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Comment by ska | Hacker News Reader

So we've got the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago, then the industrial revolution about 200 years ago. I can't think of any other separate event of equal impact.

And you are suggesting that no only are we currently within a similar scale event (plausible, but hardly proven), and there will another two such magnitude events in the next 200 years?

Or are you noting that we, and future generations, will always think we are on the cusp of "great things" but for almost all cases will be wrong?

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I think it is more likely that in 10,000 years we will see the "internet revolution" as part of the industrial revolution. It's only because we're in it that we can see it as separate things.

For example, we now speak of a single "agricultural revolution", where in reality it would have spanned hundreds of years of had several different periods (discovering plants, discovering cattle, etc).

The first thought is interesting - I find that plausible also.

Even from a contemporary perspective, one it's fairly easy to argue that the industrial revolution is still ongoing.

We have had many revolutionary technological developments throughout the past 200 years, such as radio, flight, and computers. And it doesn't seem like we're really slowing down yet.

The industrial revolution was centered around the production of things, and machines' effect on that.

We're now shifting to a knowledge economy, and the internet has been transforming that. I think of this transformation as distinct from the Industrial Revolution (either the first or the second).

Again this is recency bias. You think it's more significant because you're experiencing it.

'Knowledge economy' is a myth anyway. The 'knowledge economy' produces nothing of actual physical value to people and .com bubble 2.0 will burst within 5 years.

~800-300 BC generated most of our surviving major religions (the major exceptions being Christianity and Islam, but both trace their origins to a religion that was formalized and created or finalized [most of] its canon in that time) plus the beginnings of mathematics as we know it, our earliest writings that are kind-of science and that often represent the founding documents of entire fields of study, the foundations of basically every major field of philosophy, the study of history in something like the modern sense, et c. It was a period of awakening for modern humanity from China to the Mediterranean.

Admittedly that probably can't be attributed to any one technology or idea, but I'd put that as a solid contender for a third entry in your list.

[EDIT] for a fourth I'd skip some of the other suggestions in this thread like the Enlightenment or Renaissance, and instead add The Printing Press.

good candidate.

Standardized gold and silver coinage (money) was also developed at this time. Another huge change for humanity. Maybe the two ideas are related. See "Debt: The First 5000 years" by David Graeber.

The Islamic Golden Age, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment could probably (at their times) be considered quite important as well, I'm sure there are many more examples of these kinds of 'revolutions' or 'key milestones'. Perhaps not as impactful as the agricultural or industrial revolution, but we don't have distance from the time to determine if our current milestone will be either.

Absolutely they are important, and there are many of them.

For me the agricultural and industrial revolutions stand out as two inflection points, so if we are proposing lining up with them, we'd need pretty strong evidence. They both effectively fundamentally changed the way of life for the majority of humans on the planet.

Agree we are too close to say about our own rate of change.

> 10000, 200, 20

You don't notice the pattern? The first big bump was 10,000 years go. The next one was 200 years ago. The third one was 20 years ago. It does seem like it takes less an less time for the world to work out what's unnecessary about social organizations. If I naively extrapolate, within decades we'll have period where we have profound cultural shifts every year or so, then every week.

Frankly, I think we're already in the once-a-year period it's just that profound social shifts aren't quite as newsworthy as they were in the nineties. And the adoption curves are still on the order of decades, so while there's a new game changing structures every year, it still takes 20 years for it to disseminate. But the successor to a structure is getting created almost faster than the original is getting disseminated.

This is why people talk about the singularity. If these trends continue, it means we're headed towards a moment of "max everything". Opinions differ on what max everything will look like. I don't think "AI superintelligence" will be a thing, others do. But it doesn't seem crazy to expect things will look very alien.

We're headed towards one, globally connected, mind. Some will opt in, and life will look very different for them. Some will opt out and things will more or less freeze in a vaguely 20th century form. So I guess in that sense "everything will be different" and "nothing will change" are both right, depending on what kinds of person you are.

> If I naively extrapolate, within decades we'll have period where we have profound cultural shifts every year or so, then every week.

I think in reality there is some sort of lower bound here in what we consider "reality" today (the physical world, with its governments, etc). We already are seeing the internet as a place where revolutions happen on very short timescales, even overnight. This will only increase as VR takes hold of our minds and existence.

To be honest, I'm a little afraid of that. There is something to be said for change in the physical world and how profound big changes are, and I hope one does not transplant the other and that they evolve together. We still need infrastructure, places to live, and government to make the online/VR revolutions a possibility.

It's funny, when I re-read my comment, I notice the bit about adoption cycles, and I wonder if maybe there isn't a 20 year lower bound on these revolutions, because certain ideas can only be cemented in a person at certain stages of their life.

Maybe the skills required to lead a revolution can only be formed while living as a child under the system that the revolution is against. And so any empire you create is at least safe for 20 years, until a new generation of kids come up having never known anything else, and tear it down.

I think a lot about that when I look at Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. The blockchain completely changed how I think about computer science, and while I think it's revolutionary, I don't think it can really take off until a whole generation of students can go through their PhDs to solve some of the major problems. We see that happening now in the Ethereum community.

I see it in myself too... The web was just emerging as I was coming of age. It promised to revolutionize society, but in the 20 years since, we have seen the ways it failed to do that. Those of us who grew up immersed in the web are currently working feverishly to attack the corruption that has resisted it.

I actually have little doubt we'll succeed at democratizing access to things like information, credit, and public safety, but I can also see the ways in which we are creating a new bubble of impossibility. I can see how children growing up in the world I'm creating may have a hard time making mistakes and causing collateral damage, which could stifle exploration. I can see how groupthink can become unmoored from reality in scary ways...

And sometimes I wonder if my generation, even with this exponentially accellerating technology and culture, won't really be able to solve those problems because we didn't grow up in them. Not in the same way.

In that sense, I think the 20 year clock that advances a little each generation will still be a reasonable characterization of post-singularity life.

Yes, Ray Kurweil wrote about this. Technological progress increases at a logarithmic rate, so the time between major revolutions becomes smaller and smaller until it is continuous.

An interesting idea but hard to prove from a couple of points ! I'll have to dig up what he wrote.

That would be exponential rate. Logarithmic means that the curve gets flatter over time, not steeper. :-)

Thanks :-)

When I was writing it I knew logarithmic didn't seem quite right but it was a pre-coffee comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_revolution

Yes, that is the proposal OP was making. It isn't proven out yet but I did not it is plausible that the impact will be that large.

Do you see two more such (distinct) events in the next 200 years? To me that is completely implausible, so was trying to determine if I had misread.

It's exponential. -10 000, -200, 0, 50, 55

Pretty strong claim :)

For me it is possible that a big breakthrough would be changing our society in a close future, in even less than 200 years. I wouldn't know if 2 events may be happening, but at least one seems really probable. In ~20 years, we went from windows 95 to an overly connected world with small and powerful smartphones, the world is moving faster than ever.

CRISPR is an overview of what the revolution may look like. This technology may offers possibilities to hack DNA, this would be a huge revolution in term of health, but also totally change our world. Until now the medicine was trying to fix the body deficiencies by applying corrections afterwards. When we will reach DNA hacking capabilities, it would open the possibility to fix the real genetic cause of a disease even beforehand. It may be used to increase lifespan or boost human performance. Maybe it will be called the medical revolution?

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