 31, 2016 02:02
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Blue Star posted:Well that hardly seems necessary. Googling around apparently "complexity brake" is a term coined by Paul Allen to describe why he believes "the singularity" isn't right around the corner. Paul Allen is generally kind of an idiot but I think he's probably right in this case when you examine single scientific fields, as he was doing when he coined the term However, this is not a good model for understanding the general rate of human progress, since the complexity brake naturally creates new fields that never existed before. Those new fields can lead to their own breakthroughs. And breakthroughs in some fields can lead to breakthroughs in others that were previously stalled. I also think that it's inaccurate to say that we live in a time where "everything is slowing down".
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Jan 31, 2016 02:07
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You guys understand that this article is basically a commentary on a book, right? Krugman is adding his own comments to someone else's argument, and that argument (as best I can tell without having read the book in question) isn't actually about technological stagnation. It's about stagnant economic growth in the face of rapid technological change, and the ability of technology to raise standards of living. It's not about a lack of "progress" if you're defining progress to mean technological advancement. This actually seems to be the core of the argument:quote:In “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” Gordon doubles down on that theme, declaring that the kind of rapid economic growth we still consider our due, and expect to continue forever, was in fact a one-time-only event. This seems to be an economic argument tied in with technology. It's not that technology isn't advancing or that it doesn't benefit everyone, it's that technology is no longer providing the kind of growth that created the middle class in the first place. Cheap and widely available consumer items (even if they're completely transformative) don't actually provide the kind of security and increased quality of life that comes from greater wages. The focus here isn't on consumer-level advancements. I still kind of disagree based on what I can make of the argument, but only because I think the cause is purely political. We could all be benefiting from technology, we're just not.
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Jan 31, 2016 02:35
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RuanGacho posted:"The internet is just sending 1's and 0's and we just send more 1's and 0's now!" I've been on the internet since poo poo like Archie and Gopher were still things. Like I remember seeing Mosaic when it first came out. I mean it's better, but it's not really different.
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Jan 31, 2016 03:48
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:I've been on the internet since poo poo like Archie and Gopher were still things. Like I remember seeing Mosaic when it first came out. It is weird how some of the technology of the past couple decades is clearly and measurably improved, but we can also be so unimpressed by it. And measurably unimpressed. Like the earlier example of having the power of a Cray Supercomputer in our hands. Hell, given to children as Christmas presents. We use to use that sort of computer power to solve serious problems, and now we use it to play Candy Crush on the toilet.
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Jan 31, 2016 04:30
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Yeah the computing power we use to solve serious problems is now the equivalent of billions of Cray supercomputers.
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Jan 31, 2016 04:42
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:It is weird how some of the technology of the past couple decades is clearly and measurably improved, but we can also be so unimpressed by it. And measurably unimpressed. Because it's qualitatively different than "we used to have to burn whale oil and now we have electricity" or "we used to die and now we have vaccines"
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Jan 31, 2016 04:43
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:Because it's qualitatively different than "we used to have to burn whale oil and now we have electricity" or "we used to die and now we have vaccines" If you have no imagination I guess so. This is an ongoing revolution.
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Jan 31, 2016 04:47
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I'll believe it when I see it, then.
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Jan 31, 2016 04:52
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As technology becomes smarter, we become dumber. All hail our robot overlords.
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Jan 31, 2016 04:56
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Back in my day we just used the internet to warn our missile defenses of an impending Russian attack. I don't see whats so different?
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Jan 31, 2016 05:00
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QuarkJets posted:The Dirac equation is a relativistic wave equation. The Feynman path integral is the result of a relativistic description of quantum mechanics. Both of these tools are fundamental to a modern understanding of condensed matter physics. You don't need them for industrial semiconductor research, but that kind of research wouldn't even exist without relativity (basically you use relativity every time that you work in this field, you just might not realize it) Does this level of description actually benefit you when trying to describe how a laser works? This is what I'm asking. What feature of lasers requires relativity to exist? Of course, I'm sure that there are things in solid state physics that require relativity to be explained. Are lasers one of them? I will not accept an answer like: stimulated emission/lasing is just a limiting case of the a more general theory which involves sophisticated relativistic physics blah blah blah etc. etc. because sometimes generalizing doesn't really give you extra insight on how something works or doesn't add anything substantial to the explanation. It's like telling a structural engineer that he really needs to know quantum mechanics to be able to do his job well. Quantum mechanics doesn't inform him on how to design a bridge. If QM had never existed, it wouldn't have changed how the structural engineer designs bridges. Or for a more extreme example, it's like telling biologists that all of their work hinges on the existence of the Higgs Boson or some other fundamental particle that physicists spend their entire careers trying to find. But that's totally absurd. If no one had ever worried about the Higgs Boson, our understanding of biology would not have been any different. QuarkJets posted:Have you actually read Einstein's theory for stimulated emission? He invokes relativity explicitly, in both name and function. Here, go read it: http://cua.mit.edu/8.421/Papers/Einstein%201917.pdf Huh, I actually had read that before but only to section 3. The most famous part of the paper is when he postulates stimulated emission and the A and B coefficients and shows that they allow you to get the blackbody spectrum when you treat the electromagnetic field and the ideal gas with those A and B coefficients as being in thermal equilibrium. It looks like later in the paper he checks whether the gas with the A and B coefficients in thermal equilibrium with the electromagnetic field follows the Maxwell Boltzmann velocity distribution. He uses a coordinate transformation to a moving reference frame of a gas molecule in the argument and does name-drop relativity, but does the transformation in the limit of non-relativistic molecular speeds, or basically, where the theory of relativity isn't very important. Sorry, I'm not convinced that relativity is that important to stimulated emission or to the basic physics of a laser. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Jan 31, 2016 |
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Jan 31, 2016 05:49
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icantfindaname posted:You realize Paul Krugman, the guy who wrote the article in the OP, is a liberal, right? As a liberal, Paul Krugman can never be wrong nor have a bad or conflicting opinion. but fwiw I was trying to make fun of some of the posters in this thread
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Jan 31, 2016 06:11
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silence_kit posted:
Lasers carrying momentum/energy (and how much they carry) is a direct result of the theory of relativity. You need relativity to describe how a laser can have momentum, and how much energy it carries. quote:Huh, I actually had read that before but only to section 3. The most famous part of the paper is when he postulates stimulated emission and the A and B coefficients and shows that they allow you to get the blackbody spectrum when you treat the electromagnetic field and the ideal gas with those A and B coefficients as being in thermal equilibrium. Special relativity is pretty important. Are you Andrew Schlafly?
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Jan 31, 2016 06:21
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"I can read when the sun goes away now" and did they read? Yes. "I can peruse the sum of human knowledge at all times" but do you? No, you watched a Colbert video, which is no different from reading The Spectator while making GBS threads in a pot.
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Jan 31, 2016 08:25
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