Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What We Get Wrong About Technology

timharford.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 127 posts

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#101

Post by norea-armozel »

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 one of the future innovations that will seem baffling to some of us will be mostly social and legal. In particular, I suspect the concept of income as a human right will become a reality. I won't debate the exact nature of why this will happen other than if you look at the rate of which wealth production has taken and how much of it is concentrated today it's inevitable that it won't stay that course much longer.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#102

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

When I am thinking about technological advance in my lifetime, the first thing that comes to mind is Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon parking on a bridge and pulling his mobile phone out of the trunk. It was so cool...

The reality, 35 years later, is the cheap, ubiquitous, high-speed, mobile access to the world's knowledge and in fact, access to most of humanity. When I press 'add comment', nearly 4 billion human beings can immediately upvote it.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#103

Post by dalbasal »

larsiusprime wrote: post #84
dalbasal wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed! We also tend to discount the unintended consequences. For instance, the printing press was probably a major catalyst in sparking witch hunts, which perhaps has some lessons for modern day social media: https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept09/2009/10/31/unintended-con...

Yep. Though specifically to printing, I was taught in school about the printing press leading to the protestant reformation and it's consequences. Witch hunts might be considered a part of that.

The same thing might be happening right now. It's widely accepted that online media revolutionized the political landscape. In Europe and the states we saw centrist parties lose control of the agenda, and the empowerment of fringier politics. Trump, LePenn, alt-right, Brexit, etc.

In the middle east we saw a bigger earlier impact: the arab spring protests are widely credited to online media.

This is much more controversial, but I think the ISIS family of religious phenomenon (and many less headline grabbing ones) has a Luther-Gutenberg relationship with online media.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#104

Post by Cybiote »

titzer wrote: post #96
Cybiote wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yet, together with the machine, given no other recourse, I would have been able to extract the essence. As an example, I originally missed your english text and thought the task was to translate the german. I ran the garbled german through a translation engine and got something that made not much sense. It was still enough for me to guess that the intended meaning should not be too distant from "a bilingual speaker would leave the machine translator in the dust".

For what it's worth, I consequently ran this by a native german speaker. It's perfectly reasonable to rank them, understanding is not a binary proposition.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#106

Post by kazen44 »

KGIII wrote: post #55
dalbasal wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

probably the most important invention of the industrial revolution is the screw-cutting lathe by Henry Maudslay[1]

Without the screw cutting lathe, precision parts where impossible to make. Without machine tools, creating basically any other machine that we use today would be impossible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Maudslay

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#107

Post by Robotbeat »

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…

You're quite right about EM, I think.

And by the way, I think the lithium battery enhances this dramatically because it makes it practical for EM-based power to be mobile, not just stationary. It's a little like how coal enabled machine power to move away from rivers (i.e. watermills) in the 19th century into factories all over and start moving a little bit on large and/or fixed infrastructure (like ships and rail), and how oil enabled machine power to become completely mobile in the 20th Century.

Lithium batteries (especially as they'll become perfected in the form of lithium-sulfur and lithium-air) enable electromagnetic energy, that most magical form of energy (distinct from mere thermal or mechanical power), to become completely mobile as well and also even for fixed electricity no longer reliant on fossil fuels for prime energy but also able to utilize any kind of inexpensive energy source (wind, solar, etc).

Lithium batteries are to the 21st Century what the internal combustion engine was to the 20th. Smartphones, tablets, drones, electric cars, and into the rest of the 21st century: vast usage of renewable energy, full electrification of ground transport, spreading to air transport, even rocket engines (RocketLab's engines really wouldn't be possible without lithium batteries), cubesats, Hyperloop, etc.

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#108

Post by icebraining »

adjkant wrote: post #100
icebraining wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did Neuromancer predict?

There's an argument it inspired the internet or caused us to create it.

Well, if it managed to inspire the creation of the Internet a decade after Cerf et all actually created it, that is truly remarkable!

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#109

Post by MBCook »

amelius wrote: post #53
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?

But wasn't that the point of the article? The fixate on one giant leap and ignore the massive other changes the availability of that technology (or its constituent parts) would likely cause?

Re: What We Get Wrong About Technology

#110

Post by cfn »

jbarham wrote: post #25
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…

Gorbachev was evidently very impressed by Canadian supermarkets in 1983: "Gorbachev first visited Canada in 1983 when he was the member of the Soviet Politburo responsible for state agriculture. Gorbachev toured successful commercial farms and saw well-stocked supermarkets across the country, a vastly different picture from the Soviet Union, which was struggling with shortages. It was his first trip to a non-communis…

Interesting! Around that time (a little later maybe) I helped a couple of Russians visiting Lisbon and one thing they asked was to go to a large supermarket. When in there, they said it was like visiting a cathedral.
Post reply on HN