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From the RooshV Forum:
I constantly get the vibe from people that they think our technology is skyrocketing, that we're living in a new tech age, "where was all this ten years ago?!" etc.
But I disagree with this assessment of our technology. It has made steady improvements in one specific space: software and electronic hardware. That is all. On top of that, the improvements on the hardware have not even been ground breaking. GPS is a ground-breaking invention. Smaller screens are not: they are just an incremental improvement.
Smartphones are merely the result of incremental improvements in the size and quality of electronic components. The only breakthroughs involved are ages old. The invention of the transistor, the laser, etc. The existence of google, facebook, uber, and so on, are merely inevitable "new applications" stemming from these improvements. They are not breakthroughs, they are merely improvements and combinations upon the telephone, the directory, and the taxi.
In my opinion, technology as a whole is borderline stagnant.
A list of why technology is still shit:
The posting goes on to list examples of incremental, rather than breakthrough, changes in the areas of:
- Electronics & Machines
- Energy
- Medicine
- Clothes
- Food
- Finance
Have we really stagnated? Have we already found all of the "low-hanging fruit", so new breakthroughs are harder to find? Maybe there is greater emphasis on changes that are immediately able to be commercialized and less emphasis on basic research?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Monday May 29 2017, @07:07AM (1 child)
It is pretty apparent we are in a consolidation and refinement phase. Faster versions of chips support bigger more bloated software and fad languages, repeat. Netscape 4 could run on a 486 with 40MB RAM, not super fast but it ran. Good luck getting your clock widget to run on those resources now. Other than the 3D GPU, what has really happened in computing other than Moore's Law and bloat? We used some of the bounty to go small, leading to the Smartphone. What else? Again noting the importance of the GPU, how many major apps of today couldn't have been implemented almost the same on a 386 with better coding practices and 128MB of RAM? HD video is the other big exception I can think of, again mostly enabled with a fairly small custom decoder on most implementations to avoid the power sucking involved in software decode so add the hardware assist and a 386 is fast enough.
Note the importance of the GPU, it was one of the few areas where innovation ran loose, free of the WinTel monopoly. There is a lesson in that.
But it isn't only computing that is just iterating in place. Even the most important tech, the efficient killing of brown people, is stagnating. The war machines our fighting men ride are often older that they are. The Humvee is the new kid, introduced in 1984 (although the uparmored version is a new adaptation to new circumstances) is the only one being replaced. The M1A1 Abrams entered service in 1980, the Apache in 1975, A10 Warthog in 1977, many of the other planes older still. Our nukes are ancient and we likely lack the capacity to replace them. The new stuff has stealth but usually at the expense of almost every other desirable feature, like carrying capacity, ability to fight (so pray the stealth holds), etc. At least one of the basic rifles was updated in 1999... an incremental improvement on a 1967 design. Someday we might have directed energy weapons and the rest of the "Buck Rogers crap" but we are also waiting on our flying cars so the schedule could slip a generation... or three. Drones are new military tech, but in a real fight with a real enemy they are going to be a huge disappointment and everybody kinda knows it.
Here we note the lack of an enemy to drive development. Killing arabs is just great with what we have, Russia is still a third world country with a few nukes and China is an enigma nobody really considers a war with as a good enough idea to use as a testbed for new wonder weapons.
Space is another area where we stopped advancing and settled for drones. Yes we probably lost the imagination game because we ran way ahead of the tech for a PR win with the Soviets. But until SpaceX nobody would have gave more than a 10% chance NASA was ever sending men beyond LEO again and lower odds on any other national space agency. Just too expensive to have both a space program and a welfare state. Musk found a way to launder Green penance through Tesla to a space program so we MIGHT get off this rock if everybody who sees what is happening keeps their damned mouth shut for another decade. Maybe.
Biotech is getting to be like fusion, always a few more decades away from changing the world. Meanwhile we get incremental baby steps. Every patent expiration of the current diabetes drug we get a new one that does basically the same thing, you take it and you don't die; it doesn't actually cure anything though. Lawsuits cue up a fresh class action suit over new and different side effects.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday May 29 2017, @01:03PM
sudo mod me up