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Our Tech is Shit: A Dissent on the Claim Technology is Currently Rapidly Improving

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

cafebabe brought a forum posting to our attention:

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?

• Re:3 factors (Score: 4, Informative) by kaszz on Monday May 29 2017, @09:16AM

  by kaszz (4211) on Monday May 29 2017, @09:16AM (#517076) Journal

  The original team had a contract that prevented Xerox from interfering with the team for the first 5 years or so.

  Reminds me of..

  Excerpt from IEEE spectrum [ieee.org] in 1985:

  The freedom ended
          Although the machine has its flaws, the designers of the Commodore 64 believe they came up with many significant advances because of the freedom they enjoyed during the early stages of the project. The design team was autonomous—they did their own market research, developed their own specifications, and took their baby right up through production. But as soon as the production bugs were worked out and Commodore knew it had a winner, the corporate bureaucracy, which until then had been on the West Coast dealing with the VIC-20 and the Pet computer, moved in.
          "At that point, many marketing groups were coming in to 'help' us," Winterble recalled. "The next product definition was going to be thought up by one group, and another group was to be responsible for getting things into production, and Al's group would do R&D on chips only." "If you let marketing get involved with product definition, you'll never get it done quickly," Yannes said. "And you squander the ability to make something unique, because marketing always wants a product compatible with something else."
          Charpentier summed up their frustration: "When you get many people involved in a project, all you end up doing is justifying yourself. I knew the Commodore 64 was technically as good and as low-cost as any product that could be made at the time, but now I had to listen to marketing people saying, 'It won't sell because it doesn't have this, it can't do that.
          ''The freedom that allowed us to do the C-64 project will probably never exist again in that environment.''

  Death by MBA is still a thing..

  Parent

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