Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by 2143 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

2143

I was just thinking.

Somebody born in the 1870s and who went on to live for a 100 years would have seen:

- people going around on horses and donkeys with carriages and everything getting replaced by motor cars

- invention of aircraft, jetplanes, and even supersonic aircrafts that obsoleted ocean-liners

- moon landing

- two world wars

- decline of the British Empire

- telephones

- computers

- germ theory

It's too much.

I wonder what the world would be like if I survive till the later parts of this century.

View on HN

My grandmother was born in 1895 and died 1987, she went through all you listed and something you forgot (and many more missing):

- photography (in the family, outside professional shops)

- electricity in homes

- radio

- television

- spanish flu (she lost her first born in 1918)

and she was just fine, as a matter of fact she remained curious about everything ( and this probably helped her live for such a long time with a perfectly working brain till the very end).

My mom is now in the same ballpark (born 1930) and she often brings up this topic, all in all she believes that she witnessed much less changes than her mother, most of what she went through were refinements and betterings of existing technologies rather than "revolutionary", as an example the telex and fax were essentially evolutions of the telegraph, what she points out are:

- electric dishwashers and washing machines

- computers/internet

- cellular phones

I don't think that if we live to that age we will see many "new" things.

My grandmother was an 1895-1995 stretch and experienced that same remarkable sweep of technology. The other item that most people forget about are some of the radical consequences of the democratisation of travel in that period and just prior. My great-grandparents came of age when most people lived and died within view of the place they were born and where travel to another city was a days journey at least, by the time their youngest daughter died she could travel halfway across the planet in the same time and do so rather inexpensively.

I am sure there is some aphorism out there about how we do not recognise the big change while it is happening, but I think you are underselling just how much is changing around you. Advances in medicine, energy, transport, and computing over the past couple of decades have been rather amazing, and you are really underselling the past few years of mobile phones combined with internet advances. When I grew up the phone in the house (because landlines were all that existed) was owned by Ma Bell and was one of three types, rotary dial, no answering machines, and long-distance cost an arm and both legs. Last night I was walking my dog down a street in London while my watch updated me on turns for my new route while I was having a video call with my mother back in the US at a near-broadcast quality; 15 years ago that would have existed only in science fiction. It takes a bit of distance to see what really was 'new' and important.

I have to agree with jaclaz: The advances you mention are "refinements and betterings of existing rather than revolutionary". slightly better antibiotics and slightly better phones, but all in all not near the impact of its predecessors.

There's a thread on this very topic that I've bookmarked as I think it's one of HN's best and most insightful discussions ever. It's top comment goes:

"'Innovation' in the internet age, say the last 30 years has mostly been limited to enable hedonistic digital consumption with very little impact on how we fundamentally move through the world. The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet. A 100 years ago to 50 years ago meant going from horse carriages to trains and from weeks on a ship to hours on a plane. Today the average person crosses the Atlantic no faster than we did decades ago."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494671

And - as a side note - my grandfather (born 1885 and dead prematurely in 1936) was originally from a village that in the 1930's was reachable from my city by public transport (train) in around 6-7 hours.

When I was a kid (think of the 60's and 70's) we went there in the summer, and it took us ... the same 6-7 hours, if we used the car it took something less than 3 hours.

Nowadays, that is respectively almost 100 years or 50 years later, guess how much it takes?

I just checked, 6:15 by train, 2:30 by car.

I do know that it is probably an edge case, but one has to think how advancements in technology are actually applied to real world cases.

Yep, but broadly your last night experience is within the:

- computer/internet

- cellular phone

items.

There is a point about the difference between "concept" and "diffusion/availability", i.e., in the case of your video call it is not so much a "new concept" but rather the fact that you can access and afford this technology.

Something like radio was conceptually revolutionary, to have something similar in importance we should get to see something like teleportation, even a fixed "origin" like in Star Trek, would do.

Personally I would settle for being able to see (and use/be able to afford) completely self-driving cars, something you can call, that arrives and brings you to your destination.

I guess I can see that but I think the combinations in some of these are making something that is much more significant than the sum of its individual components. If we are looking for bullet list items that have been changed or advanced in the past three decades which are going to impact the future in ways we still do not comprehend then here is my list:

- genomics/proteomics and bioinformatics - 'AI' and machine learning - automated driving and robotics - privatised spaceflight (60s spaceflight handbook with 21st century materials science and computing) - dissolution of the USSR and fracturing of many former Warsaw pact nations, European map looks closer to 1910 - rise of violent empowered individuals and terrorism (inspired by religion, nationalism, paranoia, and misanthropy) - social/sexual changes so profound and fast that they are driving violent reactionary response - the arc of AIDS from terrifying bogeyman to a serious but chronic condition as exemplar for the future of disease

A lot has happened over the past 30 or so years and we also tend to look back at the past with an odd viewpoint, picking and choosing the old and new of that particular point in time. Yes, my grandmother went to school in a horse-drawn carriage but at the same time she could take that carriage to the train station and be halfway across the US by the following morning and upon her arrival at Grand Central Terminal the telegram from the station back home informing them of her arrival would take less than an hour to be hand-delivered. As Gibson noted, the future is here but is not evenly distributed and that also applied in the past.

I don’t think smartphones should be considered the same thing as cell phones in the 80s. They are completely different devices with completely different function that just also have a cellular modem.

I also suspect we’re going to see very significant changes as a result of AI.

I don't think anyone made that comparison.

Smartphones are computers, they use the cellular network to connect to the internet, besides strictly phoning, they remain conceptually inside:

- computer/internet

- cellular phone

as an evolution of those broader technologies, what I find remarkable is their ubiquity/affordability.

As an anecdotal data point, I got my first (personal) cellular phone well in the '90's, probably 1994 or 1995, in the (late) '80's cellular phones were mainly for business use, I remember buying for the company I worked with (and BTW for a particular case where the need to reach this particular person was essential) one of these:

https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/4500x

in 1988 or 1989 and paying it more than 4,500,000 Italian lire, the equivalent of roughly 2,000-2,500 Euro/Dollars of the time, considering inflation probably equivalent to 4,000-5,000 today and the subscription/calls were prohibitively expensive.

Even outside of the smartphone per se, I expect a lot of people don't really appreciate just how high friction it was to get information about anything including government services, information you might want to do your job, purchases, books, etc. etc.--especially outside of major cities with large libraries and research universities. (And even as an undergrad at one of those research universities it was hard to find current information on specialized topics.)

Hell, one of my friends fathers grew up in rural Sicily; he can remember the excitement at the first mechanical tractor to arrive in the village back in the 1960s.

One year, for christmas, he was gifted an orange - in midwinter! There was considerable speculation about how far it must have traveled.

Nearly every item on your list was a change he saw in his lifetime - the date a technology was widespread in the area it was invented can be separated by several decades from the date it becomes widespread globally.

One year, for christmas, he was gifted an orange - in midwinter! There was considerable speculation about how far it must have traveled.

Was that really all that uncommon, though? My father, born in the 50's, always associated oranges with christmas - it was their season, after all. For me, my parents kept up a tradition of giving an apple and an orange in stockings - this was in the late 70's to the 90's. Many years later, I moved to Norway, where I can buy boxes of mandarin oranges every christmas, as they are a traditional christmas time food (Last year was filled with mandarin cocktails to use up the box).

Not to mention the prevalence of things like clove-studded oranges that pop up around christmas.

From what I can tell, not associating oranges with Christmas is really a more modern take on the holiday, as at one time, they were in season around the holidays.

In Norway during December, 'normal' temperatures are a daily maximum of 5c. That's not fruit-growing weather for any variety I'm aware of.

However, it's true that fruit was a common Christmas gift - specifically because it wasn't in season & was therefore hard to come by. Eating common, readily-available food would hardly be appropriate for a major celebration.

> - decline of the British Empire

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpohrKaos2o

There's a long but very good interview done with the philosopher Bertrand Russell in the 60's, and a point he makes in it was that in the early 1900's the idea that the British empire and specifically their navy would be supreme forever more was widespread.

And I suppose pre-WW1 they might have had a point - he said the people at the time didn't view "land powers" like the Prussians as being terribly threatening to their global status.

Another takeaway from it, was that he was very particular about how his kids were educated, these days, we mostly give it to abandoning them to cultural groupthink rather than having any critical input into how their taught.

> the idea that the British empire and specifically their navy would be supreme forever more was widespread

People always think the current top dog has an unassailable position and will be there forever.

For example, every decade a new crop of businesses rise to the top and everyone thinks they're unstoppable, and yet they're replaced the next decade, and those become the new unstoppable juggernauts.

RCA, Sears, Walmart, Kodak, IBM, Lotus, Novell, Netgear, Ford, AT&T, ...

Who'd have thunk Apple would become the biggest company in the world?

> very particular about how his kids were educated

Why do you think this has changed? Many people base where they live, primarily where they buy houses on how good the school district is. Private schools, Montessori, etc., are still very important in many cases.

Was being particular about education a widespread thing back at that time, or is it just that Bertrand Russell was a serious philosopher and intellectual and so rather more invested than average in the fine details of his childrens' education ?

> we mostly give it to abandoning them to cultural groupthink rather than having any critical input into how their taught.

I am curious what you mean by this.

> I wonder what the world would be like if I survive till the later parts of this century.

I suspect much the same as today, but somewhat worse. Electronic gadgets will continue to get cheaper, while essentials like housing and healthcare become more expensive.

The pace of change has slowed as the low-hanging fruit of industrialization has been picked, and the costs of negligence like pollution and antibiotic overuse will become more apparent.

Consider:

- No major new household appliances have been introduced since the microwave.

- Trains in many parts of the USA are slower than they were in the 1920s: https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/05/why-trains-run-slow...

- Supersonic aviation is over.

They would have only just seen computers. The first "practical" home computers became available in 1977, and even that is stretching the definition of the word "practical".

Mainframe computing had obviously been around for a while before that, but the general public would not have been aware of it.

> Mainframe computing had obviously been around for a while before that, but the general public would not have been aware of it.

Nonsense. Of course the general public knew of computers. When I was 14, in 1969, we had a high school computer club. We used the terminal room at the local college to connect to a Leasco mainframe in London. I still have the Basic reference card somewhere.

The LEO1 was in use in 1951 to perform calculation for baking in factories and stock control.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)

The social changes are also quite dramatic in that time span, especially the position and role of women (at least in the developed world) - gaining the vote, increased representation in the work force, etc.

With water becoming scarce and our inability to generate more electricity, I wonder if we'll see the reverse of progress.

you’ll probably see..

-a moon landing

-two world wars

-decline of the nato empire

-the end of telephones

-hopefully not the end of computer technology cause by the world wars but…

-germs striking back

unlikely to see WW3 _AND_ WW4 ...

- having water, electricity, washing machine, dishwasher in every home

- cinema then radio then television

- half of the world falling under communism, rise and fall of nationalisms

- fall of religion in the west, sexual revolution

- art dropping beauty for originality

My dad was born 3 years after the invention of sliced bread, escaped Nazi Germany as a child, worked with early computers, and will soon turn 92.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com