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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: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday May 29 2017, @03:16PM
Our tech can only look like "shit" to someone with unreasonable expectations. In case it's not obvious, this dissent is a troll. Not much different than someone claiming one record low temperature reading means atmospheric and weather science is shit and Global Warming is fake.
Communication has improved by leaps and bounds. From letters carried by horseback and sailing ship to messages carried by oceanic cables and radio waves is a stupendous leap. Totally blows away the improvement in shipping speed that happened around the same time which was realized by switching from sails to steam power. Steam power changed the Atlantic crossing from a month long affair to a week long one. In communication we went from months to seconds.
We didn't stop there. The Internet is another gigantic leap, enabled by the revolution in communication speed, capacity and handling. We're still figuring out what it means. Lot of people don't want to understand that among other things, the Internet has made it impossible to both release and hoard and control information. It frees us from the evil known as copyright.
To call the search engine an incremental improvement is to totally fail to appreciate what it does and means. To pick on search engines for being basically dumb matchers of words, which is true, misses the point. They may be dumb-- brainless, really-- but they are very, very, VERY fast. It is an extremely powerful tool that has enabled scientists to make connections far faster and more easily, and enabled anyone to do research. In an episode of The Flash, there's a scene in which he uses his super power speed to search a room full of paper files in file cabinets for information. Oooo, aaah, look how fast he is? Not compared to a search engine, he isn't. If only that info had been scanned and OCRed, wouldn't have needed The Flash.
Sure there are lots of rough edges, bugs, problems, imperfections, and so on. Always have been.
Putting man on the moon, an achievement that is often cited as a blockbuster breakthrough, is actually relatively modest compared to the Internet. Showy and flashy more than useful, though still useful. I'd rate Voyager 2's Grand Tour and all the other solar system probes, the Hubble telescope, and the several Mars rovers as more impressive than the moon landing.