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What We Get Wrong About Technology

timharford.com

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Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#51

Post by rakete »

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…

Seems weird to me to include snapchat in a list together with antibiotics and cars. And I think it kind of demonstrates your own point.

You did not name any specific antibiotic products, or car manufacturers, because those are not really that significant.

The underlying inventions though are the real technological leaps forward that, as you say, are like air: so common that we overlook them all the time.

Snapchat is just a product, I think the real invention that you overlooked is the internet.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#52

Post by honestoHeminway »

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…

I thought about that- and then it hit me. If you showed someone from 1750 a supermarket- the indentured delivery boy/girls of today would be instantly recognizeable to someone from that time. Human automatization was the "High"tech of olden times. Sometimes we advance. And sometimes we regress.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#53

Post by amelius »

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…

This is basically what scifi authors do all the time. They think: what if this technology existed, what would society look like then?

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#54

Post by hnlmorg »

wott wrote: post #50
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, life would be pretty miserable without clean running water and sewerage.

...in cities, towns and villages (any dense area). But in sparsely populated areas with dispersed housing, this is not such a big deal.

You don't think clean running water is a big deal in sparsely populated areas?

I think it's probably more of a big deal there than in towns / cities because they at least had communities where utilities could be shared. If you live miles from clean water that's a good percentage of your week wasted walking to and from the nearest well / whatever with buckets.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#55

Post by KGIII »

dalbasal wrote: post #47
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…

I think we over-emphasize elements that seem more “technological,” overestimate their importance. The printing press example is great. We credit the press because it’s mechanical and complex, but not the paper (or ink or literacy or religion). For peaches in winter, most people think of botany, refrigeration, airplanes… science. Fewer people would think of joint stock companies or shipping containers as important ena…

From the Industrial Revolution, we got interchangeable parts and standardization. I think those really had some of the largest impacts on society.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#56

Post by XorNot »

jfarlow wrote: post #11
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…

And yet the supermarket is very much possible only because of the technologies behind planes, antibiotics and snapchat. It's curious. I think the hard part, as noted, is not necessarily the materialization of 'new tech', but very much how that tech plays with all the other new tech to produce a very new society. And in that you are exactly right, the most curious parts of that new society are not the technological to…

I remember being struck by the realization of the sheer amount of infrastructure that was necessary to enable to me to wrap a petri dish in aluminium foil when I was doing research.

Like, aluminium smelters are massive...then there's the mining, the rolling, the local, national and international supply chains - all so I can keep a light sensitive chemical in the dark during a 15 minute experiment setup.

I mean this is all true if you use it in the kitchen too (which is amazing) but what struck me was the weird way that progress was enabling progress - something had to go from non-existent to consumer-cheap, and suddenly a whole bunch of science is possible to do easily and en masse.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#57

Post by KGIII »

sametmax wrote: post #42
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…

> 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? People centuries ago probably asked themself the same question. Let's just assume we are missing massive chunks of informations.

I think it hubris to consider our current understanding to be the apex. So, yes, I agree. We made use of electricity long before we understood the electron. There are many more unanswered questions and our understanding is far from complete.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#58

Post by whatusername »

adjkant wrote: post #23
autarch wrote: post #5

Obligatory plug for everyone to read The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. It was published in 1975 and nails the technology of the 90s so accurately that it's quite freaky to read.

In the same category a bit, Neuromancer. Note the publish date, 1984. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/888628.Neuromancer

Of course there is the fine line between predicting future technology and inspiring future technology.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#59

Post by titzer »

FTA: "Why not unbundle the task and give the conscious thinking to the computer, and the mindless grabbing to the human?"

The article was pretty good overall, but this one's a pet peeve of mine. We're offloading our thinking to computers and this magical "AI" in hopes that all that hard work (and possibility for error!) is going to be avoided. But we're going to find out--or perhaps not, as we slip below the dumbness horizon, no longer able to formulate self-reflective thoughts ourselves--that thinking is joyful, fun, glorious, not laborious or error prone.

And as "soft" AI advances, we just can't admit to ourselves that this, too, will fail to deliver. To wit: if something absolutely must be translated between language A and language B, in 2017 a bilingual person will still _absolutely mop the floor_ with machine translation.

Google translate: "Zum Witz: Wenn irgend etwas absolut zwischen Sprache A und Sprache B übersetzt werden soll, wird im Jahr 2017 eine zweisprachige Person den Boden mit der maschinellen Übersetzung noch niemals stoßen."

Bahaha.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#60

Post by duncanawoods »

legulere wrote: post #34

> 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.

That seems overly broad - a surviving old city tourist area might be well preserved but elsewhere, post-war city rebuilding programs were cheap, rushed and ugly. Even later development is unloved because "high-design" of the time was infected by Brutalism. These already troubled urban centres were then hollowed-out by economic troubles in the 70s leading to areas of dereliction.

Over the past few decades, urban regeneration programs have been widespread to remove the bleak post-war prefab concrete monstrosities. Unfortunately what is replacing them is cheap and uninspired compared to pre-1900 architecture so I can't see us valuing it that much in 100 years.

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