What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922) • Hacker News Board

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#171

Post by kierkegaard_s » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:20 PM UTC

Interesting that the author here made the assumption opposite of WaitButWhy's Tim Urban in his AI article (see below). Author asserted pretty early that future progress wouldn't advance as quickly as past progress has. Or at least that's how I interpreted it.

(https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...)

"Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750—a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It’s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone’s face and chat with them even though they’re on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery. This is all before you show him the internet or explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general relativity.

This experience for him wouldn’t be surprising or shocking or even mind-blowing—those words aren’t big enough. He might actually die.

But here’s the interesting thing—if he then went back to 1750 and got jealous that we got to see his reaction and decided he wanted to try the same thing, he’d take the time machine and go back the same distance, get someone from around the year 1500, bring him to 1750, and show him everything. And the 1500 guy would be shocked by a lot of things—but he wouldn’t die. It would be far less of an insane experience for him, because while 1500 and 1750 were very different, they were much less different than 1750 to 2015. The 1500 guy would learn some mind-bending shit about space and physics, he’d be impressed with how committed Europe turned out to be with that new imperialism fad, and he’d have to do some major revisions of his world map conception. But watching everyday life go by in 1750—transportation, communication, etc.—definitely wouldn’t make him die."

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#172

Post by toolz » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:24 PM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #124

lettergram wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better Let me translate “you are slaves and you rent everything. We base your ability to purchase on a social credit score. But we let you rent houses in our artificially limited VR world.” I don’t make much of predictions like these. It’s ALWAYS a safe bet to assume people will lose liberty. To the point the FED was created in 1913, research w…

Central Banking has been one of the most powerful and liberating achievements of civilization. And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer, women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life. And what 'freedoms' have you lost? Well, there's more taxation. And you have to…

> What other 'freedoms' were are you keen to regain?

For me I'd like to not pay money for the "privilege" of having a central organization constantly and unapologetically spy on me.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#173

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:25 PM UTC

Karawebnetwork wrote: post #155

haunter wrote: post #15

>Similar reforms apply to cooking, a great deal of which will survive among old fashioned people, but a great deal more of which will probably be avoided by the use of synthetic foods. This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products and such. I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever th…

It's important to remember that 77 percent of U.S. adults take dietary supplements. We all eat "corned beef hash and pumpkin pie" yet the majority of people already use supplements as pill as needed. Living in the north, everyone I know uses Vitamin D pills. This is a must to survive the winter and I can't imagine how it would be if that wasn't as available.

[deleted]

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#174

Post by Clubber » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:25 PM UTC

thereddaikon wrote: post #109

pindab0ter wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What terrible phrasing is "they cease to be productive and look for ways to while away their time." We don't live to work, we work to live. Once less work is required to live, more living can be done. Some people may 'while away their time', others do valuable things that don't produce monetary value.

This is also not a new phenomena but something that has been slowly increasing over human history. Before agriculture, humans spent almost all of their time hunting and gathering. Agriculture freed up some time and every major technological revolution has in some way made society more productive and efficient allowing us for more time not working. At some point in the 19th century the concept of leisure time came aro…

>Before agriculture, humans spent almost all of their time hunting and gathering. Agriculture freed up some time

Agriculture is more work than hunting and gathering, but it's a much more consistent food source.

https://www.zmescience.com/science/hunter-gatherer-farmer-ti...

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#175

Post by jameshart » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:26 PM UTC

thejohnconway wrote: post #17

krapp wrote: post #6

I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. Hubris... hubris never changes.

Hubris? I think he was right, and that the world of 1822 was more different from 1922 than 1922 is to now. Computers seem to be the primary novel invention in the last hundred years, but long-distance data transfer was normal - and the fax machine sending pictures was overseas was just two years away (1924). 1822 was a horse-drawn, gas-lit world that was in many ways the same as it had been for millennia. 1922 was a…

"1822 was a horse-drawn, gas-lit world"

In fact, gas light was bleeding edge tech in 1822 - confined to a few parts of cities like London and Baltimore. The New York City gas company was only chartered in 1823. Chicago didn't get gas light until 1850.

Whale oil was still a significant source of illumination right through the 19th century, especially in the US.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#176

Post by eganist » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:27 PM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #140

ydlr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

United States does rank below the UK in terms of social mobility. The notion that that is because the economic development of the country is "finished" seems weird. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....

"United States does rank below the UK in terms of social mobility." It always did, because the US had slaves, and ex-slaves who had no much opportunity to 'climb'. The US now also has a giant class of a specific kind of migrant - Latinos from Central America, who are completely different than those from Spain or Cuba and the rest of the world. They exist in a kind of 'separate' USA and while technically might have th…

I'm still amazed the first and last times nukes were used against people were in 1945.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#177

Post by mikestew » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:27 PM UTC

gadders wrote: post #84

" A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. For Jefferson knew nothing of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, gramophones, movies, radium, &c.; he did not even know hot and cold bathrooms." I wonder what we would show the girl of 1922? Space travel and obv…

I wonder what we would show the girl of 1922

She can sell those candles on Etsy instead of standing around a train station all day. She will not, however, understand the enormous amount of change that took place in order to make that possible. It will give her a practical understanding of what those changes brought about, though.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#178

Post by ogogmad » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:28 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #137

Laforet wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

70s and 80s scifi media frequently depict floppy disks being used well into the 22nd century and beyond, despite the fact that optical and solid state storage did exist in some form back then. Either is is done to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, or human beings really lack the abiltiy to imagine things they have no empirical experience with.

TV/Movie scifi is mostly the last place you'd look for bold imaginings of future technology. Star Trek had a few hits with communicators, PADDs, and touch screen controls, but generally designs are very much of their time. It's very obvious with modern scifi where controls are usually holographic projections with cyan grids and twirly animations. After a while these designs become lazy tropes - like villains who wear…

> Where's the modern equivalent? There isn't one. Insights at that level more or less stopped happening after the discovery of DNA and the creation of Shannon's Information Theory.

I think Machine Learning today is equivalent in magnitude to the other scientific breakthroughs you mentioned. I don't know if you're overlooking it because it's mainly engineering-led.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#179

Post by md_ » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:31 PM UTC

didericis wrote: post #150

jollybean wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Central Banking has been one of the most powerful and liberating achievements of civilization. And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer, women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life. And what 'freedoms' have you lost? Well, there's more taxation. And you have to…

Can you explain why the freedoms you mention are the result primarily of central banking and not social and technological change? The key freedom lost via central banking (at least irresponsible central banking) is the freedom of those in the future to do anything other than meet debt obligations. Debt and credit is obviously necessary, and making money easily accessible and keeping markets liquid is a good thing, bu…

I’m confused. If you mean public debt, doesn’t central banking free the public from meeting debt obligations when those obligations are denominated in the national currency?

Countries can and do issue public debt in other currencies. If we all used gold or bitcoin, there’s no reason to think public debt would be lower. But the obligation to pay it back would, in a sense, be harder to dodge.

It’s worth noting, as an aside, that the trend line on cost of servicing public debt in the US has been downward (though I would expect this to change): https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/us-debt-has-increa....

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#180

Post by Aunche » Thu, Jan 06, 2022, 3:34 PM UTC

didericis wrote: post #150

jollybean wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Central Banking has been one of the most powerful and liberating achievements of civilization. And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer, women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life. And what 'freedoms' have you lost? Well, there's more taxation. And you have to…

Can you explain why the freedoms you mention are the result primarily of central banking and not social and technological change? The key freedom lost via central banking (at least irresponsible central banking) is the freedom of those in the future to do anything other than meet debt obligations. Debt and credit is obviously necessary, and making money easily accessible and keeping markets liquid is a good thing, bu…

> irresponsible central banking

Would you also consider triple bypass surgery done on morbidly obese patient as irresponsible? It enables bad behavior and arguably the patient may be better off dead than living in a life of pain, but it's undeniable that emergency heart surgery is a good thing.