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"There's hardly been any meaningful innovation in the last few decades," they said, speaking to an instantly-updating discussion forum frequented by thousands of people across the globe.TheImmigrant posted:I'm 40 years old, and came of age before the Internet was really a thing. I didn't send my first email until I was a freshman in college, and that was over what today seems like Paleolithic university intranet. It would be difficult to overstate how much the Internet has changed life. The smart phone is another enormous development whose influence on social interaction hasn't even fully shaken out yet. We live in a world where even refugees have access to a constantly-updating corpus of globally accessible knowledge that they use to find services, where they can instantly communicate with friends and relatives across the entire planet at all times. There also seems to be a double standard with regards to what innovation is considered revolutionary vs incremental. Could people get around and carry their goods before cars? Sure, via horses, trains, and boats. Cars just made it easier and faster. See? Merely incremental innovation! Cicero fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Jan 28, 2016 |
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Jan 28, 2016 18:57
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:59 |
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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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A big one that I don't think has been brought up: weather prediction. In particular, while normal weather prediction may be just a nicety, being able to see severe weather like blizzards or hurricanes multiple days out is incredibly useful and life-saving.
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Jan 29, 2016 23:13
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