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posted by martyb on Monday May 29 2017, @03:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-all-gone-to-bits dept.

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?

 
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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @03:52AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @03:52AM (#517000)

    We live in a world where people still believe the Creator of the entire universe desperately wants them to cut away chunks of flesh from the sexual organs if completely healthy children. In that light, we're doing pretty darn well!

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @05:01AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @05:01AM (#517017)

    Only some groups of people and which is only the majority in specific places. The more important point is that there is large groups of people that has left this shit in the dust and they are also connected to each other.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @03:20PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @03:20PM (#517167)

      ... isn't one of those groups that has left it behind.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @05:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @05:30AM (#517029)

    Besides religious shit I think we have shit science. Technical innovations spring from scientific understanding. Researchers are forced to churn out "results" in publish or perish death march which leads to exhaustion and low quality science. And to add insult to injury publications are "disseminated" by super greedy journals which can only read by the most affluent and people studying at rich universities. Science is supposed to be auto-correcting but we rarely see repeat studies because those are not considered novel and sexy enough. We have unscientific studies done using blackbox proprietary software that cannot be inspected and most data remains unpublished because disk space is so very expensive...

    I love science but hate its current sorry state. Science is all we have.