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Ubiquitous cell phones are definitely a revolutionary development. This becomes obvious when you read or watch fiction of any sort. How many story lines would be completely disrupted by the presence of a cell phone? As it turns out, a great many, even for stories being written today, as many writers haven't fully absorbed the way things have changed.

We have a long running series of phone ads in the UK which make fun of exactly this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlX9G7s2AnQ

The Orange ads are more about clueless producers ruining film ideas with rampant commercialism. I don't think there have been any Orange ads where a plot has been ruined due to the presence of a phone within the movie itself.

Watch the Orange A-Team ad

Oh thank you for that link. Just watched a few of their other commercials. Hilarious!!

This drives me nuts whenever I read anything by Connie Willis. Her time travel books play (partly, obviously) decades in the future yet there are constantly people running around and frantically looking for each other and not finding anyone. I always want to scream “Pick up your goddamn cellphone!” (Some of those were written in the nineties which explains their lack of cellphones but even her most recent books from this year have the same problem.)

It's weird that the lack of portable phones requires more suspension of disbelief than time travel. Maybe that's a testament to the writer. In Doomsday Book there are a few plot points where even an answering machine would have helped.

Excellent books though, despite that.

It's not weird at all. If you have the technology to move your physical being between time periods, you can certainly move a few radio waves around.

Pity the poor artist who establishes their reputation in one medium, then sees the medium do a big shift.

Willis probably could write books which fully encompass the cellphone-era worldview. But will they be Connie Willis books? Or will the loss of all those old tropes make her new style inevitably different from her best-selling old style?

Think of PG Wodehouse, blithely writing novels set in early-twentieth-century England as late as 1975. (Though this example is a bit contrived, since some would argue that Wodehouse wrote about a society that never existed.) Or Bach, plugging away on his late Baroque masterworks years after the Baroque went out of style.

"(Though this example is a bit contrived, since some would argue that Wodehouse wrote about a society that never existed.) "

Just think of the Drones club as a bunch of bun-tossing elves.

On the other hand, I love both Wodehouse and Bach.

Of course! In fact, I just discovered that The Art of the Fugue, which I believe Bach wrote toward the end of his career, really does sound better to me than his earlier stuff. Good for him for plugging stubbornly on in the genre he had mastered and which he knew best.

Wait, are you telling me that he was retro before retro was cool?

It's funny to watch Seinfeld with this in mind. Virtually every episode's plot is unbelievable given cell-phones.

Haha yes, even Star Trek, they can travel at warp speed but the away team can't send an MMS back to the ship, the captain has to beam down personally and see for himself...

Uhhh.... http://www.google.com/images?q=Trek+communicator&um=1...

What am I looking at here? The Star Trek communicators are voice-only.

You're forgetting that in those cases, beaming down was a result not of lack of video, but because of interference, or the classic "You have to see this for yourself" bit. More importantly, it made for a better show that way.

Interstellar video was common enough, but I'd question the importance of having video conferencing on top of their voice only communicators. I'd go further, but then I'd be showing how much time I've wasted thinking about this.

DS9>*, btw.

I seem to recall at least one episode where they showed the image of the person being communicated with in the communicator. Am I just imagining this? Or was it in one of the movie versions…?

They transmitted images from Georgie's vision thing once.

This is even sillier in the case of Star Trek since they could use even a Polaroid or film camera and beam the film/photos back up to the ship (or, of course, a data crystal or what-have-you).

Beaming Polaroids back to the ship would be amazing!

That's silly. Everybody knows the transporter messes up Polaroid film.

The ironic thing about Star Trek (and part of what makes it so kitschy-great) is that you don't suspend disbelief about the future tech on the show; you suspend disbelief about the lack of present-day tech on the show. GPS, for starters, to say nothing of SMS, MMS, etc.

It's best not to think too hard about why a society capable of telling you from orbit precisely how many lifeforms inhabit a planet is incapable of telling you exactly where their captain is when his badge is removed.

Very interesting point.

I feel like the situation is even more extreme in a sense. It seems like ubiquitous information disrupts a large percentage of all possible story plots.

Most story plots hinge on ignorance and discovery. With no physical personification of ignorance, a plot is simply less compelling.

Imagine - * Odysseus travels through exotic, distant lands, that he just forget to do Google earth on beforehand, * Why wait for Godot when you can just give him a call? * etc.

You could argue that ubiquitous information makes real life more bland, not just stories

The HN title of this needs fixing - I think Kasparov is talking about innovation within the U.S. (although the article itself is maddeningly unclear, saying "thinks the U.S. has become complacent when it comes to innovation" but then seeming to push a worldwide brush that the "last technology that could be thought of as revolutionary, he says, was the Apple II"; I think he meant in the U.S. and this is just sloppy journalism).

You're spot on about mobile phones changing things; the first mobile phone network was in Japan, and the Nordic countries were second up. The revolutionary innovation, which Kasparov is talking about, was not within the U.S.

The first mobile phone network was done by NMT in Japan, but the first commercial mobile phone was invented by Martin Cooper of Motorola and the first call made on this phone was to the head of a competing program at Bell Labs.

In Japan? That's surprising, since NMT stands for Nordic Mobile Telephony.

Heh. The problem with mobile phone history is that all the companies have similar acronyms. You are correct, it was NTT in Japan that was first and NMT that was second in deploying "1G" networks.

You've got your chronology wrong, the cell phone was introduced 1973 (that's why the OpenMoko device was called Neo 1973), predating the Apple ][ by four years.

The cell phone was not invented in 1973, that thing Michael Douglas carries around in Wall Street is called a brick.

Actually motorola unveiled the cell phone in 1973 and the brick phone design was pretty much unchanged from the beginning until the 80s when miniaturization began in earnest.

"Do you remember life pre-cellphones? When you left your house you literally dropped off the map."

Yes. I miss those days.

you can always leave your cell phone at home, but for many the cellphone is an integral part of going somewhere. planning en route, picking alternative an rendezvous etc.

I've noticed that some groups of people never meet at the place previously discussed. It's like "Hey, let's go to X" really means let's go some as-yet undisclosed location downtown.

With cellphones around people are never alone anymore. To my mind, this "aloneness" (does not mean you are feeling lonely, but could) is an integral part of a meaningful human experience.

It's your own choice still. I don't have a cell phone and never had one.

It's non-trivial to compare cell phones with the combustion engine or flight, but I think we can agree with Kasparov that more inventions of that magnitude are something we should strive for.

Yet engines are actually getting replaced by other alternatives, but those alternatives require different sets of infrastructure which are non-existent (such as for fuel cells or electric cars) Also, there are external forces driving the way to the opposite side of the story (aka keeping combustion engines, for money, of course)

Sometimes I just think that the Americans use too much cars (one person driving a car with four seats is an insult to the nature.)

> Sometimes I just think that the Americans use too much cars (one person driving a car with four seats is an insult to the nature.)

I'm guessing that you'd be mad if more of us had multiple cars, one with one seat, one with two seats, one with three, and another with four. (An extra car just for gas mileage rarely saves money because $5-7k buys a lot of gas.)

I would like to know how you know how many other people that driver will transport before returning home. After all, if they're going to need four seats at any point before they return, they need to start with four seats.

BTW - most of those "four seat" cars actually have five seats.

The obvious alternative is not to have several different cars, but to live closer to where you work, shop and play.

Another alternative more obvious than keeping a garage full of differently-sized vehicles is to improve the fuel-per-passenger-mile ratio by banding together with other travellers who are going the same way. This is how buses and trains work.

>> one person driving a car with four seats is an insult to the nature.)

> The obvious alternative is not to have several different cars, but to live closer to where you work, shop and play.

Reread the complaint - driving less doesn't solve it.

> but to live closer to where you work, shop and play.

Those are three (or more) places. You may not be able to live close to all of them. For example, I work in Sunnyvale, my wife works in SF, and we play in Monterey. At times, we've worked other places between PA and SJ.

Where can we live that would be close enough to satisfy you?

> This is how buses and trains work.

Buses and trains don't necessarily go where I want when I want.

Consider 101. It looks like a lot of people going to/from SF until you look at the individuals in those cars. There aren't a small number of end-points. And many of those folks will make side trips that trains/buses don't acomodate.

I've ridden Cal Train (I was on the first baby-bullet and that wasn't my first commute). It's great for some things but it isn't a general solution. That's why it doesn't have much ridership.

> Reread the complaint - driving less doesn't solve it. By "live closer", I mean "within 4 miles", so that you can walk. That does solve it (unless I've completely misunderstood)

> I work in Sunnyvale, my wife works in SF, and we play in Monterey

Yes, but you've chosen those places due to the prevailing social norm in your society to drive all the time. Looking at a map, were I you, I'd live in Sunnyvale/Santa Clara/Cupertino, so that one of you could walk to work, and you wouldn't have to do too much urban driving to get to Monterey.

> Buses and trains don't necessarily go where I want when I want.

How precise do you need to be? Unless I'm going somewhere obscure and far away, or travelling on Sunday, a train can normally get me to within 2 miles of where I want to be, within about half an hour of when I want to be there. That's plenty accurate enough, and certainly as accurate as urban driving.

OTOH I don't trust buses, because there are too many cars jamming up the road.

> > I work in Sunnyvale, my wife works in SF, and we play in Monterey

> Yes, but you've chosen those places due to the prevailing social norm in your society to drive all the time.

You've got it backwards. We chose those jobs because we like to make money. Driving makes it possible for us to earn much more money than we would if we didn't drive.

> Sunnyvale/Santa Clara/Cupertino, so that one of you could walk to work, and you wouldn't have to do too much urban driving to get to Monterey.

There's no "urban" driving between Sunnyvale/SC/Cupertino and Monterey. Urban is inside SF, Oakland/Berkeley.

> Unless I'm going somewhere obscure and far away, or travelling on Sunday, a train can normally get me to within 2 miles of where I want to be, within about half an hour of when I want to be there.

Middle of the day CalTrain schedules aren't every half hour and CalTrain isn't within 2 miles of everywhere I want to go on the Penninsula.

But, let's assume all that AND that CalTrain doesn't take any time to get between destinations. The half-hour schedule gap and 2 miles is an hour travel time.

Only one of our typical weekday trips are anywhere near that.

> That's plenty accurate enough, and certainly as accurate as urban driving.

No, it's not. It's significantly worse than what I've got now. Then again, the only urban driving that we do is inside SF, which is a small minority of our driving as we live in San Jose.

For some of the SJ to SF trips, Caltrain works for us. However, it doesn't a large fraction of the time.

I am seeing that urban transportation doesn't work because people don't use them, so they fail to make money and in the long run getting worse and worse.

I am guessing, if the gas price triples the same thing may not happen just as it is right now.

> am seeing that urban transportation doesn't work because people don't use them

The regions under discussion aren't urban so urban transportation simply isn't relevant.

Urban transportation requires a lot of density or a lot of folks going between common end-points. The latter is fairly rare and is very different from a lot of people going past a given point.

You have a point, although I feel you talk more about social disruption rather than technological. Switched communication and voice transmission over electromagnetic signal were genuine technology breakthroughs, and both are over a century old now. Cellphone is a combination of both, and while it was out of technical reach in 1900s, the concept still would've not sounded alien to the engineers of the time.

All sorts of tiny events required massive planning.

We old-timers just used to call it "planning."