Hacker News Reader

Comment by donw | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that it is easy to fixate on fantasies of massive technological leaps forward, because the truly revolutionary changes that underpin our lives are like air: so common that we overlook them all the time.

If you were to sit down with a person from, say, 1750, and wanted to explain the modern world, you would probably tell them about things like antibiotics, cars and planes, snapchat, that sort of thing.

All the big stuff that we think defines the modern era.

What would probably really impress the hell out of them would be a supermarket, though.

To a person from that time, the idea of being able to eat fresh peaches in the dead of winter would be just as magical as being able to instantly translate Russian into English, and yet it probably wouldn't occur to us to bring it up because fruit at the supermarket is just... obvious.

So as we look forward, the question is, what will be obvious to people ten or twenty years from now?

View on HN

Gorbachev was evidently very impressed by Canadian supermarkets in 1983: "Gorbachev first visited Canada in 1983 when he was the member of the Soviet Politburo responsible for state agriculture. Gorbachev toured successful commercial farms and saw well-stocked supermarkets across the country, a vastly different picture from the Soviet Union, which was struggling with shortages. It was his first trip to a non-communist country. The trip helped to convince Gorbachev that more economic and personal freedom was needed in the Soviet Union."

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/1990-soviet-leader-mikhail-...

Interesting! Around that time (a little later maybe) I helped a couple of Russians visiting Lisbon and one thing they asked was to go to a large supermarket. When in there, they said it was like visiting a cathedral.

I think we over-emphasize elements that seem more “technological,” overestimate their importance. The printing press example is great. We credit the press because it’s mechanical and complex, but not the paper (or ink or literacy or religion).

For peaches in winter, most people think of botany, refrigeration, airplanes… science. Fewer people would think of joint stock companies or shipping containers as important enablers.

For productivity, it seems impossible that a computer on every desk with modern digital communication, software of every kind and all our gadgets didn’t move the productivity needle. It’s all so technological. In practice, non-technologies like kanban or just-in-time did move the productivity needle. It’s counterintuitive.

There are a lot of examples of counterintuitive bland results. Genetic engineering has not improved crop yields nearly as much as green revolution technology, not even close. Nuclear energy changed very little besides war.

That’s not to say these aren’t impactful technologies. Computers have changed our lives and our work. Modern Agg-tech has changed farming. It just didn’t change total output all that much.

I suppose that in the theme of this article, big technologies work in complexes, and that makes them hard to bang into a narrative and hard to predict.

From the Industrial Revolution, we got interchangeable parts and standardization. I think those really had some of the largest impacts on society.

Absolutely.

It’s a good example of weird/unintuitive causation. Standardisation is a byproduct of industrialisation & mass production.

probably the most important invention of the industrial revolution is the screw-cutting lathe by Henry Maudslay[1]

Without the screw cutting lathe, precision parts where impossible to make. Without machine tools, creating basically any other machine that we use today would be impossible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Maudslay

I would have said steam power.

Indeed! We also tend to discount the unintended consequences. For instance, the printing press was probably a major catalyst in sparking witch hunts, which perhaps has some lessons for modern day social media: https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept09/2009/10/31/unintended-con...

Yep. Though specifically to printing, I was taught in school about the printing press leading to the protestant reformation and it's consequences. Witch hunts might be considered a part of that.

The same thing might be happening right now. It's widely accepted that online media revolutionized the political landscape. In Europe and the states we saw centrist parties lose control of the agenda, and the empowerment of fringier politics. Trump, LePenn, alt-right, Brexit, etc.

In the middle east we saw a bigger earlier impact: the arab spring protests are widely credited to online media.

This is much more controversial, but I think the ISIS family of religious phenomenon (and many less headline grabbing ones) has a Luther-Gutenberg relationship with online media.

I found that the 1978 BBC documentary series "Connections" by James Burke really spoke to that as well as the interrelatedness of inventions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)

And yet the supermarket is very much possible only because of the technologies behind planes, antibiotics and snapchat. It's curious.

I think the hard part, as noted, is not necessarily the materialization of 'new tech', but very much how that tech plays with all the other new tech to produce a very new society. And in that you are exactly right, the most curious parts of that new society are not the technological tools themselves, but the social capabilities that spring from their convergence - the supermarket.

I work at the convergence of tech and synthetic biology, and a huge 'miss' many suffer is a blindness to just how powerfully the two technologies will interconnect in the near future - and not the tech as the product, but the capabilities of their convergence. It's not that computers, AI and all that jazz will become small and invisible, nor that genomics and biology will become easy, but actually what will occur at their intersection. It's that fun space mixed with both where things get really interesting.

And this is why reading sci-fi is fun for me. It allows an author to explore the clashes, implications and make prognostications on the outcomes of the convergence of multiple technologies with respect to relatable characters' choices in their lives.

Absolutely; Neal Stephenson's latest book ("The Rise And Fall Of D.O.D.O.") touches on this, in asking what series of "small" changes it would take to unravel the modern world. Was a good read.

From where you sit, what is the impact of the intermix between those two technologies?

As a layperson, I can see tailor-made medications becoming cheap and common over the long run. Not only might that read "goodbye, cancer!", but also mitigate the resultant threat of biological warfare.

After all, if you can cook up tailor-made anticancer and antiviral drugs in a machine at Walgreens, then you can counter a tailor-made bioweapon pretty easily.

Food production is another obvious boost, so we might have a second Norman Borlaug that once again lifts the carrying capacity of Earth. We can probably also assume foods engineered to grow in extreme environments.

From that, you also get biological air and water recycling for spacecraft, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Oye, I've been putting off getting this book since it was co-written by Stephenson and I wasn't sure how that would pan out.

Guess I'll have to add to the collection!

I was skeptical as well, but it turned out to be a good read. Not quite up to the standards of Anathem or Cryptonomicon, but still definitely worthwhile.

Arbitrary biological i/o; stimuli and responses can be designed and linked, sampling from anything the world of life can currently do.

Age (see Constitutional Article 2.1, 14th US Amendment).

Memorizable strings of data worth billions of dollars.

Aesthetic biology around us, and within us as a form of expression.

Wealth (as energy expenditure) driving speed and permanence vs quality or capability (think hill coefficients). Metal & rock as materials of speed, but also waste, whereas literal capabilities are mirrorable with biology, are much more efficient, but 'slow'.

(More) Von Neumann Probes everywhere, but resembling acorns, fruit flies, and yeast.

(Explicit & commercialized) synthetic symbioses for individuals and for societies, and for other life.

> tailor-made medications

And at the same time we are moving towards a world of tailor-made anything. From cars and clothes to user interfaces and lifestyles. If we can handle the complexity of it all.

I remember being struck by the realization of the sheer amount of infrastructure that was necessary to enable to me to wrap a petri dish in aluminium foil when I was doing research.

Like, aluminium smelters are massive...then there's the mining, the rolling, the local, national and international supply chains - all so I can keep a light sensitive chemical in the dark during a 15 minute experiment setup.

I mean this is all true if you use it in the kitchen too (which is amazing) but what struck me was the weird way that progress was enabling progress - something had to go from non-existent to consumer-cheap, and suddenly a whole bunch of science is possible to do easily and en masse.

Seems weird to me to include snapchat in a list together with antibiotics and cars. And I think it kind of demonstrates your own point.

You did not name any specific antibiotic products, or car manufacturers, because those are not really that significant.

The underlying inventions though are the real technological leaps forward that, as you say, are like air: so common that we overlook them all the time.

Snapchat is just a product, I think the real invention that you overlooked is the internet.

>Snapchat is just a product, I think the real invention that you overlooked is the internet.

When I think about, I suppose it would be almost simpler to explain Snapchat than the Internet to a 18th century person.

Though, like you, I think I would try first to explain the Internet.

IIRC, there was a Reddit thread where they asked elderly (or elderly relatives of redditers) what the greatest technological advancement was during their lifetime, and indoor plumbing was more of a leap than the Saturn V taking humans to the moon and back.

A big effect in a small area vs a small effect in a large area [?]. The same volume of water in two cylinders of short and long width. We have prizes for big problems in mathematics and science, but rarely focus on enablers. The tribe rewards the hunter when he comes back with deer, not so much the one that perfects the hunting spears (tools).

Sure we do, they're called patents.

The US patent system has evolved into rewarding lawyers mostly.

I didn't say it was good :)

That's a protection, not a reward. It has a cost, and is often abused.

I guess people notice more the changes that directly impact them. As significant as the space programme is, it's often just a newspaper headline. Where as hot running water, central heating and convenient shopping affects people daily.

Yes, life would be pretty miserable without clean running water and sewerage.

...in cities, towns and villages (any dense area). But in sparsely populated areas with dispersed housing, this is not such a big deal.

You don't think clean running water is a big deal in sparsely populated areas?

I think it's probably more of a big deal there than in towns / cities because they at least had communities where utilities could be shared. If you live miles from clean water that's a good percentage of your week wasted walking to and from the nearest well / whatever with buckets.

> You don't think clean running water is a big deal in sparsely populated areas?

Depends on the region. Around here for example (rural Eastern Canada), a lot of people are drawing still their water from wells on their lands.

in sparsely populated areas with dispersed housing, this is not such a big deal.

Hot water and indoor plumbing you can go without. But the lack of clean running water is a massively big deal.

"What would probably really impress the hell out of them would be a supermarket, though."

At the end of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's film Tout va bien there is a very long take, a panning shot that sweeps back and forth across a Carrefour hypermarket from just outside the cashiers, showing you the whole breadth of departments: fresh veg, canned goods, clothes, etc. I was amazed by this – the whole hypermarket format commonplace to us today and seemingly a development of modernity, was already completely in place by late 1971 and virtually nothing has changed since (except bar-code checkout).

So, maybe development on that particular sphere of human existence stopped for a long time. We in 2017 know that we might be on the cusp of drone delivery, but if someone from that near future went back in time to the 1980s and showed it to a customer in a hypermarket, that might have blown their minds just like your 1750s guy.

Sure these super/hypermarkets are a thing for long time now.

I know them since I can think.

What has changed in the consumer market is delivery.

I mean I can buy a huge amount of stuff from all over the world via Amazon and get many thinks delivered at the next day for just 60€ a year prime costs. This is as insane as the hypermarkets were back in the 70s I think.

And it gets better every year.

With self driving trucks we will get even more stuff around the world for less money.

I think this is especially interesting, because it not only gives us much nice things, but also it makes the world smaller. We start to identify more with people around the world, because we can reach them more easily.

IMO self-driving trucks are more like an android/fusion style of future prediction, rather than paper/containers.

Strangely, the delivery thing is a return to a previous model. Grocery boys used to deliver the shopping to the house. Then the supermarket killed that. Now we're returning to it.

> yet it probably wouldn't occur to us to bring it up because fruit at the supermarket is just... obvious.

The author, Tim Harford, has been running a podcast for the BBC called 50 Things that Made the Modern Economy. If you feel inclined, you should suggest this to him as the last development to cover: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4Y4Gn8gbQvp4X87wGLV...

You should also listen to all the episodes of the podcast:

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b1g3c/episodes/downloads

> so common that we overlook them all the time.

And this reminds me of the definition of "progress" that goes something like this: All the things you can do (or accomplish) without thinking.

This would apply to so many things that, as you say, we overlook: Making phone calls or video calls and not worrying about all the servers, cables, wireless technology, audio components, processors, and more that comes to together all at once to make that possible. Or as someone else here mentioned the supermarket where you can go and buy far more than your basic necessities and not really concern yourself with all the various manufacturing and processing and shipping and sourcing that it took to get the products there, not to mention the machines and technology and people it took to make them all.

At a far more macro level, perhaps one of our biggest forms of "progress" in human history has simply been our shift away from the need to constantly spend all day, every day, hunting for sustenance to get thru the day and the next day and so on. We live in a world where we have a tremendous amount of automation and low-cost forms of scalable agriculture that we have freed ourselves up so much to do so many other things. We overlook this all the time because it is the very nature of progress (we don't have to think about it because we are busy thinking about other things... hopefully better things).

> At a far more macro level, perhaps one of our biggest forms of "progress" in human history has simply been our shift away from the need to constantly spend all day, every day, hunting for sustenance to get thru the day and the next day and so on.

This is probably a myth. Studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies likely spent between 20 and 40 hours per week obtaining food. They are still believed to have been plagued by high infant mortality, disease, and warfare, so they were still leading relatively unstable lives when compared with today. But the average hunter-gatherer may have largely been better off (healthier, with more leisure time) than the average worker during the Industrial Revolution.

While we're near the topic, the five-day work week itself is something that a lot of us take for granted, but it has only been adopted nationwide in America for 80 years.

Super cheap hormone-free contraception applied to men, not women:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_spe...

Men only need a contraception like that if they are actually going to be having sex. What if the future is more men using porn and avoiding actual physical intimacy with a woman? It’s already easy to find in Japan or nerd circles men who think that actual relationships are more trouble than they are worth.

I think one of the future innovations that will seem baffling to some of us will be mostly social and legal. In particular, I suspect the concept of income as a human right will become a reality. I won't debate the exact nature of why this will happen other than if you look at the rate of which wealth production has taken and how much of it is concentrated today it's inevitable that it won't stay that course much longer.

>So as we look forward, the question is, what will be obvious to people ten or twenty years from now?

I think far more useful question is asking what should be obvious right now that you aren't seeing. That is, unless you're trying to gamble on who will win the Super Bowl in 2025 or something equally inane.

This is basically what scifi authors do all the time. They think: what if this technology existed, what would society look like then?

But wasn't that the point of the article? The fixate on one giant leap and ignore the massive other changes the availability of that technology (or its constituent parts) would likely cause?

I think you are right. When people from the then Soviet Union were emigrating to the Western world it was the supermarket that impressed them most.

I thought about that- and then it hit me. If you showed someone from 1750 a supermarket- the indentured delivery boy/girls of today would be instantly recognizeable to someone from that time. Human automatization was the "High"tech of olden times. Sometimes we advance. And sometimes we regress.

This is why people like Elon Musk are completely mischaracterized as innovators and leaders of the tech scene.

Today's tech-bros go for the most obvious nerd-bait, like electric cars, rockets, and solar panels. This is stuff that, if you asked any tech-bro today, or 20 years ago, what would impress them, they would answer with that obvious stuff.

Meanwhile, the ACTUAL world-changing innovations are things like pinch-to-zoom and momentum scroll - stuff that you actually initially had to argue with the tech-bros about - "why do we need that?" - but becomes obvious only after-the-fact.

Innovation is what your grandmother recognizes as innovative, not what the technologists recognize as innovative.

What? Do you honestly think that pinch-to-zoom is more world changing invention than solar panels? I could totally live without pinch-to-zoom or even momentum scroll, but I doubt we, society as we know it, would survive very long without clean and renewable energy sources.

> What? Do you honestly think that pinch-to-zoom is more world changing invention than solar panels?

Yes.

> I could totally live without pinch-to-zoom or even momentum scroll, but I doubt we, society as we know it, would survive very long without clean and renewable energy sources.

You can live without solar panels. You likely do.

Meanwhile, you became far more productive because of UX.

I still use keyboard and mouse for development purposes, so neither of your example has any impact on my productivity. Meanwhile, few percentage of my country's energy is generated by solar power (combined with wind and other renewables, that's enough to replace an old and potentially unsafe nuclear power plant, which is not a small feat) and I personally operate few panels in my summer house (and regularly keep adding more as they become cheaper and more efficient).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com