Humankind has been stagnant for 40 years.
December 4, 2014 6:19 AM Subscribe
Michael Hanlon on the lack of true invention like what we saw between 1945 and 1971. Technology is booming, but it seems we are basically just making smaller and faster versions of things that were already invented 40 years ago. Most of what is happening in medicine, technology, civil rights, etc. seems to be expansion rather than innovation.
How To See The Future
...we look at the present day through a rear-view mirror. This is something Marshall McLuhan said back in the Sixties, when the world was in the grip of authentic-seeming future narratives. He said, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”posted by igowen at 6:33 AM on December 4, 2014 [16 favorites]
He went on to say this, in 1969, the year of the crewed Moon landing: “Because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. The present is always invisible because it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an earlier day.”
This article says far more about the author's understanding of technology and selective application of what's "new" and what's an "improvement", probably due to not understanding the underlying technologies. I mean, really, it's a bunch of sweeping statements of ignorance of progress, rather than statements of less progress.
These days, one has to learn far more in order to even understand what's going on. Our breadth of knowledge has exploded in a way that a single person can scarcely understand, because it takes years of graduate study to reach the frontiers of knowledge in interesting research areas.
Two days ago I was listening to a Nobel prize winner discussing how he broke the diffraction limit in order to visualize the movement and activity of individual molecules. This was something that's been predicted to be impossible by the physicists of the "golden" age in this article.
And yet, if you're reading the newspaper and online news sources, you will only miss out on the new things that are being discovered and invented, or at best you will be misinformed by a game of telephone where the press offices and journalists do not have the education or knowledge to communicate what's actually happening. And when these inventions show up in the consumer devices that this articles author might notice, or in treatments that are FDA approved, enough time has passed that they are no longer inventions but mere improvements.
posted by Llama-Lime at 6:33 AM on December 4, 2014 [31 favorites]
These days, one has to learn far more in order to even understand what's going on. Our breadth of knowledge has exploded in a way that a single person can scarcely understand, because it takes years of graduate study to reach the frontiers of knowledge in interesting research areas.
Two days ago I was listening to a Nobel prize winner discussing how he broke the diffraction limit in order to visualize the movement and activity of individual molecules. This was something that's been predicted to be impossible by the physicists of the "golden" age in this article.
And yet, if you're reading the newspaper and online news sources, you will only miss out on the new things that are being discovered and invented, or at best you will be misinformed by a game of telephone where the press offices and journalists do not have the education or knowledge to communicate what's actually happening. And when these inventions show up in the consumer devices that this articles author might notice, or in treatments that are FDA approved, enough time has passed that they are no longer inventions but mere improvements.
posted by Llama-Lime at 6:33 AM on December 4, 2014 [31 favorites]
Hanlon's view of innovation is derived from the myth that true invention does not build upon the ideas of the past. He forgets that the automobile was originally designed to be a faster, automated horse buggy. The internet? The terms "switches" and "routers" were lifted straight from telephony terminology and performed analogous functions to their analog counterparts. Take any idea that someone there feels must have arrived like a bolt out of the blue, and you can easily find that they were all modifications of previous paradigms.
posted by surazal at 6:37 AM on December 4, 2014 [21 favorites]
posted by surazal at 6:37 AM on December 4, 2014 [21 favorites]
These days, one has to learn far more in order to even understand what's going on. Our breadth of knowledge has exploded in a way that a single person can scarcely understand, because it takes years of graduate study to reach the frontiers of knowledge in interesting research areas.
QFT. I consider myself a pretty smart polymath, and I stumbled into a graduate seminar a few years ago wherein I quickly realized that not only did I know less about this subject than everyone else in the room, but no one in the room could have explained it to me in an hour. And this wasn't, like, "Here are the twelve smartest people in the world on this subject" -- it was honestly just "Hey, come hear about some new shit that you might be interested in."
posted by Etrigan at 6:38 AM on December 4, 2014 [8 favorites]
QFT. I consider myself a pretty smart polymath, and I stumbled into a graduate seminar a few years ago wherein I quickly realized that not only did I know less about this subject than everyone else in the room, but no one in the room could have explained it to me in an hour. And this wasn't, like, "Here are the twelve smartest people in the world on this subject" -- it was honestly just "Hey, come hear about some new shit that you might be interested in."
posted by Etrigan at 6:38 AM on December 4, 2014 [8 favorites]
@Etrigan: Bad choice of words in an attempt to be concise. I just meant the civil rights issues that are being given a lot of media attention now aren't super new.
posted by Enchanting Grasshopper at 6:40 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Enchanting Grasshopper at 6:40 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
We have cars that don't use gasoline.
Which were also invented in the 1960s, along with lithium batteries and regenerative braking. The innovation of the last five decades has been getting consumers to buy the damn things (and in convincing the Stonecutters to stop holding it back).
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:42 AM on December 4, 2014 [8 favorites]
Which were also invented in the 1960s, along with lithium batteries and regenerative braking. The innovation of the last five decades has been getting consumers to buy the damn things (and in convincing the Stonecutters to stop holding it back).
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:42 AM on December 4, 2014 [8 favorites]
We have cars that don't use gasoline. If that's not a paradigm shift, then I genuinely do not know what the hell he's looking for.
We had cars that didn't use gasoline in 1906 too. Both Steam and Electric cars were available.
posted by Gungho at 6:43 AM on December 4, 2014 [17 favorites]
We had cars that didn't use gasoline in 1906 too. Both Steam and Electric cars were available.
posted by Gungho at 6:43 AM on December 4, 2014 [17 favorites]
I agree with Etrigan, we're still innovating after the Golden Quarter, it's just not apparent until time gives us distance. Still want my flying car though. Will settle for a hover board.
posted by arcticseal at 6:44 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by arcticseal at 6:44 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
Well, they were invented in the 1880s, but Hanlon's still just dismissing anything that doesn't fit his thesis as mere refinement rather than innovation.
posted by Etrigan at 6:45 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by Etrigan at 6:45 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Haven't read it and am off to work here, but one point that I think is cogent with this is that for all the fact we have little mini super-computers in our pockets, we use that power to...
Play FruitFucker on our iGizmos and repost image macros.
Yeah - I guess it's get-off-my-lawnism, and the future is always going to seem mundane to those who live in it, but this definitely doesn't feel like any future I would have hoped for with all this tech.
But that's not so much the tech, and more about people.
posted by symbioid at 6:47 AM on December 4, 2014 [4 favorites]
Play FruitFucker on our iGizmos and repost image macros.
Yeah - I guess it's get-off-my-lawnism, and the future is always going to seem mundane to those who live in it, but this definitely doesn't feel like any future I would have hoped for with all this tech.
But that's not so much the tech, and more about people.
posted by symbioid at 6:47 AM on December 4, 2014 [4 favorites]
"We aren't inventing anything now" is the refrain of the ignorant. It'd be more correct to say "we aren't inventing anything that is comprehensible by a layman now." Like, okay, distributed computing algorithms were theorized and applied in limited contexts back in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, but these days I can pay a couple hundred bucks for compute time on a few dozen machines and write a program that uses all of them to perform some computation that I need.
posted by sonic meat machine at 6:47 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by sonic meat machine at 6:47 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Compared to the period between the end of the Civil War, and say, 1920, the years of Hanlon's focus look absolutely anemic. The car, electric light, germ theory, the electric washer, home refrigeration, etc. - much of the world as we now know it was either invented wholesale or first made widely available in this era.
Hell, there were probably more innovations in medicine alone in the 40 years after the Civil War than there had been in the previous 4000.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:58 AM on December 4, 2014 [13 favorites]
Hell, there were probably more innovations in medicine alone in the 40 years after the Civil War than there had been in the previous 4000.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:58 AM on December 4, 2014 [13 favorites]
I remember back in the sixties when I stored all of my data in the cloud.
posted by oceanjesse at 6:58 AM on December 4, 2014 [9 favorites]
posted by oceanjesse at 6:58 AM on December 4, 2014 [9 favorites]
the lack of true invention like what we saw between 1945 and 1971
Let me guess; the author is about 50 years old?
For the past 20 years, as a science writer, I have covered...
Yep.
posted by erniepan at 7:00 AM on December 4, 2014 [8 favorites]
Let me guess; the author is about 50 years old?
For the past 20 years, as a science writer, I have covered...
Yep.
posted by erniepan at 7:00 AM on December 4, 2014 [8 favorites]
Sounds like this guy invested heavily in Fusion and personal jet-packs and might be kinda bitter.
posted by OHenryPacey at 7:00 AM on December 4, 2014
posted by OHenryPacey at 7:00 AM on December 4, 2014
Just about everything that defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown, during this time. The Pill. Electronics. Computers and the birth of the internet. Nuclear power. Television. Antibiotics.
I believe the BBC began regular TV broadcasts in 1936? Penicillin was discovered in, what, 1928?
posted by Segundus at 7:01 AM on December 4, 2014 [8 favorites]
I believe the BBC began regular TV broadcasts in 1936? Penicillin was discovered in, what, 1928?
posted by Segundus at 7:01 AM on December 4, 2014 [8 favorites]
For Pete's sake, we're living in a time when actual bionic legs are real.
posted by gwint at 7:03 AM on December 4, 2014 [6 favorites]
posted by gwint at 7:03 AM on December 4, 2014 [6 favorites]
QFT
Yes, quantum field theory was pretty innovative.
posted by Wolfdog at 7:06 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
Yes, quantum field theory was pretty innovative.
posted by Wolfdog at 7:06 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
Didn't we give the blind sight, too? Pretty sure there's been successful implantation of CCDs into otherwise nonfunctional eyes to give blind people really low resolution sight. Sure, it's low resolution, but I'm also pretty sure they're using sensors that don't measure up to high end digital cameras. Meaning better than human vision is an actual possibility.
posted by Strudel at 7:08 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Strudel at 7:08 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
Television.
Television has its origins in the 19th century, and took shape as we know it in the 1920s, with experimental broadcasts in the US as early as 1928.
Basically, Hanlon didn't do any research for this piece.
posted by ryanshepard at 7:11 AM on December 4, 2014 [7 favorites]
Television has its origins in the 19th century, and took shape as we know it in the 1920s, with experimental broadcasts in the US as early as 1928.
Basically, Hanlon didn't do any research for this piece.
posted by ryanshepard at 7:11 AM on December 4, 2014 [7 favorites]
Popular music.
Electronic music and all its wonderful permutations and variations. Punk.
posted by Dysk at 7:11 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
Electronic music and all its wonderful permutations and variations. Punk.
posted by Dysk at 7:11 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
Did he just not watch Terminator 2?
posted by Swandive at 7:13 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Swandive at 7:13 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
Electronics? No electronics before 1945?
posted by Segundus at 7:13 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Segundus at 7:13 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
Punk.
Smooth jazz cruises. Autotune. Guys who play video game music on 6-string basses.
posted by thelonius at 7:15 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
Smooth jazz cruises. Autotune. Guys who play video game music on 6-string basses.
posted by thelonius at 7:15 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
Electronic music and all its wonderful permutations and variations.
Now I'm threadsitting and going to leave, but electronic music was also born in the 19th century and really got underway in the 1920s.
posted by ryanshepard at 7:16 AM on December 4, 2014 [5 favorites]
Now I'm threadsitting and going to leave, but electronic music was also born in the 19th century and really got underway in the 1920s.
posted by ryanshepard at 7:16 AM on December 4, 2014 [5 favorites]
The car, electric light, germ theory, the electric washer, home refrigeration, etc.
Airplanes!
posted by indubitable at 7:17 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
Airplanes!
posted by indubitable at 7:17 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
There's a joke - with some grain of truth in it - that we've cured every variety of cancer... in mice.
This is, in part, because we're willing to do horrible experiments on mice.
The author's thesis, if you read down far enough, is that we haven't been able to solve the complicated problems of cancer (and Alzheimer's, and fusion power) because we haven't been willing to take enough risks. If only we had less rigorous research protocols for experiments on humans, we could duplicate the effectiveness of smallpox eradication:
But only some truth. Artificial intelligence was one of the big busts of his "Golden Quarter", and it's only with determined effort over decades that we've started to make some progress. There's no risk-taking that would've got effective AI faster, because it's a complicated problem.
Cancer, Alzheimer's and nuclear fusion are also complicated problems. Just like AI, a huge amount of research effort has to be put in before we start seeing results. Taking more risks doesn't make the complication go away.
posted by clawsoon at 7:17 AM on December 4, 2014 [6 favorites]
This is, in part, because we're willing to do horrible experiments on mice.
The author's thesis, if you read down far enough, is that we haven't been able to solve the complicated problems of cancer (and Alzheimer's, and fusion power) because we haven't been willing to take enough risks. If only we had less rigorous research protocols for experiments on humans, we could duplicate the effectiveness of smallpox eradication:
Many of the achievements of the Golden Quarter just wouldn’t be attempted now. The assault on smallpox, spearheaded by a worldwide vaccination campaign, probably killed several thousand people, though it saved tens of millions more.I'd suggest there's some truth to his thesis, and some horror to it. Yes, skipping animal testing and trying all candidate cancer drugs directly on humans might give us faster research progress. It would also result in many horrific deaths. Yes, risking a few more big nuclear explosions might get us fusion power faster.
But only some truth. Artificial intelligence was one of the big busts of his "Golden Quarter", and it's only with determined effort over decades that we've started to make some progress. There's no risk-taking that would've got effective AI faster, because it's a complicated problem.
Cancer, Alzheimer's and nuclear fusion are also complicated problems. Just like AI, a huge amount of research effort has to be put in before we start seeing results. Taking more risks doesn't make the complication go away.
posted by clawsoon at 7:17 AM on December 4, 2014 [6 favorites]
I still think commodified mass-market 3D-printing has a chance of being the big paradigm-shifter the author is looking for, but we're not quite there yet. Could turn out to be another one of those "always ten years away" technologies but I hope not.
And I think it's time to retire the flying car refrain. They totally exist they're just not practical.
posted by Wretch729 at 7:17 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
And I think it's time to retire the flying car refrain. They totally exist they're just not practical.
posted by Wretch729 at 7:17 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
So I'm reading this on a super computer that fits in my pocket. Thirty years ago me would probably see that as pretty astounding.
posted by octothorpe at 7:23 AM on December 4, 2014 [4 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 7:23 AM on December 4, 2014 [4 favorites]
LOL nerds. spend your career coding new advertising platforms, drive a luxury muskmobile and decorate your life with product extruded by vertically integrated content conglomerates.
The private sector is totally the nexus of innovation. That's what all your screens tell you.
posted by ennui.bz at 7:25 AM on December 4, 2014 [8 favorites]
The private sector is totally the nexus of innovation. That's what all your screens tell you.
posted by ennui.bz at 7:25 AM on December 4, 2014 [8 favorites]
I think the author makes some good points about risk aversion and public spending. But it's disingenuous to lump the "Internet" in the 1945-1971 period and not giving credit to the modern era for today's not-yet-widespread health and science advances.
But consider - from this week's TMQ:
Also consider: (PDF)
posted by borborygmi at 7:29 AM on December 4, 2014 [4 favorites]
But consider - from this week's TMQ:
it remains a moral outrage that about one person in six worldwide lives on $1.25 a day or less. But check the trend: A quarter century ago more than a third of the world lived in such extreme poverty, about a decade ago it was down to about a fifth, today it's about 12 percent and on track to fall to only about 5 percent in 2030.That may not count as a "paradigm shift" for the author but I bet the people lifted out of extreme poverty think it's niftier than, say, the Concorde.
This spectacular reduction in extreme poverty has occurred at the same time that the global population has skyrocketed. In 1990, there were about 5.2 billion people with 36 percent in extreme poverty, or about 2 billion impoverished. Now there are more than 7 billion people with about 12 percent impoverished, or about 840 million impoverished. That's still way too many. Yet the post-war world shows a long-term trend toward more people, but less extreme want.
Also consider: (PDF)
First the good news: overall median survival time for all cancer typesThe author says the War on Cancer has been a "spectacular failure" and yet also seems to think that, if we had only spent more money on Alzheimer's, we'd have better therapies. I guess all I can say is, I'm glad he's not controlling the budget.
40 years ago was just one year, now it is predicted to be nearly six years.
This improvement is testament to the improvements in surgery, diagnosis,
radiotherapy, and new drugs. There have been particularly dramatic
improvements in survival time for breast cancer, colon cancer and NonHodgkin’s
Lymphoma – with many years added to median survival times.
posted by borborygmi at 7:29 AM on December 4, 2014 [4 favorites]
I have some sympathy for this view. It's not correct - in the stuff I look at, materials science alone has given us OLEDs, graphene, quantum dots, memristors - and it's not useful, but it does have some resonance.
Innovation happens when things are ready. You might look at a CPU today and go "Ah, that's just Turing and Von Neumann, how dull", but we've gone from one computer to uncountable billions that, mostly, can all talk to each other if needs be. So the innovation happens one layer above the fundamental invention, and that invention happened one layer above the valve and combinatorial logic, which themselves happened one layer above thermionic emission and electrical theory... the focus where people make new things happen is always ranging up and down the stack.
If you've spent your working and intellectual life focussed on just one bit of the stack, which is likely if you come of age with an interest in new things at a time when that bit of the stack is blossoming, then you're going to see that cycle work itself out during your lifetime. My particular love is radio: did all the good stuff get invented before World War II? Well, you can argue that - we're still using the basic circuits that Armstrong et al created - but on the other hand, I can watch pictures from comets live on my phone while sitting on a bus. No innovation? Hardly.
Depends how you look at things.
posted by Devonian at 7:29 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Innovation happens when things are ready. You might look at a CPU today and go "Ah, that's just Turing and Von Neumann, how dull", but we've gone from one computer to uncountable billions that, mostly, can all talk to each other if needs be. So the innovation happens one layer above the fundamental invention, and that invention happened one layer above the valve and combinatorial logic, which themselves happened one layer above thermionic emission and electrical theory... the focus where people make new things happen is always ranging up and down the stack.
If you've spent your working and intellectual life focussed on just one bit of the stack, which is likely if you come of age with an interest in new things at a time when that bit of the stack is blossoming, then you're going to see that cycle work itself out during your lifetime. My particular love is radio: did all the good stuff get invented before World War II? Well, you can argue that - we're still using the basic circuits that Armstrong et al created - but on the other hand, I can watch pictures from comets live on my phone while sitting on a bus. No innovation? Hardly.
Depends how you look at things.
posted by Devonian at 7:29 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
We had cars that didn't use gasoline in 1906 too.
A model electric car was made in 1835, if the Wiki of a Million Lies is to be believed.
And, oh God, it brings up Concorde again. Always with the Concorde. Concorde was never smart. It was the last gasp of a vision of air travel as a toy for the rich, and was economically killed when the 747 etc showed that the actual money was in cramming craptons of peasants into zillions of planes to go boring places where some jackass might want to buy your shit or where grandma lives. Supersonic air travel is always going to require way more energy than transonic flight for only a marginal reduction in actual travel time, so, duh, of course the real action is in making transonic flight more efficient.
Popular music.
I'd point to hiphop and rap over electronica and punk.
Cheap, reliable and safe automobiles.
The idea that cars from the 1945-1971 era could be reasonably called "reliable" or "safe" is laughable on its face. Yeah, sure, at some level they're still just cars, but modern cars are vastly safer, vastly more reliable and durable, vastly more fuel-efficient, and they typically have dramatically higher performance as well. A few years ago, Edmunds did a performance test between a Kia Sedona minivan and a 1984 Ferrari 308 including a slalom and skidpad. The Ferrari won... but clocked in about the same as a RAV4, even after they fitted it with modern tires.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:30 AM on December 4, 2014 [10 favorites]
A model electric car was made in 1835, if the Wiki of a Million Lies is to be believed.
And, oh God, it brings up Concorde again. Always with the Concorde. Concorde was never smart. It was the last gasp of a vision of air travel as a toy for the rich, and was economically killed when the 747 etc showed that the actual money was in cramming craptons of peasants into zillions of planes to go boring places where some jackass might want to buy your shit or where grandma lives. Supersonic air travel is always going to require way more energy than transonic flight for only a marginal reduction in actual travel time, so, duh, of course the real action is in making transonic flight more efficient.
Popular music.
I'd point to hiphop and rap over electronica and punk.
Cheap, reliable and safe automobiles.
The idea that cars from the 1945-1971 era could be reasonably called "reliable" or "safe" is laughable on its face. Yeah, sure, at some level they're still just cars, but modern cars are vastly safer, vastly more reliable and durable, vastly more fuel-efficient, and they typically have dramatically higher performance as well. A few years ago, Edmunds did a performance test between a Kia Sedona minivan and a 1984 Ferrari 308 including a slalom and skidpad. The Ferrari won... but clocked in about the same as a RAV4, even after they fitted it with modern tires.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:30 AM on December 4, 2014 [10 favorites]
He has a point. Refinement of inventions is insignificant. It will be a cold day in hell before I let any computer replace my steam-powered abacus.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:38 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:38 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
I was recently reading about Price's Law that the number of science publications grows exponentially. A quick google on my magic pocket window didn't tell me if it has held true through to the present day, but it strikes me as a slightly more empirical way to measure scientific progress than journeys to the moon or Atlantic Ocean crossing time.
The author has some good points about risk and public funding of science, but they're not well thought out.
posted by Brodiggitty at 7:41 AM on December 4, 2014
The author has some good points about risk and public funding of science, but they're not well thought out.
posted by Brodiggitty at 7:41 AM on December 4, 2014
Its also worth pointing out that while commercial innovation may seem (I disagree personally) stuck on new advert serving and tracking, games, and other 'frivolous' applications, pure research advances at our fundamental level of understanding of our physical world and cosmology are profound and accelerating.
posted by sfts2 at 7:42 AM on December 4, 2014
posted by sfts2 at 7:42 AM on December 4, 2014
Word processors, video games, gene splicing, the disposable lighter, post-it notes, liposuction, laser printers, ink-jet printers, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial hearts, the walkman, the scanning tunneling microscope, synthetic skin, RU-486, doppler radar, SSRIs, HTML, smart pills, HIV protease inhibitor ...
Sure, nothing new here since 1971.
posted by kyrademon at 7:42 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Sure, nothing new here since 1971.
posted by kyrademon at 7:42 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
There's nothing new under the sun (since nineteen hundred and seventy-one).
posted by forgetful snow at 7:44 AM on December 4, 2014
posted by forgetful snow at 7:44 AM on December 4, 2014
Recently, I innovated the snot out of the Cotton Gin.
posted by Nanukthedog at 7:49 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Nanukthedog at 7:49 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
I do think the author is being a bit myopic, but I think it's also Pollyannaish to insist that everything is going Just Fine Today Thanks.
There are a number of really hard problems out there that we are unlikely to solve without applying significant resources to them. In the last few decades, at least in the US, we have seen the death of most of the big government research labs and the remaining corporate ones, with only a few exceptions. (The National Labs related to the maintenance of the nuclear arsenal, and a couple of corporations like IBM that maintain some level of pure research investment for the hell of it.)
We have invention and progress, but they are only in those directions that the market determines are short-term profitable. Faster microprocessors, better lithium-ion batteries, smaller CMOS cameras, amazing little micro-mechanical gyroscopes and accelerometers... but basic physics research has slowed down. (Russia is largely out of the game, the US is barely hanging on, only the Europeans seem to still be willing to ante up anymore.) Medical and pharmaceutical research is basically limited to what drug companies think will be profitable given the current insanely high-friction regulatory environment, plus a few conditions here and there that attract enough public attention to warrant grant money.
I think we seem to be in an optimization trap because that's what you can do with the resources most researchers (whether they think of themselves as 'researchers' or 'engineers' or something more prosaic) have available. And people are smart, and have a lot of very good tools available, and therefore do a pretty good job of optimizing. Things get better.
But when you look at what a bunch of very well-motivated people, with ample funding, did in the 1940s with comptometers and slide rules, it does make you wonder what people could do with today's tools, if they were really given a hard task—on par with the development of, say, radar—and a really deep wallet, and told to get cracking. I think you'd see some amazing things. We don't know, exactly, what we are missing out on, because we don't have anybody doing that today. That's the opportunity cost of the current system.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:59 AM on December 4, 2014 [23 favorites]
There are a number of really hard problems out there that we are unlikely to solve without applying significant resources to them. In the last few decades, at least in the US, we have seen the death of most of the big government research labs and the remaining corporate ones, with only a few exceptions. (The National Labs related to the maintenance of the nuclear arsenal, and a couple of corporations like IBM that maintain some level of pure research investment for the hell of it.)
We have invention and progress, but they are only in those directions that the market determines are short-term profitable. Faster microprocessors, better lithium-ion batteries, smaller CMOS cameras, amazing little micro-mechanical gyroscopes and accelerometers... but basic physics research has slowed down. (Russia is largely out of the game, the US is barely hanging on, only the Europeans seem to still be willing to ante up anymore.) Medical and pharmaceutical research is basically limited to what drug companies think will be profitable given the current insanely high-friction regulatory environment, plus a few conditions here and there that attract enough public attention to warrant grant money.
I think we seem to be in an optimization trap because that's what you can do with the resources most researchers (whether they think of themselves as 'researchers' or 'engineers' or something more prosaic) have available. And people are smart, and have a lot of very good tools available, and therefore do a pretty good job of optimizing. Things get better.
But when you look at what a bunch of very well-motivated people, with ample funding, did in the 1940s with comptometers and slide rules, it does make you wonder what people could do with today's tools, if they were really given a hard task—on par with the development of, say, radar—and a really deep wallet, and told to get cracking. I think you'd see some amazing things. We don't know, exactly, what we are missing out on, because we don't have anybody doing that today. That's the opportunity cost of the current system.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:59 AM on December 4, 2014 [23 favorites]
I was trying to teach an ethics course recently, talking about issues in organ transplant ethics, when a student asked me if this whole debate wouldn't just become irrelevant in the next five years or so once we've got 3D printed custom organs. And...yes, it might.
If we were living any further into the future I'd need to start wearing silver lame jumpsuits.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 8:05 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
If we were living any further into the future I'd need to start wearing silver lame jumpsuits.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 8:05 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
If Hanlon wants to get real specific, we didn't invent antibiotics. Those fun guys did it for us, we're just building on their work.
posted by maryr at 8:08 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by maryr at 8:08 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
This puzzles me: "The time for a new drug candidate to gain approval in the US rose from less than eight years in the 1960s to nearly 13 years by the 1990s. Many promising new treatments now take 20 years or more to reach the market."
Is he conflating drug candidate with new treatments (such as a treatment concept)? Has there ever been a promising new drug candidate that has taken 20 years to reach the market? (It would lose its patent)
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 8:09 AM on December 4, 2014
Is he conflating drug candidate with new treatments (such as a treatment concept)? Has there ever been a promising new drug candidate that has taken 20 years to reach the market? (It would lose its patent)
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 8:09 AM on December 4, 2014
Kadin2048
I agree completely with what you say, almost. Its true that research is often being defunded by governments, and and I fear it is only going to get worse. Its also true that what pure research is being done is more focused on short term profit motive - so less 'pure.' I'd argue however that the advances in real-time networked collaboration and computing power will offset this and in fact generate a positive feedback loop as more advances get applied to information technology. As an example, I'd suggest advances in cosmology - which is as non-directly commercial as any research area and has shown tremendous progress.
If only we could take a portion of the defense budget and apply it to say particle physics. The Superconducting supercollider which probably would have proven Higgs Mechanism 20 years ago, was budgeted for under $10b, versus Iraq war, or F35, or anything. Makes me cringe.
posted by sfts2 at 8:11 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
I agree completely with what you say, almost. Its true that research is often being defunded by governments, and and I fear it is only going to get worse. Its also true that what pure research is being done is more focused on short term profit motive - so less 'pure.' I'd argue however that the advances in real-time networked collaboration and computing power will offset this and in fact generate a positive feedback loop as more advances get applied to information technology. As an example, I'd suggest advances in cosmology - which is as non-directly commercial as any research area and has shown tremendous progress.
If only we could take a portion of the defense budget and apply it to say particle physics. The Superconducting supercollider which probably would have proven Higgs Mechanism 20 years ago, was budgeted for under $10b, versus Iraq war, or F35, or anything. Makes me cringe.
posted by sfts2 at 8:11 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
Where would the hyperlink and/or the search engine fit in innovation? Because if I think of how my day to day life has changed in the past 20 years, those seem pretty key. Actually, where/when would we attribute string matching? That is one of the best uses of computers that we have.
posted by maryr at 8:11 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by maryr at 8:11 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
Or is that not new because the highlighter was invented in 1963?
posted by maryr at 8:12 AM on December 4, 2014
posted by maryr at 8:12 AM on December 4, 2014
magnetic resonance imaging
The underlying physics of MRI was developed in the late 1930s, principally by Isidor Rabi, who won a Nobel for it in '44.
Much of the work was done at Columbia University, which had a very good physics department at the time (probably the best in the US), although I don't know if credit for that is due primarily to funding, or to the fact that it was the recipient of a number of the greatest minds of Europe who landed there after seeing the writing on the wall with regards to fascism at home.
There is certainly something to be said for cramming all the best minds in a generation into one place at one time and giving them access to basically unlimited resources, although the price paid to do that was rather steep.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:16 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
The underlying physics of MRI was developed in the late 1930s, principally by Isidor Rabi, who won a Nobel for it in '44.
Much of the work was done at Columbia University, which had a very good physics department at the time (probably the best in the US), although I don't know if credit for that is due primarily to funding, or to the fact that it was the recipient of a number of the greatest minds of Europe who landed there after seeing the writing on the wall with regards to fascism at home.
There is certainly something to be said for cramming all the best minds in a generation into one place at one time and giving them access to basically unlimited resources, although the price paid to do that was rather steep.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:16 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
The Superconducting supercollider which probably would have proven Higgs Mechanism 20 years ago, was budgeted for under $10b, versus Iraq war, or F35, or anything. Makes me cringe.
Absolutely agreed. What is even more galling, is that the immense sum spent on the F-35—currently at $1.5 Trillion USD and counting—is significantly more than the total costs, adjusted for inflation, of the entire B-29 program ($41.46B in 2014 dollars) and the Manhattan Project ($38.74B in 2014 dollars) combined.
Military research is a really bad way to do science in general; too much of the output ends up locked away in classified files, or worse yet just destroyed if it doesn't prove militarily feasible or useful, but I accept that sometimes it's the only way to get public funding.
But we're not even getting that much for our money today. I don't know what the fuck Lockheed is doing with all that money, but it's pretty clear they're not doing it very efficiently.
And in all likelihood, when they finally get done, the Chinese and the Russians will just steal everything and copy it at a far lower unit cost, because they're not as far down the sclerotic road of Baumol's Cost Disease as we are.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:31 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
Absolutely agreed. What is even more galling, is that the immense sum spent on the F-35—currently at $1.5 Trillion USD and counting—is significantly more than the total costs, adjusted for inflation, of the entire B-29 program ($41.46B in 2014 dollars) and the Manhattan Project ($38.74B in 2014 dollars) combined.
Military research is a really bad way to do science in general; too much of the output ends up locked away in classified files, or worse yet just destroyed if it doesn't prove militarily feasible or useful, but I accept that sometimes it's the only way to get public funding.
But we're not even getting that much for our money today. I don't know what the fuck Lockheed is doing with all that money, but it's pretty clear they're not doing it very efficiently.
And in all likelihood, when they finally get done, the Chinese and the Russians will just steal everything and copy it at a far lower unit cost, because they're not as far down the sclerotic road of Baumol's Cost Disease as we are.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:31 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
And in 1971, there was one airliner that could do the trip in three hours. Now, Concorde is dead. Our cars are faster, safer and use less fuel than they did in 1971, but there has been no paradigm shift.From a grand enough point of view, Roman chariots, covered wagons, railroads, cruise ships, automobiles and airliners all fit the same paradigm: Large, heavy, capital-intensive, mostly infrastructure-intensive machines - boxes, really - that consume generous amounts of concentrated fuel in order to move human bodies to the places they need to be. The Boeing Dreamliner and the stagecoach do the same job in largely the same way.
You're not going to spot a paradigm shift in a new vehicle design because "vehicle" is the paradigm.
You want to see a paradigm shift, maybe you could look at a panoply of alternatives to travel itself: Facebook, Skype, Facetime, Amazon, cell phones, etc. The recent availability of which does seem to coincide with a reduction in vehicle use.
It's easy to look at a summary of history and lose the perspective that, say, the development and democratization of air travel took decades. It may have been a fast change in historical terms, but it wasn't blink-and-you-miss-it fast to live through it. It almost never is, at the time.
posted by Western Infidels at 8:33 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
Maryr - the word hyperlink was coined in the mid-60s by Ted Nelson, and he got the idea from an essay (generally held to be one of the first positing a WWW-like system) in 1945 called "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush.
Vannevar Bush was basically head of wartime R&D in the US. The von Neumann architecture, which has defined practical computing, also came out of wartime R&D in the US - in this case, the Manhattan Project, which Bush also oversaw.
There's something to be said for the theory that the vast majority of significant advances in technology over the last sixty or seventy years are due most directly to the actions of one man, Adolf Hitler.
However, he was overlooked by the Nobel committee.
posted by Devonian at 8:37 AM on December 4, 2014 [5 favorites]
Vannevar Bush was basically head of wartime R&D in the US. The von Neumann architecture, which has defined practical computing, also came out of wartime R&D in the US - in this case, the Manhattan Project, which Bush also oversaw.
There's something to be said for the theory that the vast majority of significant advances in technology over the last sixty or seventy years are due most directly to the actions of one man, Adolf Hitler.
However, he was overlooked by the Nobel committee.
posted by Devonian at 8:37 AM on December 4, 2014 [5 favorites]
Actually, where/when would we attribute string matching?
Interesting question. sed was included in V7 of AT&T Unix, which was the last Bell Labs version, so at least for that particular implementation you can credit Bell Labs.
However, qed, one of the first text editors, featured regular expressions, and it was developed in 1965 at Berkeley, as part of Project Genie, which was another fine product of Licklider at DARPA. For those who aren't familiar with him, there's a great biography which makes for fine snow-day reading, or you can just read his seminal paper, which has section headings that include "Prerequisites for Realization of Man-Computer Symbiosis", and marvel at the fact that this dude had an office in the Pentagon.
Anyway, I don't know if that's necessarily the earliest implementation of string matching (probably, almost certainly, not) but it may be one of the earliest implementations that you could use outside of a programming context. (At least, if you consider regular expressions to be "outside of a programming context", which is arguable, I suppose.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:47 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Interesting question. sed was included in V7 of AT&T Unix, which was the last Bell Labs version, so at least for that particular implementation you can credit Bell Labs.
However, qed, one of the first text editors, featured regular expressions, and it was developed in 1965 at Berkeley, as part of Project Genie, which was another fine product of Licklider at DARPA. For those who aren't familiar with him, there's a great biography which makes for fine snow-day reading, or you can just read his seminal paper, which has section headings that include "Prerequisites for Realization of Man-Computer Symbiosis", and marvel at the fact that this dude had an office in the Pentagon.
Anyway, I don't know if that's necessarily the earliest implementation of string matching (probably, almost certainly, not) but it may be one of the earliest implementations that you could use outside of a programming context. (At least, if you consider regular expressions to be "outside of a programming context", which is arguable, I suppose.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:47 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Clearly, there is nothing left to invent. Shut down the patent office already.
posted by beagle at 8:50 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by beagle at 8:50 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
Haven't read it and am off to work here, but one point that I think is cogent with this is that for all the fact we have little mini super-computers in our pockets, we use that power to...We also use our iGizmos to videochat with distant relatives, take photos of medical problems for rapid analysis by experts, identify currency for the visually impaired, and hear instantly about news happening on, literally, the other side of the world. Just because the trivial is possible, or common, does not diminish the powerful.
Play FruitFucker on our iGizmos and repost image macros.
posted by Tomorrowful at 9:01 AM on December 4, 2014 [4 favorites]
I'm seeing a lot of "the underlying concepts for that were actually developed in blah" or "that term was actually first coined in blee" in this thread, but we're talking about inventions so who the heck cares?
The underlying concept for a traversable wormhole has been around since 1988, but anyone who thinks this means we've already invented practical interstellar travel is perhaps being slightly optimistic about it, don't you think?
Either someone built a gizmo that does it in the year xxxx or wasn't invented in xxxx.
posted by kyrademon at 9:07 AM on December 4, 2014 [5 favorites]
The underlying concept for a traversable wormhole has been around since 1988, but anyone who thinks this means we've already invented practical interstellar travel is perhaps being slightly optimistic about it, don't you think?
Either someone built a gizmo that does it in the year xxxx or wasn't invented in xxxx.
posted by kyrademon at 9:07 AM on December 4, 2014 [5 favorites]
Past 40 years have also seen the bulk of the rise and decline of the indoor shopping mall.
posted by ZeusHumms at 9:07 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by ZeusHumms at 9:07 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
I just hold that while the last century (loosely speaking) was the century of radical revolutionary inventions, this century may well be about optimization of those inventions. For human life, sometimes optimizations make all the difference.
Optimization can be seen in improving gas consumption of cars and planes, which delays us in killing our environment. It can be seen in making electric cars practical and sellable.
It can be seen in not just pulling the easy 50% of the world's population out of poverty, but also the other 50% that's much harder to pull out. We've been making _amazing_ strides in this regard in the last couple of decades, actually.
It can be seen in educating not just the richest, smartest and most driven part of the population, but in providing higher ed to ever more and more of the rest of society in hopes of a transformative change once you get _everyone_ (or nearly so) to go through college.
It can be seen in taking inventions like the telephone, telegraph, and internet, and optimizing the experience until over a billion people can be connected in one friend network, and where any one of 3 billion people can send a text message to any of the others, and where any one of 6 billion people can have a voice conversation with any other person almost anywhere in the world.
Now, you could say that "telephony was invented over a century ago". This is true. However, giving almost every human the ability to talk to any other human is in my opinion a bigger achievement than the technological breakthrough of stringing a cable from one city to another 130+ years ago. We should not discount the incremental revolution in optimizing these technological inventions in the service of humanity -- between communication, transportation, healthcare, and political thought, we're just focused on less visible change lately. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
posted by haykinson at 9:13 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Optimization can be seen in improving gas consumption of cars and planes, which delays us in killing our environment. It can be seen in making electric cars practical and sellable.
It can be seen in not just pulling the easy 50% of the world's population out of poverty, but also the other 50% that's much harder to pull out. We've been making _amazing_ strides in this regard in the last couple of decades, actually.
It can be seen in educating not just the richest, smartest and most driven part of the population, but in providing higher ed to ever more and more of the rest of society in hopes of a transformative change once you get _everyone_ (or nearly so) to go through college.
It can be seen in taking inventions like the telephone, telegraph, and internet, and optimizing the experience until over a billion people can be connected in one friend network, and where any one of 3 billion people can send a text message to any of the others, and where any one of 6 billion people can have a voice conversation with any other person almost anywhere in the world.
Now, you could say that "telephony was invented over a century ago". This is true. However, giving almost every human the ability to talk to any other human is in my opinion a bigger achievement than the technological breakthrough of stringing a cable from one city to another 130+ years ago. We should not discount the incremental revolution in optimizing these technological inventions in the service of humanity -- between communication, transportation, healthcare, and political thought, we're just focused on less visible change lately. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
posted by haykinson at 9:13 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
I don't think I'm being very Pollyannish, but I'm a biologist, so when I see him say something like this:
Just riffing off of your use of the word "myopia", we now have surgeries for the eye that give me perfect vision after years of only being able to see clearly for a hand length. And in biology, there has never ever been a better time to be researching or inventing. Check out a recent trial of stem cell therapy for retinas (also a rare example of good science journalism), where they had huge success in outcomes in what was only a trial for basic safety. The biggest criticism seems to be that it's not using newer technology for induced stem cells that won't require immune suppression. But this is the progress even in a field where there's been a concerted and successful political effort to retard research and stymie the development of technology.
We could be potentially be moving much faster with more money, particularly since so much of a current research leader's time is spent applying for money instead of doing research. If 1-3% of the vast amounts of money wasted on government contractors was invested in the far more efficient government research grant process, we'd be moving faster. But I'm suspicious of big centralized research goals when they don't rise naturally from researchers. The "War on Cancer" was one such big push. It was started by advertisers and executives as the initiative of moneyed elites that are used to getting their way through bluster and force of will, instead of an effort that was based on the realities of those who were working in the field. And even still, it has improved cancer treatment quite a bit. And we now have far more technology for understanding cancer than we've ever had before. But we needed the basic molecular biology to move forward in order to understand cancer; dumping tons of money into cancer research like was done eventually provided a lot of basic molecular biology and general biological technology (e.g. cancer cell lines) such that we can push forward understanding forward more. If this money was instead applied where the researchers saw the best way to advance understand, rather than to direct application of "cancer," it may have been a more efficient use of time and money.
posted by Llama-Lime at 9:15 AM on December 4, 2014 [12 favorites]
We saw the biggest advances in science and technology: if you were a biologist, physicist or materials scientist, there was no better time to be workingIt's just so incredibly wrong that I know he hasn't been paying attention. The things that we're discovering every year in fundamental biology are mind blowing. I was drawn into biology almost against my will 10 years ago based on the leaps and jumps taking place, and I never would have been drawn in based on what was going on in the previous century. We're seeing structures and complexity that would have never been imagined. We're able to look into the past and see our genetic history by comparing to other animals genomes. We're able to push and prod and reason in ways that would make any 1950s biologist insanely jealous, and we're still just barely scratching the surface of what's going on in a cell and between cells.
Just riffing off of your use of the word "myopia", we now have surgeries for the eye that give me perfect vision after years of only being able to see clearly for a hand length. And in biology, there has never ever been a better time to be researching or inventing. Check out a recent trial of stem cell therapy for retinas (also a rare example of good science journalism), where they had huge success in outcomes in what was only a trial for basic safety. The biggest criticism seems to be that it's not using newer technology for induced stem cells that won't require immune suppression. But this is the progress even in a field where there's been a concerted and successful political effort to retard research and stymie the development of technology.
We could be potentially be moving much faster with more money, particularly since so much of a current research leader's time is spent applying for money instead of doing research. If 1-3% of the vast amounts of money wasted on government contractors was invested in the far more efficient government research grant process, we'd be moving faster. But I'm suspicious of big centralized research goals when they don't rise naturally from researchers. The "War on Cancer" was one such big push. It was started by advertisers and executives as the initiative of moneyed elites that are used to getting their way through bluster and force of will, instead of an effort that was based on the realities of those who were working in the field. And even still, it has improved cancer treatment quite a bit. And we now have far more technology for understanding cancer than we've ever had before. But we needed the basic molecular biology to move forward in order to understand cancer; dumping tons of money into cancer research like was done eventually provided a lot of basic molecular biology and general biological technology (e.g. cancer cell lines) such that we can push forward understanding forward more. If this money was instead applied where the researchers saw the best way to advance understand, rather than to direct application of "cancer," it may have been a more efficient use of time and money.
posted by Llama-Lime at 9:15 AM on December 4, 2014 [12 favorites]
I don't doubt we should devote more resources toward science. But overall, the idea that we've been stagnant for 40 years is bullshit. I started wasting a whole bunch of time listing the scientific discoveries and technological innovations and common household tech since 1971, but eh.
While my morning commute would not be completely incomprehensible to a time traveler from 1971, they'd be pretty fucking taken aback by my smartphone playing electronic music from Pandora through Bluetooth in my Prius cruising silently through the parking lot, assuming they believed any of it. And it would take me hours to explain my job even in the most rudimentary terms.
They'd flip out when I told them about black holes and dark matter, or that I inject myself with perfect human insulin manufactured by bacteria, or that my wife and I fell in love before we met, or that a robot landed on a comet a couple of weeks ago and the biggest news was that one of the techs was wearing a shirt with scantily-clad women on it, or that I did all my Christmas shopping in one hour without leaving my desk.
I'd show them my Microsoft Band and my Native Instruments Maschine and Tron Legacy. I'd loan them my Kindle and let them read A Brief History of Time as well as showing them Marvel Unlimited and Google Maps and Wikipedia and YouTube videos of 3D printers and Boston Dynamics robots. I'd make microwave popcorn. I'd take them to a pet store and show them GloFish. And they'd say "Far out, you're living in the future!" and I'd say "I know."
And that would be just barely scratching the surface.
posted by Foosnark at 9:21 AM on December 4, 2014 [10 favorites]
While my morning commute would not be completely incomprehensible to a time traveler from 1971, they'd be pretty fucking taken aback by my smartphone playing electronic music from Pandora through Bluetooth in my Prius cruising silently through the parking lot, assuming they believed any of it. And it would take me hours to explain my job even in the most rudimentary terms.
They'd flip out when I told them about black holes and dark matter, or that I inject myself with perfect human insulin manufactured by bacteria, or that my wife and I fell in love before we met, or that a robot landed on a comet a couple of weeks ago and the biggest news was that one of the techs was wearing a shirt with scantily-clad women on it, or that I did all my Christmas shopping in one hour without leaving my desk.
I'd show them my Microsoft Band and my Native Instruments Maschine and Tron Legacy. I'd loan them my Kindle and let them read A Brief History of Time as well as showing them Marvel Unlimited and Google Maps and Wikipedia and YouTube videos of 3D printers and Boston Dynamics robots. I'd make microwave popcorn. I'd take them to a pet store and show them GloFish. And they'd say "Far out, you're living in the future!" and I'd say "I know."
And that would be just barely scratching the surface.
posted by Foosnark at 9:21 AM on December 4, 2014 [10 favorites]
Oh great, yet another article saying how the 25-year era that ended five years before I was born was the most awesome time in human history.
I prefer living today than in that time, thank you very much.
posted by A dead Quaker at 9:23 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
I prefer living today than in that time, thank you very much.
posted by A dead Quaker at 9:23 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
What a tremendously ignorant thing to write.
posted by humanfont at 9:36 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by humanfont at 9:36 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
It seems to me like the more you know, the more completely new and different something has to be, to be seen as disruptive. For an idea or technology to be disruptive it has to be seen as a replacement for the current thing it's replacing. In this kind of a model, something like an electric car is just an evolution of the gas powered car, it doesn't change much of anything except how the car is powered. For something to be revolutionary it has to replace the idea of a car, so a jetpack is getting there but point to point teleportation would change everything.
posted by doctor_negative at 9:37 AM on December 4, 2014
posted by doctor_negative at 9:37 AM on December 4, 2014
So so wrong.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:39 AM on December 4, 2014
posted by MartinWisse at 9:39 AM on December 4, 2014
I had a relative that lived to be 100. She died four years ago. She was born in 1910. I once asked her about change and innovation in her lifetime. I asked her what the most impressive and/or best invention in her lifetime was. I assumed she would say the airplane or space travel or nuclear power, or something pretty major. Nope. She looked at me and told me the best invention in her lifetime, the one that had the most impact on her was the toaster oven. Now, whenever I put that slice of Elios pizza in the toaster oven, I think of my great aunt.
posted by 724A at 9:47 AM on December 4, 2014 [7 favorites]
posted by 724A at 9:47 AM on December 4, 2014 [7 favorites]
Today, progress is defined almost entirely by consumer-driven, often banal improvements in information technology. [...] As the US technologist Peter Thiel once put it: ‘We wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters.’
You also got Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars. All those worlds are yours if you could be bothered to pull your head out of your ass, you useless twit.
posted by RedOrGreen at 9:54 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
You also got Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars. All those worlds are yours if you could be bothered to pull your head out of your ass, you useless twit.
posted by RedOrGreen at 9:54 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
"Popular music. "
Jazz would like to tell you to go fuck yourself.
But also, man, carrying supercomputers around in our pockets, all the time. That seems big. And there are things going on right now in green energy that seem fairly close to hitting tipping points where they're paradigm-changing ... it's just hard to know exactly what they'll be.
I was pregnant with my first child in 2008, and when they announced Barack Obama had won the election, I collapsed to my knees sobbing and clutching my belly with joy, overwhelmed because my children would be born into a world where there has ALWAYS been a black president. They would NEVER know a world where that wasn't possible, where it hadn't happened. That felt revolutionary to me.
I also think maybe some of this "stall" is because the Baby Boomers are such a dominant force, and we're only just starting to move out from under that. Their music, their fashion, their political concerns, have really dominated American culture (and European culture, though not to quite the same extent I don't think) for a long time. Obama is the first president where we haven't had to keep bickering about who did what in Vietnam and judge with all the cultural baggage that goes with that. I feel like I can see, in local government, as Xers and millennials start to take more active roles, a different set of concerns that don't fall neatly into the left/right categories of the past, and that aren't traditional concerns of the Baby Boomer cohort, although it's hard to identify quite yet which of those are quixotic quests by individuals and which are more generational concerns. Definitely environmental concerns are in the forefront -- even young Republicans (at the city council, county board, etc.) accept the need for low environmental impact projects. I would also say the younger cohort is less willing to accept the "growth will follow" justification for civic projects, and are often pushing to hear what happens if the city doesn't grow, if the tax base doesn't grow, are there ways we can make this development flexible to future needs instead of single-use. The older cohort at the city council is like "if you build it, they will come" whereas the younger cohort has more questions about "how do we scale down from this if it fails?" and "okay but when it gets blighted later, what then?"
I think as the Baby Boomers retire from public life, it'll start being more obvious what the next waves of innovation in society are going to look like, as Xers and Millennials hit their 40s and become senior executives and elected leaders and so on, and come out of the Boomers' shadows a bit.
Of course the Boomers will still have to innovate death, but that's probably good, I suspect dying in America will be a lot better after the Boomers go through and fix all the horrible parts, as they have tended to do by virtue of their sheer numbers with a lot of life-change moments. (Truly don't mean that morbidly, truly think the wave of Boomers is going to look at a lot of problems with death and dying in America and demand it get better on their way out.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:59 AM on December 4, 2014 [7 favorites]
Jazz would like to tell you to go fuck yourself.
But also, man, carrying supercomputers around in our pockets, all the time. That seems big. And there are things going on right now in green energy that seem fairly close to hitting tipping points where they're paradigm-changing ... it's just hard to know exactly what they'll be.
I was pregnant with my first child in 2008, and when they announced Barack Obama had won the election, I collapsed to my knees sobbing and clutching my belly with joy, overwhelmed because my children would be born into a world where there has ALWAYS been a black president. They would NEVER know a world where that wasn't possible, where it hadn't happened. That felt revolutionary to me.
I also think maybe some of this "stall" is because the Baby Boomers are such a dominant force, and we're only just starting to move out from under that. Their music, their fashion, their political concerns, have really dominated American culture (and European culture, though not to quite the same extent I don't think) for a long time. Obama is the first president where we haven't had to keep bickering about who did what in Vietnam and judge with all the cultural baggage that goes with that. I feel like I can see, in local government, as Xers and millennials start to take more active roles, a different set of concerns that don't fall neatly into the left/right categories of the past, and that aren't traditional concerns of the Baby Boomer cohort, although it's hard to identify quite yet which of those are quixotic quests by individuals and which are more generational concerns. Definitely environmental concerns are in the forefront -- even young Republicans (at the city council, county board, etc.) accept the need for low environmental impact projects. I would also say the younger cohort is less willing to accept the "growth will follow" justification for civic projects, and are often pushing to hear what happens if the city doesn't grow, if the tax base doesn't grow, are there ways we can make this development flexible to future needs instead of single-use. The older cohort at the city council is like "if you build it, they will come" whereas the younger cohort has more questions about "how do we scale down from this if it fails?" and "okay but when it gets blighted later, what then?"
I think as the Baby Boomers retire from public life, it'll start being more obvious what the next waves of innovation in society are going to look like, as Xers and Millennials hit their 40s and become senior executives and elected leaders and so on, and come out of the Boomers' shadows a bit.
Of course the Boomers will still have to innovate death, but that's probably good, I suspect dying in America will be a lot better after the Boomers go through and fix all the horrible parts, as they have tended to do by virtue of their sheer numbers with a lot of life-change moments. (Truly don't mean that morbidly, truly think the wave of Boomers is going to look at a lot of problems with death and dying in America and demand it get better on their way out.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:59 AM on December 4, 2014 [7 favorites]
The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths (Anthem 2013) is stirring up much-needed debate worldwide about the role of the state in fostering the innovation needed for smart, sustainable growth.
posted by elmono at 10:03 AM on December 4, 2014
posted by elmono at 10:03 AM on December 4, 2014
We need a paradigm shift in the way R&D is done and in the way that technology is applied in the marketplace. So much of the low hanging fruit has been plucked such that modern research involves huge, expensive teams of dedicated researchers rather than individual scientists in the days of Newton and Darwin. As research becomes increasingly risky, it's not unexpected that institutions and even governments are shying away from basic research: Bell Labs, IBM research, et al, once had enormous budgets dedicated to basic research in physics. Another thing is that so much money has been invested in existing infrastructure that adopting completely new technologies would be prohibitively expensive and makes no sense from an economic standpoint. Intel is not going to make non-silicon-based chips and Samsung is not going to make plastic displays overnight, until they see a risk of losing to competitors who adopt such new technology. But the capital costs of revolutionizing hardware are also prohibitively expensive, and wealth and knowledge are becoming increasingly concentrated, so it is difficult for a competitor to appear, which explains the slowed pace of innovation in the physical realm (hardware, not software) when compared to the 1940s.
For those of you who claim that the article is "wrong" or "ignorant", I think the author in the article is specifically talking about revolutions that create entire new industries rather than the ones we currently have. To be fair, there is a lot of innovation going on in the Internet of Things, cloud technology, biotech, etc. But there haven't been entirely new industries (sure, there's Facebook and a lot of information startups, but they are just dressing up old industries and rebranding them as "tech") that are popping up utilizing new physical technology in the physical realm.
I think that this trend of applying incremental changes to existing technology such as the internet/biotech/electronics/aerospace/materials and adapting them to old problems will continue until people can no longer make money from it.
posted by wye naught at 10:09 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
For those of you who claim that the article is "wrong" or "ignorant", I think the author in the article is specifically talking about revolutions that create entire new industries rather than the ones we currently have. To be fair, there is a lot of innovation going on in the Internet of Things, cloud technology, biotech, etc. But there haven't been entirely new industries (sure, there's Facebook and a lot of information startups, but they are just dressing up old industries and rebranding them as "tech") that are popping up utilizing new physical technology in the physical realm.
I think that this trend of applying incremental changes to existing technology such as the internet/biotech/electronics/aerospace/materials and adapting them to old problems will continue until people can no longer make money from it.
posted by wye naught at 10:09 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Okay, first off, saying that civil rights was innovated in the post-WWII era requires willful ignorance of suffrage.
There's an awful of lot willful ignorance going around these days, especially in politics, so I can understand the temptation to attribute that to anyone who say something that seems blinkered, but it's very possible he just didn't think of it.
What a tremendously ignorant thing to write.
I'm not so sure. It is true, there are some big things he doesn't seem to realize the importance of (the Internet). But if you keep reading into the article, he makes some good points, that seem to indicate that, whatever we have, we could have had more.
You also got Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars. All those worlds are yours if you could be bothered to pull your head out of your ass, you useless twit.
I think the useless twit might agree with you. He's talking about invention more than discovery, or should be, I think he himself might get the two confused a bit.
I think what he might be getting at is the lack of big vision improvement. We have seen great change in the past few decades, but most of it is something we've almost stumbled upon. Fewer things that someone charted the course for, more things that have just happened, rising up out of the stew of events. Public funding for general research has declined greatly, and private funding has mostly contented itself with short term stuff. And we don't get to see the innovation foregone by that lack. It's easy to see where we are and think that it couldn't possibly be better right now, when it very easily could. Just take all the resources we've poured into Iraq and Afghanistan. How much research could that have funded? How many people could that have helped?
The thing is, those conflicts were the result of a big vision, just an incredibly blinkered one. A lot of the lack the author bemoans may ultimately be political in origin.
posted by JHarris at 10:12 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
There's an awful of lot willful ignorance going around these days, especially in politics, so I can understand the temptation to attribute that to anyone who say something that seems blinkered, but it's very possible he just didn't think of it.
What a tremendously ignorant thing to write.
I'm not so sure. It is true, there are some big things he doesn't seem to realize the importance of (the Internet). But if you keep reading into the article, he makes some good points, that seem to indicate that, whatever we have, we could have had more.
You also got Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars. All those worlds are yours if you could be bothered to pull your head out of your ass, you useless twit.
I think the useless twit might agree with you. He's talking about invention more than discovery, or should be, I think he himself might get the two confused a bit.
I think what he might be getting at is the lack of big vision improvement. We have seen great change in the past few decades, but most of it is something we've almost stumbled upon. Fewer things that someone charted the course for, more things that have just happened, rising up out of the stew of events. Public funding for general research has declined greatly, and private funding has mostly contented itself with short term stuff. And we don't get to see the innovation foregone by that lack. It's easy to see where we are and think that it couldn't possibly be better right now, when it very easily could. Just take all the resources we've poured into Iraq and Afghanistan. How much research could that have funded? How many people could that have helped?
The thing is, those conflicts were the result of a big vision, just an incredibly blinkered one. A lot of the lack the author bemoans may ultimately be political in origin.
posted by JHarris at 10:12 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
But check the trend: A quarter century ago more than a third of the world lived in such extreme poverty, about a decade ago it was down to about a fifth, today it's about 12 percent and on track to fall to only about 5 percent in 2030.
Most of these gains can be attributed to China. No mean feat, but world poverty has been steadily decreasing since the end of WWII.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:12 AM on December 4, 2014
Most of these gains can be attributed to China. No mean feat, but world poverty has been steadily decreasing since the end of WWII.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:12 AM on December 4, 2014
Haven't read it and am off to work here, but one point that I think is cogent with this is that for all the fact we have little mini super-computers in our pockets, we use that power to...
Allow a grandchild to have a video-call with a grandparent a thousand miles away. Find our way to any destination on the globe. Get recommendations on which destination we should find our way to. Look up any obscure corner of human knowledge, read any newspaper on the planet (with on-demand automated translation), watch a college lecture on any topic from a prestigious university, watch a video that shows you how to change the oil on your car and good fucking christ, yes, play Fruit Ninja.
This is a pretty big deal. One of the reasons why we haven't seen as many "great leap" innovations is that there is a ton of gold to be mined in computer-aided refinement of current technology, and pushing cost of entry to tools and techniques down. Once that spools up, we'll probably be off and running again.
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:14 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Allow a grandchild to have a video-call with a grandparent a thousand miles away. Find our way to any destination on the globe. Get recommendations on which destination we should find our way to. Look up any obscure corner of human knowledge, read any newspaper on the planet (with on-demand automated translation), watch a college lecture on any topic from a prestigious university, watch a video that shows you how to change the oil on your car and good fucking christ, yes, play Fruit Ninja.
This is a pretty big deal. One of the reasons why we haven't seen as many "great leap" innovations is that there is a ton of gold to be mined in computer-aided refinement of current technology, and pushing cost of entry to tools and techniques down. Once that spools up, we'll probably be off and running again.
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:14 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
If the Pyro Shooter isn't innovation, I don't know what is.
posted by Muddler at 10:22 AM on December 4, 2014
posted by Muddler at 10:22 AM on December 4, 2014
Most of these gains can be attributed to China.
Also, the writer claims that we got out of the 70s recession quite chirpily, when most of our increased standard of living is due to cheap Chinese imports that have floated the buying power of working families.
The grandparents of us boomers saw far more fundamental change to the human experience than any of us can imagine, especially if they were living in rural locations. From 1900-1950 they witnessed the widespread implementation of electric light, powered flight, the auto, the telephone, assembly line production systems, the mechanization of war, home refrigeration, the first nuclear bombs, recorded music, the radio...SYNTHETIC FERTILIZERS!
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:26 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
Also, the writer claims that we got out of the 70s recession quite chirpily, when most of our increased standard of living is due to cheap Chinese imports that have floated the buying power of working families.
The grandparents of us boomers saw far more fundamental change to the human experience than any of us can imagine, especially if they were living in rural locations. From 1900-1950 they witnessed the widespread implementation of electric light, powered flight, the auto, the telephone, assembly line production systems, the mechanization of war, home refrigeration, the first nuclear bombs, recorded music, the radio...SYNTHETIC FERTILIZERS!
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:26 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
His third paragraph where he makes his case, annotated.
Just about everything that defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown, during this time. The Pill. [yeah, pretty much correct] Electronics. [wtf?] Computers [marginally correct, there were definitely big leaps forward] and the birth of the internet [no. By this standard computers began with Babbage]. Nuclear power [Nuclear power plants? okay]. Television [no. coast to coast broadcasting by TV, yes]. Antibiotics [The third Nobel prize for antibiotics had been awarded by 1945]. Space travel [actual people in space, yes]. Civil rights [he knows nothing about history. Gandhi, as one of the most significant before 1945 examples, many others].
There is more. Feminism [see civil rights]. Teenagers [is he just trying to be snarky?]. The Green Revolution in agriculture [it's a bit like saying "the turbulent sixties didn't happen until the 60s." There has always been agriculture being adapted to various new landscapes. Doing it as part of the Green Revolution didn't happen without calling it the Green Revolution.] Decolonisation [U.S. Independence, Central and South American Independence, among others]. Popular music [weird again, suggests he knows nothing about the subject]. Mass aviation [I guess he means as a form of consumer transportation, because there was mass aviation in WWII]. The birth of the gay rights movement [not the birth, but it did get on its feet]. Cheap, reliable and safe automobiles [cheap and reliable would be the Model T, safety and regulation, okay]. High-speed trains [while the term high-speed is relative, I would agree the electric trains were a quantum leap above the previous fast trains]. We put a man on the Moon [when he refers to a specific event, rather than an invention or concept, he does well] sent a probe to Mars [ditto], beat smallpox [really the defeat didn't take place until the late 70s] and discovered the double-spiral key of life [DNA discovery was fairly old before we discovered DNA was a double-helix and proved it was the genetic material].
In retrospect, I don't know I wasted my time on this.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 10:52 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
Just about everything that defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown, during this time. The Pill. [yeah, pretty much correct] Electronics. [wtf?] Computers [marginally correct, there were definitely big leaps forward] and the birth of the internet [no. By this standard computers began with Babbage]. Nuclear power [Nuclear power plants? okay]. Television [no. coast to coast broadcasting by TV, yes]. Antibiotics [The third Nobel prize for antibiotics had been awarded by 1945]. Space travel [actual people in space, yes]. Civil rights [he knows nothing about history. Gandhi, as one of the most significant before 1945 examples, many others].
There is more. Feminism [see civil rights]. Teenagers [is he just trying to be snarky?]. The Green Revolution in agriculture [it's a bit like saying "the turbulent sixties didn't happen until the 60s." There has always been agriculture being adapted to various new landscapes. Doing it as part of the Green Revolution didn't happen without calling it the Green Revolution.] Decolonisation [U.S. Independence, Central and South American Independence, among others]. Popular music [weird again, suggests he knows nothing about the subject]. Mass aviation [I guess he means as a form of consumer transportation, because there was mass aviation in WWII]. The birth of the gay rights movement [not the birth, but it did get on its feet]. Cheap, reliable and safe automobiles [cheap and reliable would be the Model T, safety and regulation, okay]. High-speed trains [while the term high-speed is relative, I would agree the electric trains were a quantum leap above the previous fast trains]. We put a man on the Moon [when he refers to a specific event, rather than an invention or concept, he does well] sent a probe to Mars [ditto], beat smallpox [really the defeat didn't take place until the late 70s] and discovered the double-spiral key of life [DNA discovery was fairly old before we discovered DNA was a double-helix and proved it was the genetic material].
In retrospect, I don't know I wasted my time on this.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 10:52 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
I have a feeling that he's discounting innovations in the Web and programming fields as being minor improvements instead of major innovations. Over the past 12 years (more or less my period of young adulthood) we've seen the following major changes:
posted by codacorolla at 10:52 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
- Computers, working together, can amass incredibly large amounts of data and run statistical analysis on that data. The ability to do this isn't limited to massive corporations, but can also be purchased piece-meal by interested amateurs. We're seeing the positive ends of this (in terms of social science research, for instance) and also the negative ends of this (in terms of widescale state surveillance). This is something that would have been literal science fiction in the golden years that he's writing about, and even up to the 90s.
- The Internet that was first conceptualized in his golden period was largely document delivery. However, over the past 12 years the Internet has become the backbone for massively networked suites of software. Although we think of Twitter and Facebook as largely being a sort of social email system, it's more true that it's a piece of software we use to communicate across distance and culture. Talk to someone in the 90s about Word Processing, and I'm sure that they wouldn't ever conceive of the idea of someone doing 90% of their writing in their web browser window (if they even knew what a web browser was). The collaborative power of a free Google Drive account would single handedly replace a huge fraction of the workload (sharing and managing documents and information) in a golden age office setting. Once again, this would be high science fiction in the 70s, and something seen as fanciful in the 80s and 90s, and is commonplace today.
- Every day millions of children (and adults) log on to virtual worlds for entertainment. They play with both their friends and strangers from across the planet. Many of them do this from handheld computers in their pockets. The first massively multiplayer games created in the early stages of networked computing were simple text-based adventures, and today even games available for free and programmed in a person's free time have immersive graphical interfaces. Once again, this is something that wasn't even imagined in the golden age of innovation, and was high science fiction in the 80s and 90s.
posted by codacorolla at 10:52 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
medicine, technology, civil rights
One of these things is not like the others.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 11:44 AM on December 4, 2014
One of these things is not like the others.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 11:44 AM on December 4, 2014
Well, obviously. "Technology" is from a Greek root rather than Latin.
posted by Etrigan at 11:51 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by Etrigan at 11:51 AM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Now I'm threadsitting and going to leave, but electronic music was also born in the 19th century and really got underway in the 1920s.
Perhaps kind of splitting hairs, but I'd differentiate between synthesizer music - which is how I'd class what you're referencing - and electronic music in musicological terms. There's a groaning chasm between Switched On Bach and house, techno, drum and bass, trance, etc.
posted by Dysk at 11:59 AM on December 4, 2014
Perhaps kind of splitting hairs, but I'd differentiate between synthesizer music - which is how I'd class what you're referencing - and electronic music in musicological terms. There's a groaning chasm between Switched On Bach and house, techno, drum and bass, trance, etc.
posted by Dysk at 11:59 AM on December 4, 2014
These days, one has to learn far more in order to even understand what's going on. Our breadth of knowledge has exploded in a way that a single person can scarcely understand, because it takes years of graduate study to reach the frontiers of knowledge in interesting research areas.
But this just explains the author's perspective, i.e. it doesn't necessarily disagree with his complaint. I think he just holds a different--albeit a nonrigorous, intuited--metric for what should be significant in technological change.
posted by polymodus at 12:18 PM on December 4, 2014
But this just explains the author's perspective, i.e. it doesn't necessarily disagree with his complaint. I think he just holds a different--albeit a nonrigorous, intuited--metric for what should be significant in technological change.
posted by polymodus at 12:18 PM on December 4, 2014
Has Humankind been stagnating for the last 5000 years? Consider all the groundbreaking innovations our revered ancestors developed:
Fire
Textiles
Pottery
Animal Domestication
Agriculture
Cities
Metalworking
Chariots
Boats
Writing
Arithmetic
Obviously we're just relying on incremental development from these groundbreaking discoveries. The incessant requirement to have concrete results and our massive aversion to risking lives in the pursuit of innovation cripples our ability to have BIG ideas. But what to do?
The solution of course is simple, and the same one I always propose to solve our complex global problems: make me God Emperor. With absolute power I will be more than willing to risk trillions of dollars and tens of millions of lives in the quest to develop...um...something. Some BIG idea. No Baumal's Cost Disease or missing out on amazing things with me!
posted by happyroach at 1:49 PM on December 4, 2014
Fire
Textiles
Pottery
Animal Domestication
Agriculture
Cities
Metalworking
Chariots
Boats
Writing
Arithmetic
Obviously we're just relying on incremental development from these groundbreaking discoveries. The incessant requirement to have concrete results and our massive aversion to risking lives in the pursuit of innovation cripples our ability to have BIG ideas. But what to do?
The solution of course is simple, and the same one I always propose to solve our complex global problems: make me God Emperor. With absolute power I will be more than willing to risk trillions of dollars and tens of millions of lives in the quest to develop...um...something. Some BIG idea. No Baumal's Cost Disease or missing out on amazing things with me!
posted by happyroach at 1:49 PM on December 4, 2014
I would generally agree with the author’s that premise far more changed culturally in the period from WWII to the 70s, than in the subsequent period, in terms of how people actually live their lives.
We still go to school, have jobs, drive gasoline powered cars, and buy our energy from fossil-fuel generated power plants. Progress seems to be frustratingly slow, on the big issues.
For the most part, we don’t live all that much differently than we did, in the 1970s…we just have better toys.
posted by littlejohnnyjewel at 1:51 PM on December 4, 2014
We still go to school, have jobs, drive gasoline powered cars, and buy our energy from fossil-fuel generated power plants. Progress seems to be frustratingly slow, on the big issues.
For the most part, we don’t live all that much differently than we did, in the 1970s…we just have better toys.
posted by littlejohnnyjewel at 1:51 PM on December 4, 2014
Michael Hanlon on the lack of true invention...
That doesn't seem to be an entirely accurate summary of Hanlon...
But past the semantic quibbles: there's been a great deal of refinement (often *neeeded*) of old inventions. Audio has taken great leaps, computing, electronics, internal combustion engines, medical treatment, HVAC, and on and on.
There were countless inventions in the first half of the 20th century that desperately needed refinement. Batteries have been around a century: refinement has been difficult. We started heating with oil a century ago: look where that's gotten us. Whatever potential there ever was for safe nuclear power, we've never approached that. We continue to waste *vast* quantities, billions and billions of tons, of everything - drowning in it. A mandatory 50% program of conservation alone would stop the bulk of global warming.
I could go on and on, but as Harlan Ellison constantly points out: an idea is not a book. A basic invention is like a newborn infant.
posted by Twang at 1:52 PM on December 4, 2014
That doesn't seem to be an entirely accurate summary of Hanlon...
But past the semantic quibbles: there's been a great deal of refinement (often *neeeded*) of old inventions. Audio has taken great leaps, computing, electronics, internal combustion engines, medical treatment, HVAC, and on and on.
There were countless inventions in the first half of the 20th century that desperately needed refinement. Batteries have been around a century: refinement has been difficult. We started heating with oil a century ago: look where that's gotten us. Whatever potential there ever was for safe nuclear power, we've never approached that. We continue to waste *vast* quantities, billions and billions of tons, of everything - drowning in it. A mandatory 50% program of conservation alone would stop the bulk of global warming.
I could go on and on, but as Harlan Ellison constantly points out: an idea is not a book. A basic invention is like a newborn infant.
posted by Twang at 1:52 PM on December 4, 2014
Hanlon's lawn is being trod upon by whippersnappers
Even whippersnappers haven't come that far. Sure some of them are electric now, but that just means you whippersnap through the cable sometimes. They still use that same fluro orange plastic cord that they did back in the 80s. The only truly modern innovation is now the chemicals you need to poison your lawn are readily available, and you can concrete over the whole sorry mess in a weekend. Progress!
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:04 PM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
Even whippersnappers haven't come that far. Sure some of them are electric now, but that just means you whippersnap through the cable sometimes. They still use that same fluro orange plastic cord that they did back in the 80s. The only truly modern innovation is now the chemicals you need to poison your lawn are readily available, and you can concrete over the whole sorry mess in a weekend. Progress!
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:04 PM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
We have cars that don't use gasoline. If that's not a paradigm shift, then I genuinely do not know what the hell he's looking for.
And some drive themselves.
posted by Mental Wimp at 2:21 PM on December 4, 2014
And some drive themselves.
posted by Mental Wimp at 2:21 PM on December 4, 2014
Right now I'm paying my rent by writing erotic eBooks that I sell on Amazon. I'm going to spend most of today working on my laptop, using Open Office as my word processor and designing my book cover using Photoshop, then I'll probably unwind with my girlfriend later by watching some shows we DVR'ed on our new HD TV. After I put her to bed I'll watch one of The Rad Brad's video game playthroughs on YouTube, catch up with my backlog of email, waste some time on Metafilter and maybe finally get around to doing some of my Christmas shopping online, all while waiting anxiously for my doctor to get back to my latest email about my upcoming genetic test that will tell us if my recent bout of colon cancer was a genetic thing and if my family needs to worry about getting it too.
So yeah, its basically the same day I'd have if this was 1974.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:38 PM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
So yeah, its basically the same day I'd have if this was 1974.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:38 PM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
(Also, 700th comment! Man, I do go on.)
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:40 PM on December 4, 2014
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:40 PM on December 4, 2014
Teleport a computer engineer from 40 years ago into the present day. They'd be familiar with terminals and a CLI, and maybe know a few UNIX commands. They'd understand computing theory, logic gates, ICs CPUs, and would be tickled to learn how many gates we've crammed onto a single wafer and what tricks we use to get high clock speeds. They could probably get started coding right away in FORTRAN, C, LISP, Pascal, assembler, etc. They would be annoyed with our lack of documentation.
Now teleport an engineer from 80 years ago. They might have experience with various office machines, but not necessarily know how to type. The fanciest computers around were either telephone exchange switches or mechanical integrators. Turing and Shannon were still undergrads.
The thesis is not "nothing cool happened in the last 40 years" but that there are fewer giants, and we're stacking up taller human pyramids on their shoulders.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:49 PM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
Now teleport an engineer from 80 years ago. They might have experience with various office machines, but not necessarily know how to type. The fanciest computers around were either telephone exchange switches or mechanical integrators. Turing and Shannon were still undergrads.
The thesis is not "nothing cool happened in the last 40 years" but that there are fewer giants, and we're stacking up taller human pyramids on their shoulders.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:49 PM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
cheap and reliable would be the Model T
If a Model T is "reliable," what word do you use for modern cars that stand a very reasonable chance of running 100,000 miles or more with only infrequent preventive maintenance?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:05 PM on December 4, 2014
If a Model T is "reliable," what word do you use for modern cars that stand a very reasonable chance of running 100,000 miles or more with only infrequent preventive maintenance?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:05 PM on December 4, 2014
Computers, working together, can amass incredibly large amounts of data and run statistical analysis on that data.
this is largely an economic model, not a technical one. hard drives, statistics, and http have been around.
I'm sure that they wouldn't ever conceive of the idea of someone doing 90% of their writing in their web browser window
never worked on a mainframe?
virtual worlds for entertainment
still, capitalizing on http, radio, batteries, and massive blocks of procedural code - yo '80s. it's nice that they're small and light.
I think what you are seeing is the 'applications' arising from older innovation, rather than innovation itself. That said, I firmly believe innovation is alive and well, because my phd friends tell me so. As noted above, you can't even recognize innovation in actual engineering and sciences unless you're pretty elevated in the medium.
posted by j_curiouser at 3:12 PM on December 4, 2014
this is largely an economic model, not a technical one. hard drives, statistics, and http have been around.
I'm sure that they wouldn't ever conceive of the idea of someone doing 90% of their writing in their web browser window
never worked on a mainframe?
virtual worlds for entertainment
still, capitalizing on http, radio, batteries, and massive blocks of procedural code - yo '80s. it's nice that they're small and light.
I think what you are seeing is the 'applications' arising from older innovation, rather than innovation itself. That said, I firmly believe innovation is alive and well, because my phd friends tell me so. As noted above, you can't even recognize innovation in actual engineering and sciences unless you're pretty elevated in the medium.
posted by j_curiouser at 3:12 PM on December 4, 2014
A bunch of these things that were "born" between the 1940s-70s didn't really come close to becoming what they became until much later. OK, so the internet technically began before the 1990s. BFD. It was just little clusters of geeks talking to each other back then. The internet as we know it began in the 1990s, and that is the internet that continues to transform society in massive ways.
OK, so the gay rights movement began back then. But there was very little actual progress until much later, and just in the last 10 years I've seen truly profound changes in how the US mainstream culture views gays. In 1970-something the idea of gay marriage would have been, at best, a zany punchline on a variety show, two guys in tuxedos mincing offstage hand in hand while the canned orchestra played the shave-and-a-haircut sting.
People literally have Star Trek stuff in their pockets, little computers that can answer questions you ask out loud, show you whatever video you want to see or even make a phone call. You can say that some nerd thought up the germ of that idea in 1965, but that was not the freaking iPhone. If you keep tracing any invention back far enough, you can say it all started with the bold innovation of the wheel and it's been downhill ever since.
This is not the future I expected, or really wanted. But to say progress has stopped, as the author actually does, is just silly.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:48 PM on December 4, 2014
OK, so the gay rights movement began back then. But there was very little actual progress until much later, and just in the last 10 years I've seen truly profound changes in how the US mainstream culture views gays. In 1970-something the idea of gay marriage would have been, at best, a zany punchline on a variety show, two guys in tuxedos mincing offstage hand in hand while the canned orchestra played the shave-and-a-haircut sting.
People literally have Star Trek stuff in their pockets, little computers that can answer questions you ask out loud, show you whatever video you want to see or even make a phone call. You can say that some nerd thought up the germ of that idea in 1965, but that was not the freaking iPhone. If you keep tracing any invention back far enough, you can say it all started with the bold innovation of the wheel and it's been downhill ever since.
This is not the future I expected, or really wanted. But to say progress has stopped, as the author actually does, is just silly.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:48 PM on December 4, 2014
Every claimed advance from the author's golden era of the 1950s-1970s fits the criteria of incremental improvement on existing tech and not a new industry breakthrough.
posted by humanfont at 7:17 PM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by humanfont at 7:17 PM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
I love you people. You give me hope when you jump all in the sh*t of an ill conceived rant like this.
As innovation moves from hardware to software it's a lot less obvious (in terms of artifacts). He doesn't get it. I'm mostly interested in people (present company included) that do.
posted by cleroy at 9:02 PM on December 4, 2014
As innovation moves from hardware to software it's a lot less obvious (in terms of artifacts). He doesn't get it. I'm mostly interested in people (present company included) that do.
posted by cleroy at 9:02 PM on December 4, 2014
Aiyee! The fire in my pocket window is growing dim. Must I rub two sticks together to embiggen this innovative flame? Methinks not. Huzzah.
posted by valkane at 5:39 AM on December 5, 2014
posted by valkane at 5:39 AM on December 5, 2014
Has he not used an mp3 player, a cell phone, a smart phone, a GPS, or Google? Those have been game changers in my life (born 1975).
The time for a new drug candidate to gain approval in the US rose from less than eight years in the 1960s to nearly 13 years by the 1990s.
And, in the 1960s, we had drugs like thalidomide (not approved in the US, but it was approved in Europe). Might have been a better idea to require more testing for that one, huh? I wonder if the EU's caution about new drugs might have something to do with that.
posted by Anne Neville at 6:06 AM on December 5, 2014
The time for a new drug candidate to gain approval in the US rose from less than eight years in the 1960s to nearly 13 years by the 1990s.
And, in the 1960s, we had drugs like thalidomide (not approved in the US, but it was approved in Europe). Might have been a better idea to require more testing for that one, huh? I wonder if the EU's caution about new drugs might have something to do with that.
posted by Anne Neville at 6:06 AM on December 5, 2014
I haven't been impressed by any new developments since the heavy elements were formed in the hearts of early stars and then scattered in their supernovas.
posted by freecellwizard at 6:58 AM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by freecellwizard at 6:58 AM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]
Bah heavy elements were just stars building on hydrogen. The last true innovation came with the gluon-quark plasma.
posted by humanfont at 6:14 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by humanfont at 6:14 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]
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Second, he says, "Our cars are faster, safer and use less fuel than they did in 1971, but there has been no paradigm shift." We have cars that don't use gasoline. If that's not a paradigm shift, then I genuinely do not know what the hell he's looking for.
Hanlon's lawn is being trod upon by whippersnappers, and he is unhappy about it.
posted by Etrigan at 6:31 AM on December 4, 2014 [36 favorites]