Directed energy weapons, electric cars, wind power, quantum computers, nanomachines, fabricators, etc etc.
Just because the leading edge existed 50 years ago didn't mean it did shit for anybody.
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.