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Logistics has seriously improved greatly since 1940, which while seeming like a difference in degree, becomes a difference in kind as it becomes available to more and more "average" people. This causes much quicker delivery of goods, and often opens up small businesses to near global reach. And when the payload is digital, it has become insanely accessible. It really sounds as if he greatly, greatly underestimates what the tap of information from the Internet has caused, as well as being hyper focused on "average people". It's true that average people haven't done better, but that has vast more to do with neoliberalism and the move to a service economy than a stagnation in technology. That also does not include increases in medical technology which has caught many diseases much earlier, and provided a more positive prognosis to people. Your home may not be all that different, but the world outside is very different.
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Jan 27, 2016 03:33
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Blue Star posted:There was already the internet and websites and email and all that stuff; it's just gotten more ubiquitous and all-encompassing, and again, it's mostly our culture that has changed. We've got more social media, and we can call each other at any time, and do our banking at home, and order stuff online. That's about it. 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. In 1995 Clueless came out. If you look at it today you may be mistaken that it holds up remarkably well with the constant cell phone use. However, the point of the ubiquitous cell phone use in that movie was to satirize the rich! You're supposed to be laughing at these ridiculous people on their cell phones all the time. Ordering a book from Amazon meant it took a guaranteed week or more to get here in the 90s. At the expedited rate. Now you can often get it in a couple of days, and in many cases, even sooner, for a surcharge. I'm just about to hit my mid-30s, and the future is not what I expected. Yes, we had much higher expectations for a lot of things, but like how we laughed at the Jetsons, we can laugh at Total Recall, while still living in a greatly changed world.
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Jan 27, 2016 03:41
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Popular Thug Drink posted:But on the other hand, cheap shipping has created a global market for manufacturing labor and whoops, there goes the wage-earning basis of the first world middle class! Completely correct, but it doesn't show a result of technological stagnation, but the result of political losses by the left. Technology has been loving over the workers since 1870, if not earlier. It'll keep loving over workers.
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Jan 27, 2016 03:49
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icantfindaname posted:I would say the transformations wrought by the internet have already 'hit' though, you're not going to see massive increases in digital information going forwards Yeah, this I could agree with, but we'll see. The next big areas that are due for a revolution will be AI and biotech (perhaps both through cognitive science), and the sad thing is that while advances have been made, both problems turned out to be much harder than we thought. It's additionally very fair to say that the 50s were a big change in life, but it was not solely because of technology, but also the particular situation at that time, which is likely to not be repeated. silence_kit posted:Yeah, I agree, these things are a pretty big deal in society and earlier posters were kind of downplaying them, but are they really as big of a deal as the automobile, or electrification and plumbing? I don't think they are. I completely think so, I think as adept as we actually are with the Internet, we're just babbys at handling all this information, and it probably has a lot to do with not understanding enough about our own brain trying to synthesize it (cognitive biases are a bitch), as well as not having had gone through the struggles with it all yet. Computers have been popular for 40 years. The Internet for 20. It's like we all own Photoshop, but we only really understand how to use it MS Paint. We're sitting in 1920, saying "well, the lights are nifty, but what will we actually use this electricity for?"
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Jan 27, 2016 04:53
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Wipfmetz posted:The difference of 1870 :: 1940 has to be less noticeable than the difference of "Before Fire" :: "After Fire". Agricultural/Industrial society may just turn out to be a bubble that's going to burst any day now.
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Jan 27, 2016 21:18
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computer parts posted:That's another thing too - it seems like people are mainly concerned about the first product that can do x, rather than the first product that lets you do x easily. 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. Also underestimated is the sort of "long tail" effect, where it's now much easier to hit little niche pockets of people. Yeah, selling Kindle Erotica or Bandcamp albums is not going to let you quit your day job normally. However, it provides a path for independent income for people, even if it's just enough to buy a beer every now and them. The amount of advertising that large media companies have, and control of the system like movie studios is not going to go away anytime soon, but I really do feel that markets have opened up in a way that's pretty exciting. Go a few threads over from here, and you have people rolling their eyes at how much lovely artists make on Patreon. That type of accessible finance did not exist just a decade ago. Way back when, my friends said that Warhol was a bit wrong when he said in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. I think it's more accurate that everyone will be famous to 1500 people.
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Jan 29, 2016 23:23
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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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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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