Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure we do, they're called patents.
The US patent system has evolved into rewarding lawyers mostly.
I didn't say it was good :)
What We Get Wrong About Technology
91–100 of 127 posts
Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you read about the Toyota production system and compare it to the ford system you will see a lot of this difference. The Japanes system emphasized human skill while the ford system made humans into monkeys reapeating the same dumb operation over and over. As a Norwegian I've seen this difference between Scandinavian and American work culture. In the US there tends to be deep levels of management where the people a…
Interesting that you bring up autonomy and the military. I wonder if this has anything to do with the US naval piloting incidents of late. Previous HN commentary suggested that the Navy has become a highly bureaucratic organization where all decision making and responsibility are deferred up the command chain as far as possible.
Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? Do you honestly think that pinch-to-zoom is more world changing invention than solar panels? I could totally live without pinch-to-zoom or even momentum scroll, but I doubt we, society as we know it, would survive very long without clean and renewable energy sources.
> What? Do you honestly think that pinch-to-zoom is more world changing invention than solar panels? Yes. > I could totally live without pinch-to-zoom or even momentum scroll, but I doubt we, society as we know it, would survive very long without clean and renewable energy sources. You can live without solar panels. You likely do. Meanwhile, you became far more productive because of UX.
I still use keyboard and mouse for development purposes, so neither of your example has any impact on my productivity. Meanwhile, few percentage of my country's energy is generated by solar power (combined with wind and other renewables, that's enough to replace an old and potentially unsafe nuclear power plant, which is not a small feat) and I personally operate few panels in my summer house (and regularly keep adding more as they become cheaper and more efficient).
Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology
#94Earlier 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.
in sparsely populated areas with dispersed housing, this is not such a big deal.
Hot water and indoor plumbing you can go without. But the lack of clean running water is a massively big deal.
Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology
#95I 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…
> so common that we overlook them all the time.
And this reminds me of the definition of "progress" that goes something like this: All the things you can do (or accomplish) without thinking.
This would apply to so many things that, as you say, we overlook: Making phone calls or video calls and not worrying about all the servers, cables, wireless technology, audio components, processors, and more that comes to together all at once to make that possible. Or as someone else here mentioned the supermarket where you can go and buy far more than your basic necessities and not really concern yourself with all the various manufacturing and processing and shipping and sourcing that it took to get the products there, not to mention the machines and technology and people it took to make them all.
At a far more macro level, perhaps one of our biggest forms of "progress" in human history has simply been our shift away from the need to constantly spend all day, every day, hunting for sustenance to get thru the day and the next day and so on. We live in a world where we have a tremendous amount of automation and low-cost forms of scalable agriculture that we have freed ourselves up so much to do so many other things. We overlook this all the time because it is the very nature of progress (we don't have to think about it because we are busy thinking about other things... hopefully better things).
Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology
#96FTA: "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…
An AI can be like an electric bicycle, multiplying your existing ability. It can be like a car, working side by side. Or it can be like a self-driving car, leading your driving skills to rot with time. You're assuming the only form is the last kind. As a human, I most prefer the electric cycle but I expect most will tend towards some kind of car. For the foreseeable future, only cars and cycles will exist because we…
> I don't speak German but mixing and matching between the three, I'm guessing the ranking for this example is Bing, DeepL, Google.
It is not a good idea to rank translations that you do not understand. That's part of the problem I am trying to point out here. "Zum Witz" is not correct--at all. "_absolutely MOP die floor_" makes no sense; it's painful Danglish. And, again, the literal translation of the metaphor "mop the floor" is not a good translation.
Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology
#97I 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…
> Now that we've discovered EM, have we exhausted the basic knowledge about the world? I don't know whether there is more basic science to be discovered, but even if there isn't, there is plenty of technology to be invented within the scope of existing science. Atomically precise manufacturing, for example: we know about atoms, but our ability to work with them is still crude in the extreme.
And even if we did have atom-precise manufacturing. This could enable say, the construction of nanobots, and these could possibly be used to perform surgery or cure cancer, but making nanobots that cure cancer, even if you already have nanobots, is probably more challenging than the Apollo moon mission (how do you control a swarm of tiny spaceships to make them do useful things inside a human body?). The possibilities (and challenges) are endless.
Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
...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.
> You don't think clean running water is a big deal in sparsely populated areas?
Depends on the region. Around here for example (rural Eastern Canada), a lot of people are drawing still their water from wells on their lands.