> I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time.
Your ancestors all felt the same way. So will your children.
Your ancestors all felt the same way. So will your children.
I don't disagree that my descendents will be justified in feeling the same way, as long as the exponential curve keeps on going and civilization doesn't end.
Maybe if you transported someone from 1950s China to present-day China, they would be more shocked, but a present day suburban home in 2021 is not all that markedly different than a 1950s home -- and neither is the workplace, the commute, the cars. Mostly replaced paper with screens and tvs with bigger, flatter tvs.
The most conceptually difficult thing would be understanding that wireless telegraphs with cameras are pocket-sized and everywhere.
Well you set the bar artificially high with that phrasing. Is there ever anything people of the last couple thousand years would be literally unable to conceptually fathom? No. We know that from ancient texts, they would be able to grasp anything we have today (even if it might take more elaborate explanation). 1950s Americans, or any citizens around the world at the time, would be more than astounded by 3-4 billion people being essentially always connected on a gigantic, seemingly instantaneous global communications and commerce network. The modern smartphone would similarly astound, what they can do all-in-one and the quality of it (the audio, the video, the music, movies, news, communication, click-button services & purchasing, digitization of money, the quality of digital photographs and how many you can take with no regard for space, it would all astound). Someone from the 1980s would be just as astounded by a recent iPhone, they'd feel like a time traveler.
People in 2007 were truly astounded by the iPhone. It almost felt like a product delivered from the future. It put all industry jaws on the floor and reset the grid for everyone in the tech industry, without exception. Maybe people have now widely forgotten the shock effect it had, I haven't forgotten.
That said, the parent's claim was an exaggeration. We're not inventing/harnessing such extraordinary stuff every year. Maybe a few things of note per decade globally.
CRISPR, cracking the human genome, modern antibiotics, Internet, Web, transistor and microprocessor, software, computers including personal, space flight, powered flight, various engines, electricity and electric light, fossil fuels, nuclear power and weapons, various green revolution outcomes (food production), solar and a few key renewable energy technologies, the commercial/industrial laser, and so on.
There are several dozen things that can be added to that list from the last 100-150 years. A few per decade globally might be a reasonable peg.
This is a large exaggeration. I was there as an adult. It was another cool piece of tech, sure, but come on.
Most people were blissfully unaware of the existence of PDAs, much less how they worked or what they could do, and for them the iPhone might as well have emerged perfectly formed from an unspecified bodily orifice of Steve Jobs. The statement "It almost _felt like_ a product delivered from the future" is entirely justified.
Not in the American middle-class, upper middle-class, and wealthy.
The same with mp3 players before iPod.
Apples hardware and design is OK, but their marketing is in their own league, like for example a company selling flavored water bottles while there's good quality water taps available almost everywhere. They can take something that is already readily available and sell it for 2x the price, and at the same time make people think it's revolutionary.
For some reasons I was not truly astounded at all. I had several smartphones before but I preferred smaller "cool" phones until iPhone 4.
The iphone became for phones what the ipod was for music players. Great device but not really from the future. I bought it for the web browser.
Even today I use my iphone perhaps at 10% of its power mostly for things that I do on my laptop anyway(mail, chat, web browsing) so
I'm actually astounded that I can't hook it to a monitor and use it as a computer/macbook so to me it seems we got stuck in the past.
~1905-1985 was a pretty good run.
Cell phones, the internet, mrna vaccines. There's probably tons of amazing stuff I'm overlooking. I don't think I would trade with Katherine. Although, I wish she was around for a few years longer so I could talk to her when I was closer to being an adult.
I don't think you could find a modern technology that would throw her for a loop. Maybe, but she's a cherry picked example.
Blatantly obvious? Not to me. I'm a technologist (e.g. wrote a bunch of code the results of which you use every day) with a degree in history and in many ways ancient Greece seems more vital than today.
TBF there’s a survivorship bias in older work: the stuff people found useful has been more likely to survive. Also a more modern (i.e. anyone in the subsequent couple of millennia) has to say something new, not just repeat the old. Which is harder to do.
I’m not arguing that the current world isn’t amazing (went to the moon! Reduction in poverty and higher living standard! I’m typing this comment on an iPad!). Simply making the point that it’s hardly uniquely so (and arguably the 2021st century has so far not been the peak of technical or social development).
What is unusual of the current age is the widespread belief that the current times are somehow unusual.
We have been saying this forever, and will continue to do so.
Also consider that technology, even in it's most beautiful form, is rarely seen by people. They live in a blur of tamed down ease of use. It's not necessarily an existential enlightenment for them (it also backfires a lot, people are leaving devices to go back to more time outside and sport, look at parkour and people living in the wild for instance)
Where do you live? The last sorta revolutionary tech I saw in my life was the cellphone, and I strain to see that as actually revolutionary in any meaningful way, to be honest.
Historical estimates for GDP per capita put it around $2 per day in 2011 prices. And that stayed fairly constant - it doubled in maybe a thousand years, if at all. Compare that to today: US GDP per capita has nearly tripled in my lifetime.
Politically things might've been just as turbulent back then though. New overlords and all that would be more impactful back then than now.
The (lack of) inter-connectedness of the world would effect the way our ancestors felt about their moment in time.
However people are not uniformly distributed and such belief does not seem to have been the case in, say, the contemporaneous Arab world.
All that being said: I agree with you that claims that our era is somehow amazingly unique are way overblown.
We’ve been on a long upward curve of progress for awhile now, but this isn’t guaranteed to continue forever. The future could be a mad max / book of eli hellscape that may set us back two thousand years.
presently, we've the opposite problem: technology advances so quickly it's difficult / near impossible to accurately predict life in five hundred years. (making time travel VERY COMPELLING!)