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What We Get Wrong About Technology

timharford.com

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Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#31

Post by WA »

donw wrote: post #9

I suspect that it is easy to fixate on fantasies of massive technological leaps forward, because the truly revolutionary changes that underpin our lives are like air: so common that we overlook them all the time. If you were to sit down with a person from, say, 1750, and wanted to explain the modern world, you would probably tell them about things like antibiotics, cars and planes, snapchat, that sort of thing. All t…

Super cheap hormone-free contraception applied to men, not women:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_spe...

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#32

Post by mrexroad »

donw wrote: post #9

I suspect that it is easy to fixate on fantasies of massive technological leaps forward, because the truly revolutionary changes that underpin our lives are like air: so common that we overlook them all the time. If you were to sit down with a person from, say, 1750, and wanted to explain the modern world, you would probably tell them about things like antibiotics, cars and planes, snapchat, that sort of thing. All t…

IIRC, there was a Reddit thread where they asked elderly (or elderly relatives of redditers) what the greatest technological advancement was during their lifetime, and indoor plumbing was more of a leap than the Saturn V taking humans to the moon and back.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#33

Post by vinchuco »

mrexroad wrote: post #32
donw wrote: post #9

I suspect that it is easy to fixate on fantasies of massive technological leaps forward, because the truly revolutionary changes that underpin our lives are like air: so common that we overlook them all the time. If you were to sit down with a person from, say, 1750, and wanted to explain the modern world, you would probably tell them about things like antibiotics, cars and planes, snapchat, that sort of thing. All t…

IIRC, there was a Reddit thread where they asked elderly (or elderly relatives of redditers) what the greatest technological advancement was during their lifetime, and indoor plumbing was more of a leap than the Saturn V taking humans to the moon and back.

A big effect in a small area vs a small effect in a large area [?]. The same volume of water in two cylinders of short and long width. We have prizes for big problems in mathematics and science, but rarely focus on enablers. The tribe rewards the hunter when he comes back with deer, not so much the one that perfects the hunting spears (tools).

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#34

Post by legulere »

> plausible that LA would look much the same

This is actually something I liked in contrast to earlier futurism. If I look around me here in Europe I see that buildings rarely get removed once they stand. The last time the face of cities here changed was after the Second World War. If I look at pictures from the 60s rarely anything changed, except maybe the introduction of some pedestrian zones.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#35

Post by lordnacho »

I wonder if the great leap he mentions (1870-1970) is mostly from the discovery of electromagnetism.

It would seem to be magical. Here's this thing that allows you to move huge amounts of power over vast distances, but deposit it in whatever tiny portions you like, in whatever room you want, and it's so easy you run the wires along your existing walls.

The same force allows you to send both signal and power through thin air. And if you don't want it there, you can shield from it.

Or you can make a motor quite elegantly by winding some wires.

And you can manipulate it so finely that you can do calculations with teeny tiny amounts of it. And store the results.

But one thing I was wondering was how much it depends on basic science. Now that we've discovered EM, have we exhausted the basic knowledge about the world? Is every tech going forward just refinements on particular aspects of nature, or is it unlimited how we combine things?

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#36

Post by adrianN »

lordnacho wrote: post #35

I wonder if the great leap he mentions (1870-1970) is mostly from the discovery of electromagnetism. It would seem to be magical. Here's this thing that allows you to move huge amounts of power over vast distances, but deposit it in whatever tiny portions you like, in whatever room you want, and it's so easy you run the wires along your existing walls. The same force allows you to send both signal and power through t…

Quantum computers are still in the "we have discovered the basic science, but the engineering is lacking" phase. If we'd manage to make them work as amazingly well as classical computers we could do some things we're currently struggling with much better. Foremost anything that has to do with quantum mechanical simulations, for example designing new drugs, creating useful protein nanomachines, predicting material properties...

Another cool step up in terms of technology would be the manipulation of black holes. Black holes are, via Hawking radiation, excellent mass->useful energy converters. If we manage to create some small black holes we could for example travel much faster around the universe, without having to create and store dangerous amounts of antimatter.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#37

Post by waivek »

randomdrake wrote: post #6

> Jennifer and the many other programmes like her are examples of a “voice-directed application” — just software and a simple, inexpensive earpiece. Such systems have become part of life for warehouse workers: a voice in their ear or instructions on a screen tell them where to go and what to do, down to the fine details. If 13 items must be collected from a shelf, Jennifer will tell the human worker to pick five, the…

Furthermore, if you look at the kind of automation that was developed, you see precisely what workers in the early labor movement were complaining about: being turned into mindless tools of production. I mean, automation could have been designed in such a way as to use the skills of skilled machinists and to eliminate management—there’s nothing inherent in automation that says it can’t be used that way. But it wasn’t, believe me; it was used in exactly the opposite way. Automation was designed through the state system to demean and degrade people—to de-skill workers and increase managerial control. And again, that had nothing to do with the market, and it had nothing to do with the nature of the technology: it had to do with straight power interests. So the kind of automation that was developed in places like the M.I.T. Engineering Department was very carefully designed so that it would create interchangeable workers and enhance managerial control—and that was not for economic reasons. I mean, study after study, including by management firms like Arthur D. Little and so on, show that managers have selected automation even when it cuts back on profits—just because it gives them more control over their workforce.

See, the Luddites are always accused of having wanted to destroy machinery, but it’s been known in scholarship for a long time that that’s not true—what they really wanted to do was to prevent themselves from being de-skilled, and Noble talks about this in his book. The Luddites had nothing against machinery itself, they just didn’t want it to destroy them, they wanted it to be developed in such a way that it would enhance their skills and their power, and not degrade and destroy them—which of course makes perfect sense. And that sentiment runs right throughout the working-class movements of the nineteenth century, actually—and you can even see it today.

- from Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#38

Post by ape4 »

Animats wrote: post #12

The article mentions "Jennifer", which is the real-world implementation of Marshall Brain's "Manna 1.0". Here's a video of it in action.[1] This is another example of "machines should think, people should work.". The computer is the boss. That may be the future. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC-ReBX0icU

I can see people absolutely hating Jennifer.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#39

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

donw wrote: post #9

I suspect that it is easy to fixate on fantasies of massive technological leaps forward, because the truly revolutionary changes that underpin our lives are like air: so common that we overlook them all the time. If you were to sit down with a person from, say, 1750, and wanted to explain the modern world, you would probably tell them about things like antibiotics, cars and planes, snapchat, that sort of thing. All t…

"What would probably really impress the hell out of them would be a supermarket, though."

At the end of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's film Tout va bien there is a very long take, a panning shot that sweeps back and forth across a Carrefour hypermarket from just outside the cashiers, showing you the whole breadth of departments: fresh veg, canned goods, clothes, etc. I was amazed by this – the whole hypermarket format commonplace to us today and seemingly a development of modernity, was already completely in place by late 1971 and virtually nothing has changed since (except bar-code checkout).

So, maybe development on that particular sphere of human existence stopped for a long time. We in 2017 know that we might be on the cusp of drone delivery, but if someone from that near future went back in time to the 1980s and showed it to a customer in a hypermarket, that might have blown their minds just like your 1750s guy.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#40

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

WA wrote: post #31
donw wrote: post #9

I suspect that it is easy to fixate on fantasies of massive technological leaps forward, because the truly revolutionary changes that underpin our lives are like air: so common that we overlook them all the time. If you were to sit down with a person from, say, 1750, and wanted to explain the modern world, you would probably tell them about things like antibiotics, cars and planes, snapchat, that sort of thing. All t…

Super cheap hormone-free contraception applied to men, not women: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_spe...

Men only need a contraception like that if they are actually going to be having sex. What if the future is more men using porn and avoiding actual physical intimacy with a woman? It’s already easy to find in Japan or nerd circles men who think that actual relationships are more trouble than they are worth.
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