The Myth of Technological Progress
takimag.com
takimag.com
If you want a real comparison you should look at todays bleeding edge technology or the commonday technologies of the 50's.
His argument is that Excel and World of Warcraft are not much of a qualitative improvement over life in the 1950s.
'nuff said. the author is probably just trying to be provocative. either that or he's an idiot.
Computers add a little more convenience. Shopping is a little more convenient than catalog shopping, maybe. You can be "friends" with people by looking at their pictures and reading occasional snippets of text from them instead of spending time with them in person. It is much easier to adopt a lifestyle of sitting in an automobile seat, to sitting in a cubicle seat, to sitting in a reclining chair in front of a television or a computer screen, than it was in the 1950s. We've gone from listening to a transistor radio in our pocket to listening to music on our iPod. That's an improvement in terms of choice and convenience, but it that all we've got to show for the past 50 years?
What are the qualitative improvements in life since 1959? Taking just one thing he mentioned in the 50 years before that, the invention of antibiotics, is there anything in the past 50 years that compares in the impact to human lives? (Note how he convincingly argues it was even the enabler of the sexual revolution.)
"Computer networks came a year or two after 1959 and didn’t change very much, other than how we waste time in the office, and whom advertisers pay."
Which, even according to his statement, happened in the 50 year window from 1959-2009.
You can't change facts to support your argument just because it's convenient.
Just imagine what your world would be like without google and email (just to name two aspects of the internet). We wouldn't be having this debate (maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing ;).
I would not be wasting time having this debate at my office, which is part of his point. :)
I do not think just saying "The Internet, I mean, come on..." wins the argument. There needs to be something showing that the Internet changes our lives in ways similar to what radio, television, antibiotics and the atom bomb changed lives in the first half of the 20th century.
I think part of the problem with making that argument is that the Internet and computing technology is changing life much more appreciably in India and China than it is here. It is allowing people in India to suddenly join the cubicle dwelling, information processing, Western world work force in large numbers in ways that are profoundly changing the lives of many people there. Walmart's computerized, just in time inventory systems makes ordering products in China and getting them to the right shelves in a timely manner feasible. That is having perhaps an even more profound effect on the life of many Chinese. (This also applies to many other developing countries, of course.)
So it may be that the technology advances are less noticeable here in the U.S., where many of us were already working in offices and shopping at department stores in the 1950s. But the way lives are changing in developing countries is akin to the kinds of changes Americans experienced in the first half of the 20th century.
Just because the leading edge existed 50 years ago didn't mean it did shit for anybody.
"The Nash metropolitan got 40-mpg in real world driving tests, much like the overrated hair shirt Toyota Prius."
The technology is more advanced, but is it a real qualitative improvement over what we had 50 years ago?
He does explicitly mention nano-tech:
"Some wise acre is likely to pipe up and sing the glories of “Nanotech,” a “subject” which was “invented” in K. Eric Drexler‘s Ph.D. thesis in 1989. In the 20 years since he penned his fanciful little story, we have yet to see a single example of the wondrous miniature perpetual motion machines Drexler has been promising us “real soon now.” I wonder what his timeline for delivery of this “technology” will be?"
Do you disagree with that assessment?
Yes, I do disagree with that assessment because it's fundamentally the same sort of thing people complaining about computers 30 or 40 years ago said. It's technology that is still under development and has not reached the mass market stage yet where it will change the way we live.
A computer in 1959 was something only Professors or Government researches got to use. A computer with comparative computational power in 2009 is something that is so cheap that it is disposable.
The example of the cars is so completely bogus that it ought to be embarrassing for a physicist (which Locklin is) to have written it; one would expect them to know better.
It's about like saying:
- between 1900 and 1950 we invented all this awesome new technology
- but the information density of printed books (words-per-page) has remained roughly constant from 1950 to 2000
- ergo the rate of change must be declining
...in other words, compare:
- in column A: an unqualified sense of "rate of progress" over some time interval
- in column B: a product whose performance on some metric is substantially constrained by some combination of physics and rigid human factors
...and then point to lack of substantial improvement in the product's score on the metric in column B as evidence for the deceleration of progress; it is at heart only a qualitative improvement but there's no radical improvement to be had in that area, so looking to it and wondering "why no radical improvements in the information density of printed text?" says more about you than about what's happening.
Now, why the car example is bogus:
There's only so much energy in a gallon of gasoline, and fuel-efficiency is thus bounded to a pretty narrow range of variation.
Modern cars are larger and heavier than equivalent product categories of yesteryear, mainly in response to safety regulations.
Just look at the Nash Metropolitan (conveniently parked in a standard USA parking space for size reference):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nash_Metropolitan.jpg
Or if you're not so good at depth perception:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef01156fb...
(next to a cooper mini for comparison).
There's no mystery here: the 40mpg car he picked out of the past got 40mpg b/c it's a tiny car.
This isn't a case of some technological triumph of our forefathers being abandoned by decadent successor generations; it's a case of the laws of physics dictating the range of possible cars, and there being not all that much stateside consumer demand for microcars like the metropolitan.
So yes: cars today are little different in fuel efficiency than cherry-picked microcars of the 60s and 70s because the laws of physics haven't changed between now and then; we're not driving 100mpg micromachines because no one wants to buy them (yet).
I'd wager a fair amount that in a universe in which we were all driving microcars good old Locklin would be bitching about the forgotten musclecars are of yesteryear, along the lines of his concorde complaint in the same article.
I don't know what part of what I said was vehement.
After everything you said, I think you arrive pretty close to Locklin's conclusion:
"Are cars better? They are certainly safer, and it’s easier to buy a very high performance car than it was in 1959, but they don’t get much more efficient than they were in 1959."
You give the reason why cars are not much more efficient than they were in 1959 (heavier due to increased safety regulations, which Locklin also csites). But nevertheless, driving a car in 2009 is a pretty similar experience, all around, to driving a car in 1959 (except maybe more traffic). Compare that to the difference between 1909, when cars went from being a novelty to the primary means of conveyance. Are you seriously arguing that the difference in everyday transportation between 2009 and 1959 is of greater magnitude than that between 1909 and 1959?
In practical terms I think you (and Locklin) are committing a basic error of comparing unlike quantities, perhaps unintentionally.
Take cars, again; I think I have you checked-and-mated. Here goes:
(i) you seem to believe that with respect to personal transportation 1909-1959 saw a "significant" change because cars went from novelty to primary means of conveyance
(ii) you point out that cars haven't changed radically in 1959-2009; they are neither radically "better" (according to a metric like fuel efficiency) nor is the experience of driving 2009 cars radically different than 1959 cars
(iii) you now want to assert that the change in "everyday transportation" is greater from 1909-1959 than from 1959-2009
The structure of this argument is:
- the change you care about in (i) is SOCIAL CHANGE (in terms of lifestyles, activity pattern, etc.)
- the change you care about in (ii) is TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE (for which Locklin used the proxy metric FUEL EFFICIENCY)
- in (iii) you want to conclude that "amount of SOCIAL CHANGE" is declining
- but (ii) is pretty much the definition of a "red herring": FUEL EFFICIENCY and SOCIAL CHANGE don't have all that much to do with each other other than being measurable quantities (loosely speaking)
It's a nice cognitive trick:
- "progress" is a fuzzy word with lots of meanings in lots of places
- you want to make people accept a statement about "progress" in a particular context (overall technological progress)
- you accomplish this by inserting a factual-but-unrelated statement evidencing a lack of "progress" (in this case: in fuel efficiency)
- this "primes" the brain to accept a semantically-similar conclusion without adequate supporting argumentation
...and using FUEL EFFICIENCY as your metric is silly, especially from a physicist: given that it can't be much better than it is given the constraints at hand its lack of progress is a given, and it's only really useful in the argument for its semantic priming effect.
A less kind summary of the proposition at hand is:
- When cars became widely adopted they caused radical social change.
- Incremental changes to cars have (obviously, lol) not caused similarly radical social change (unsurprisingly)
- Ergo the rate of technological progress is slowing down, as evidenced by the lack of radical changes in cars (wut?)
This ought to be seen as a category error, full stop...but it's good enough to pass muster as a rah-rah for the self-styled iconoclast brigade; that's some mighty-fine reasoning-work there, Lou.
But, hey, let's keep running with it.
Even if you're completely right -- car-induced changes in everyday transportation are insignificant in the 1959-2009 era -- you're looking at stuff in a silly way.
I'm going to make the case for air transport being a comparable shift: air transportation did not become easily affordable for consumers until the 70s or 80s or 90s (depending on who you ask and which country you were in).
Before it became affordable it was a luxury item (hence the term "jetset" for the leisure class who could afford to travel around like that), and if people traveled long-range they did so by boat, train, or automobile.
In the modern era air travel is often unbelievably inexpensive -- in some parts of the world international tickets are on par with an expensive restaurant -- to the point that long-distance travel by anything other than plane is rare-to-nonexistent (depending on where you live and how you define long-distance).
Is this a "significant" shift? I LOL at you, b/c:
- if you say "no", you undercut what you claim in (i): that a change in affordability (leading to wider adoption and also to use for a wider variety of things than when it was expensive) counts as "progress"
- if you say "yes" you save (i) so I assume you're going to say (i)
So within the category of "personal transportation" (a mild generalization from "everyday transportation") we have had a significant technological change in the 1959-2009 era.
You can argue it's less significant than the automobile-induced changes; I've got stuff to do so won't participate but at least we're now comparing like kinds (SOCIAL CHANGE and SOCIAL CHANGE instead of SOCIAL CHANGE and FUEL EFFICIENCY).
But social change is a wiggly thing (and the perception of it is often colored by value-judgments; witness Locklin talking about most technology just enabling bad behavior); the appeal of the invalid argumentation strategy is that by throwing in hard facts you make your opinions on relative magnitudes of social change look more objective (and this will work up to the point at which you get called out on the apples-to-oranges).
Just because the counter arguments were so poorly argued. Much of the counter arguments were in the vein of "that guy doesn't think the Internet really changed people's lives, he's obviously an idiot" "Yeah, you are so right, he's obviously an idiot," instead of explaining ways in which the Internet has made QUALITATIVE improvements to people's lives compared to 1959.
You finally get to the point of arguing that the wide availability of air travel might be a qualitative improvement over what we had in 1959, but after much nattering on about fuel efficiency and social change that still doesn't change the fact that the experience of driving an automobile in 2009 is largely similar to that of 1959. I might even agree with you on the airlines point. What I object to is all of the "this guy is obviously an idiot" without citing any obvious counter examples to his real points. In my experience, Hacker News is usually better than that, with people employing bad arguments getting called out even by people who happen to agree with the opinions. That is not aimed exclusively at you, just the general tone of responses I was reading here.
That would serve as a summing function of sorts, to integrate all the different components of life-goodness into one binary value: Yes I'd trade permanently; or No, I prefer my life here-and-now.
(This is a variation on Gregg Easterbrook's thought experiment in his book, The Progress Paradox.)
I think the author is right in that there are physical constraints on what types of things are possible, so any improvements will only be of degree. Once you have weapons that harness nuclear reactions, there aren't a lot of other fundamental forces left to harness. Likewise once you have devices that can reproduce sights and sounds (the two senses used for communication) all you can really do is make those devices cheaper and bigger (or smaller). The author didn't express that very well, choosing instead to cherry pick specific inventions and present opinions as facts.
It makes perfect sense that refinement of existing technology would overtake invention of new ones. I don't see how it could be otherwise given the physical constraints you speak of; how many radical new sources of energy can we come up with, aside from fusion?
The argument is that progress from 1909 to 1959 dwarfs the amount of progress from 1959 to today.
I agree that is in conflict with the headline. I wonder if he chose the title himself, or if it was assigned by the publication.
He brings up Lisp, which was interesting. I learned Lisp from the internet, in less than a month, in my spare time, without taking time away from my work or family. Pretty much all the technical knowledge that I've gained over the past eight years has come largely or entirely from online material, with far less impact on my schedule than graduate school would have had.
And I bet that almost every commenter here has had much the same experience as I.
Another perspective is the impact of technology on rural life. During his lifetime, we saw technology increase the productivity of the american farmer by two orders of magnitude. No other segment of daily life experienced that form of amplification. The impact of today's technology on say a clerk's life is not as great.
As we work in this field, we see amazing things (one poster here quotes the impact of Google), but few things have improved lives the way that the technology of the sewer has.
Unless one or two of us bypass all that crap and do a software startup.
well, a decrease in lone inventors is natural. when all the low hanging fruit has been picked it takes standing on shoulders to reach the higher stuff.