Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtraffic | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe missing the value of new technology can be relegated to "societies of the past."

Personal computers and the internet both had really slow starts, for two really big examples.

I'm sure there are technologies sitting around right now with vast potential that our society doesn't value.

Yeah the net didn't really boom until we could use the web to shop, effectively turning it into a more accessible mail order catalog.

These days it seems to have turned into something akin to TV shop, with the addition of an interactive link on top of the video stream.

Eh, I think the net boomed without needing online shopping. Lots of people were and are using the Net 99%-100% of the time for non-shopping purposes. The net boom drivers were:

-Email

-Funny cat pics/videos, etc. eBaumsWorld etc

-News/blogs/forums

-Online gaming

-Porn

-YouTube (see above)

Outside of email what you list largely came after the dot-coms bubble crashed.

Porn was alive and well before. Forums as well. Blogs came later, if I remember right. Online gaming existed, but was much smaller (of course).

Blogs were around long before, and the term "blog" to refer to them was even coined around the beginning of the .com bubble (1997) , not after the crash (2000-2002).

Thanks!

Some things seem so obvious. How can those old people not immediately realize the implications of recorded and proliferated sound? How could Charlie Chaplin possibly think that talkies were a passing fad? How can people today think that our media isn't heading towards the virtual, our computation towards brain interfacing?

I think it is just the environment. We grew up with computers. Technology is advancing at a crazy rate compared to what it was 100 years ago. The idea of things constantly changing just didn't exist...because things generally didn't change.

In my lifetime people went from a single family landline phone to every family member carrying an internet connected smartphone over just 20 years. There just wasn't that rapid pace of change in any time period before now.

Different kinds of technology accelerate at different rate.

Most of the time it follows some kind of S curve, and i dear say that the IC, and thus the computer, is hitting the flattening top of the S these days.

Lots of people today think electric cars are a fad, renewables are unworkable, climate change doesn't exist, automation/self-driving cars won't replace manual labor, etc etc. Some of those will seem obvious with hindsight.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com