Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

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Things that you can do today that you couldn't do in 1990:

* Survive much longer with many types of cancer.

* Live a pretty normal life, more or less indefinitely, despite being HIV+

* See your grandkids that live in a different state via a high-quality video connection.

* Enjoy television shows that offer multi-month and multi-year arcs and are designed to be consumed by dedicated fans in order, rather than principally for syndication in random order.

* Vacuum your floors with a robot.

* Survive more car crashes dues to a variety of safety features.

Is life "better" today than in 1990? Sure, of course it is. Does that make us happier? I genuinely don't know. Most hedonic research strikes me as obvious bullshit. Maybe people's happiness levels reset to the norms around them regardless of what those norms are. Maybe you'd literally be just as happy if you lived in a medieval village with open-trench sewers and a pretty decent chance of your wife dying in childbirth and you doing hard labor for your adult life to a brief, decrepit old age. I mean, seriously, maybe you would! It's not outside the realm of possibility.

It's hard for me to argue that that kind of happiness means that there's no point to increased material prosperity.

While all those points are true, they are mainly because of advancing science, rather than economic growth. Those are partly interconnected, but there are also important differences.

The Internet as you know it is also a direct product of its academic background. That's why we have had network neutrality so inherent in its culture. That's why there are only peers, not producers and consumers. If it had been designed as a product, the network itself would never have been designed to be dumb with smart endpoints. (And there are countless examples of this.)

If Tim Berners-Lee designed the web to be a product, there would be a marketplace of competing web-like products, which in turn would have given us other features, but it would never have become societal infrastructure in the way it did.

Sometimes we need academia and science, sometimes we need products.

The question here is how to optimize between the two.

No, they aren't. Those are all products, all produced for profit. They may depend on basic research, but basic research does not get products into people's hands, and basic research does not make people wealthy enough to pay for new products.

I am obviously not arguing against research, and I think your whole deal of arguing that there's some kind of tradeoff to be made between them is wrong. You can have more research and more economic growth. In fact, if you don't have more economic growth, it'll be harder to have more research, and to some extent vice versa.

This isn't to get embroiled in a real tangent about network neutrality. Nobody is advocating for any kind of particular regulatory framework for the internet, here.

No. Advancements in science are where you show that it's possible to do something in particular, like control the level of HIV in someone's bloodstream or make a better airbag. Wonderful! But turning that knowledge into a technology that can be deployed to the people that need, and then actually deploying it, involves a lot of resources - both material and and labor - and those resources come with a price tag.

It's not like once we learn something in the lab we can just make it available to everyone for free. I mean, you could go to Wikipedia right now and read about, say, aeronautics and all the theory of how air flowing over a wing can provide lift, and articles on structural engineering and so on. But having that knowledge is not the same thing as having a plane, or having access to a plane ticket. If you would like to fly from A to B, you need a functional aircraft first.

The "academic internet" wasn't nearly as impressive as today's internet.

I am (un?)fortunate to have my first memories around the time of the first private networks being connected to the internet (late 80s).

Back then, the internet was run by academics.

It wasn't until the 2nd or 3rd round of commercialization efforts that it really became compelling.

So the structure of the internet is because of the academic beginnings, but the actual content (data, apps, etc.) are IMO b/c of desire to acquire wealth.

> Enjoy television shows that offer multi-month and multi-year arcs and are designed to be consumed by dedicated fans in order, rather than principally for syndication in random order.

This has nothing to do with economic or technical limitations. It has cultural reasons. SDF Macross aired in 1982 in Japan with 26 episodes in order and I'm sure there are even earlier shows.

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