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Comment by itg | Hacker News Reader

Oh look, another typical aging misanthrope complaining about whatever generation is after him. Improvements in tech has made life easier but that doesn't necessarily mean the world is AMAZING, especially for a lot of young people in this economy.

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He was joking. He was making people lsugh. There was no other guy on the plane complaining about the internet going down, it was him.

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1885790,00.html

Thank you for this link. I had never seen it. This is an amazing quote that I wish he had said on Conan:

If you had a jetpack, you'd be like, "I have the shitiest jetpack. I can't believe I got this jetpack. Who's your service provider? Did they make the new one? Hate this thing, it sucks." Then we'd all sit there and talk about that.

From the article:

It's funny how many different ways you can react to that clip. I even read something by a marketing expert who said, "Louis CK is on to something. We have to figure out how we can to get consumers to really appreciate our product; there's no brand value anymore." Does that surprise you? That even the marketing industry's like: "Yes!"

Life imitates Bill Hicks?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

(edited to fix formatting)

I think he's making a good point. You can't deny that the technological advances in the last 15 years were bigger than than in the last 200. He's just saying that all of that is easily taken for granted.

I beg to differ. You could argue that the advances in technology since 1995 (while substantial, notably in IT) do not compare with the breakthroughs accomplished since 1810.

Although we do enjoy faster and more mobile access to internet and computing in general, most of the advances over the past 15 years are incremental improvements over technologies that already existed back then.

What breakthroughs comparable to the advent of e.g. the train, the plane or antibiotics occured over the last 15 years?

The introduction of HIV protease inhibitors in 1995-6 was pretty big.

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/338/13/853

> Mortality among the patients declined from 29.4 per 100 person-years in 1995 to 8.8 per 100 person-years in the second quarter of 1997.

Yet there are now a lot more incremental advances per year than 200 years ago. Revolutions can only happen only so often. Apart from that, an "average technology" today has on average much more applications than back then, IMHO (convergence, I would call that). And it's adopted faster and is available to more people (=cheaper).

Also, I think that today's breakthroughs have much more prerequisites in humanity's knowledge and capabilities in different fields than 200 years ago.

I'm not quite sure if you're saying that technology has been progressing at a faster rate in the past 15 years than it has in the previous 200 (which I'd agree with) or that we've had greater progress in the past 15 years than we did in the previous 200 combined (which is absurd).

That's a very important distinction to make, which a lot of people elide right over (I'm looking at you, singularitarians). We've been moving really fast recently, but the destination is pretty mediocre in a lot of ways. C.f. Warren Ellis: "Having a nice robot phone is not an acceptable substitute for a future." http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2010/05/start/...

The routine is funny. That said, without constant effort to appreciate it, everything is easily taken for granted. Give Cinderella a year or two after she married the prince, and she's probably a stuck up bitch who yells at the maid.

> You can't deny that the technological advances in the last 15 years were bigger than than in the last 200.

I can and it's nonsense.

Nuclear power? The Electrical Grid? The Industrial revolution? The transportation revolution? Mass airtravel? Genetics? Electronics?

Versus what ? The internet? Cell phones? Sure it's great but it definitely isn't bigger by any yardstick than what preceded it, in fact plenty of those previous inventions were pre-requisites for those to be possible in the first place.

I'd bet you could live just fine in the world of 15 years ago, but I'd challenge you to live in the one from 200 years ago.

The internet and cell phones have been around for more than 15 years. (Even the web has been around longer.)

The record in mathematics is pretty good. E.g. compiling functional programming languages made huge strides in the last two decades. And so did linear and integer optimization.

You do know this is a comedy routine right?

It's got a nice meta-joke in it too. He's adopting the persona of the back-in-my-day nostalgist, to argue that in the past, things were better because people appreciated how much worse things were in the past.

It's actually an interview. And he's acting as a humorist, not a comedian. So I think the criticism is somewhat valid.

When comedians go on late-night shows they work bits of their material into the interview. This is a bit -- he's said elsewhere that the guy in the story is him.

I think you misunderstood, or it was poorly phrased. But I think the point he was trying to make is that, not that everything in the world is amazing, but rather we live in a time where we (generally speaking) take everything for granted and don't take the time (at least occasionally) to appreciate things for what they are.

I think the keyword here is "appreciation". We snap too quickly if things doesn't always work as they were intended to. Neil deGrasse Tyson made an interesting point about how people would have reacted to iphone if you showed it to them 10 years ago[1]. Yet we bitch and moan about flash and multi-task and copy&paste on iPhone (albeit, some are very legitimate criticism to some extend).

[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xag3oOzvU68#t=2m18s

Except, appreciate doesn't provide progression. All that progression that we are supposed to appreciate isn't built on appreciation.

200 years ago, crossing the entire country was a bigger undertaking then it was 50 years ago, and 50 years ago it was a bigger undertaking then it is now. If 50 years ago, people merely appreciated, progress wouldn't have happened. Rather, people weren't happy it was fast enough.

As for why we bitch and moan? Because we care. It's not new, people have been complaining for ages. It's just with the internet, it's easier then ever to find people to bitch and moan with, or about, or to.

However, it was funny. =)

I agree with your point. However appreciating something doesn't mean you have to stop doing everything and marvel at its beauty. I believe progression is a result of appreciation (from the person who is involved in creating it), not exclusively from nagging from consumers (a bit of a generalization maybe).

True. I was too black and white. Good points. =)

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