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Garry Kasparov: The Last Revolutionary Technology Was The Apple II

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Re: Garry Kasparov: The Last Revolutionary Technology Was The Apple II

#41

Post by anamax »

itsnotvalid wrote: post #40
andreyf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's non-trivial to compare cell phones with the combustion engine or flight, but I think we can agree with Kasparov that more inventions of that magnitude are something we should strive for.

Yet engines are actually getting replaced by other alternatives, but those alternatives require different sets of infrastructure which are non-existent (such as for fuel cells or electric cars) Also, there are external forces driving the way to the opposite side of the story (aka keeping combustion engines, for money, of course) Sometimes I just think that the Americans use too much cars (one person driving a car wit…

> Sometimes I just think that the Americans use too much cars (one person driving a car with four seats is an insult to the nature.)

I'm guessing that you'd be mad if more of us had multiple cars, one with one seat, one with two seats, one with three, and another with four. (An extra car just for gas mileage rarely saves money because $5-7k buys a lot of gas.)

I would like to know how you know how many other people that driver will transport before returning home. After all, if they're going to need four seats at any point before they return, they need to start with four seats.

BTW - most of those "four seat" cars actually have five seats.

Re: Garry Kasparov: The Last Revolutionary Technology Was The Apple II

#44

Post by tjmc »

Reclix wrote: post #35

Though I agree with some of the above comments that the technological innovations since 1977 haven't been altogether uninspiring, I do wonder: Who right now is funding innovation that doesn't directly have a business model tied to it? i.e., innovation for the sake of innovation, without the startup pitch, killer ceo, etc - the scientist pushing the limits for the sake of science? Is NASA a place where this happens? A…

It's not frivolous because fundamental research often leads to unexpected commercial benefits. One example - Japanese physicists doing research into quantum tunneling led to the shrinking of satellite dish antennas from 2m to about 30cm.

On some levels I think Kasparov is right. You could fly from London to New York faster in 1977 (on the Concord) than you can today.

Re: Garry Kasparov: The Last Revolutionary Technology Was The Apple II

#46

Post by imperator »

ggchappell wrote: post #11
hsmyers wrote: post #6

The only industry left that might fit Mr. Kasparov's prescription is the aerospace industry. There are still cowboys with calculators if not slide-rules and things moving from cad space to real space that are more than revolutionary and a damn site more than an incremental improvement...

Your comment is interesting, in that I don't see how it can possibly be true. From my POV, aerospace is the quintessential example of an industry that showed great promise and was revolutionizing our world, and then ... just stopped. The planes I fly on today are basically indistinguishable from the ones my father flew on back in the 1960s -- except for the TVs, but that's not really aerospace. Meanwhile, no one has…

In a way you are both right. There are currently two aspects of the American space industry.

One, the moribund aerospace giants that are largely just making the same old rockets, entrenched in their job creation programs.

And two, the new space companies, which are making suborbital rocketplanes and cheap boosters. At present, they may not look impressive because of small steps they are taking, but you just have to look at Scaled's Space Ship Two to realize that radical innovation in their design is not dead.

This has been a long time coming, and there has been a dark age in aerospace.

If you are interested, in my view the seminal event in the new space industry was the Delta Clipper Program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X).

And now there are some really impressive companies trying to make space truly viable for everyone. Some of those companies are.

XCOR Aerospace: http://xcor.com/ Scaled Composites: http://scaled.com/ Masten: http://masten-space.com/ Armadillo: http://armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home

Aside from aerospace. While I agree that there have been game changers like the cell phone, I do agree with Kasparov that there is an atmosphere of risk aversion. For instance I don't see any daring research programs like when DARPA funded Engelbart's augment research that led to Human User Interface objects like the mouse. And that disturbs me. Often visionaries look very crazy or at best very hard to understand because they are operating out of the scope of our context. I don't see people having the patience for these visionaries. And the people who do claim to be visionaries seem to have very conservative imaginations.

Re: Garry Kasparov: The Last Revolutionary Technology Was The Apple II

#47

Post by trafficlight »

teamonkey wrote: post #36
ugh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This drives me nuts whenever I read anything by Connie Willis. Her time travel books play (partly, obviously) decades in the future yet there are constantly people running around and frantically looking for each other and not finding anyone. I always want to scream “Pick up your goddamn cellphone!” (Some of those were written in the nineties which explains their lack of cellphones but even her most recent books from…

It's weird that the lack of portable phones requires more suspension of disbelief than time travel. Maybe that's a testament to the writer. In Doomsday Book there are a few plot points where even an answering machine would have helped. Excellent books though, despite that.

It's not weird at all. If you have the technology to move your physical being between time periods, you can certainly move a few radio waves around.

Re: Garry Kasparov: The Last Revolutionary Technology Was The Apple II

#48

Post by trafficlight »

jerf wrote: post #28
[deleted] wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Your story is missing critical parts and makes no sense as written. It is unclear to me how not having a cellphone resulted in the law telling your brother's account that it is now mandatory for him to flee from the cops.

The parent's story is gone now, but your summary makes it sound awesome.

Re: Garry Kasparov: The Last Revolutionary Technology Was The Apple II

#49

Post by geidden »

astrofinch wrote: post #33
mattmaroon wrote: post #20

This clearly shows that being very wise and being very intelligent are not the same thing.

I'm not sure that being the best chess player in the world is evidence that Kasparov is very intelligent--any more than being the best poker player, the best piano player, or even the best marketer. Chess is a learned skill just like any of those. Put another way, looking at all of the world's very most intelligent people, the fraction that care enough about chess to become the world champion if they had the aptitude…

Point of fact: chess is learned but only to a point, probably around 2100-2150 ELO. That is the limit of what most people can accomplish with a lot of study and hard work.

Pushing beyond that and into the Super to Elite Grandmaster range (2550-2800) requires extraordinary levels of memory, concentration, calculation and pattern matching. Levels that can't be instilled in someone through any amount of training. A person either possesses them or (s)he doesn't.

I lack the evidence at hand, but I'm certain I've seen it before that aptitude in those areas correlates strongly to high intelligence.

Re: Garry Kasparov: The Last Revolutionary Technology Was The Apple II

#50

Post by jonnathanson »

Reclix wrote: post #35

Though I agree with some of the above comments that the technological innovations since 1977 haven't been altogether uninspiring, I do wonder: Who right now is funding innovation that doesn't directly have a business model tied to it? i.e., innovation for the sake of innovation, without the startup pitch, killer ceo, etc - the scientist pushing the limits for the sake of science? Is NASA a place where this happens? A…

Primarily, the people doing innovation for innovation's sake right now are the guys who've already made their fuck-you millions or billions, and can now afford to fund out-there research. Folks like Paul Allen, Elon Musk, (to a certain extent) Peter Thiel, Sir Richard Branson, etc. Sure, there's occasionally a commercial motive behind some of their side projects -- but not always, and often as a pipedream. In a way, it is refreshing to see people's throwing money at pipedreams simply to make them ever so slightly more realistic. Will Branson make space flight affordable to the masses in his lifetime? Almost certainly not. But he realized that if he didn't kickstart the process, it would have taken the world a lot longer to get started.
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