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I disagree with your assessment. It is widely understood that shipping containers are responsible for more global trade than any other factor, which has lowere

I disagree with your assessment. It is widely understood that shipping containers are responsible for more global trade than any other factor, which has lowered the prices of goods around the world at a scale never seen before. The unprecedented demand for trade necessitated their adoption, but they are essentially a metal box on top of other metal boxes on top of a flat surface. Shipping containers were a tremendous innovation but they required absolutely no new or novel technology to produce or deploy. Another example: insulation. Energy costs are higher to heat in the winter than cool in the summer, but an extraordinary amount of energy is wasted due to insufficient insulation. Solving this problem would decrease energy costs, increase quality of life, and would require no new technology whatsoever. I fear we in the tech sphere are sometimes too addicted to the lure of the future to imagine what we could do with what we already have. I mean, shit, literally, could be solved by better toilets. Last I checked India had more cell phones than flushing toilets. Proper sanitation saves on health care costs later on. This is another very old technology that can prevent us from even needing high technology to solve the problem caused by insufficient sanitation and toilet access. Shit happens, but it doesn't always have to.

api 10y ago
I'm not saying there is no value to incremental improvement, just that there is a qualitative difference between that and true invention and that the latter has stagnated since roughly the early 1970s. The former makes things faster/better/cheaper, while the latter makes things possible. You could still ship things across the ocean before containers. But before boats? I predict that when the current zeitgeist finally does shift we will once again see the invention of things currently considered impossible. I can't say exactly what those will be any more than a scientist in the 1700s could have envisioned radio, though I can certainly speculate. For an early candidate my money would be on the invention of a process to reliably reverse aging in living cells, and maybe something really radical in energy like a compact high density fusion reactor exploiting a novel approach to containment discovered through machine learning. In the long term I strongly suspect that there are fundamental issues with our current models of physics (the whole dark matter 'hack' and the lack of agreement between QM and GR) and that solving this might open the door to things currently considered impossible. BTW -- I think there have been a few fundamental inventions from 1970 to present. - Graphene, though I don't know quite enough about materials to know if this has clear antecedents. - The block chain, which seems like an actual novel mathematical discovery as well as a CS basic invention. It also seems pregnant with social implications since it might suggest a way to actually make communal self-governance by consensus work. - CRISPR/CAS9 All those happened in the past 10 years or so, which fits in with the idea that the dark age is on its way out.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  You're being ridiculous. I'm comparing the difference between a half century previous to shipping containers to the half century after. Boats have been around for thousands of years. Your argument is very narrow and rigid. What you call "incremental" innovations or new uses of old technologies can vastly outweigh the impact of novel technologies, some of which take decades to reach the average Westerner, let alone the average human being. Your argument also ignores the cumulative effects of fully utilizing existing technologies. The cure for polio existed long before coordinated efforts brought it to the brink of eradication. Likewise, chemical birth control has been around for 50 years, and the only thing stopping it from widespread adoption - and thus a significant decrease in unwanted births and excess human consumption of scarce resources - is money and political will. Another example - I really don't have all day but your line of argument is seriously flawed - is nuclear power. Modern reactors are safe and stable - the earthquake that flattened Fukushima left the reactor intact; it was the tidal flood that caused leakages - and we could produce a great deal of mostly-carbon-neutral energy with them, but we as a society choose not to. We don't need fancy new tech to make nuclear work, we just need funding and political will. I suspect you, by the name of API, is falling for the old adage: to a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail. Earth, humanity, and life itself is not an engineering problem with an engineering solution.
  - unprepare 10y ago
    You seem to be arguing that innovation is good. api seems to be arguing that invention is good. these are not mutually exclusive ideas, and i dont see where api is saying the innovation is bad or we should have less of it, only that we should have more invention (and presumably, more of both)
- acqq 10y ago
  It sounds like an unsupported belief in the possibility of the "revolutionary" progress of technology which would still save the humanity in its present desire to keep "business as usual." I'm not optimistic about that. The way I see it, the premises on which the world currently runs are unsustainable, and there's no technological miracle that will change that. Fusion is very improbable, fission can't support the growth that people got used to during the last 100 years, fossil fuels are clearly very limited, the amount of food which can be sustainably produced is limited, etc.

api 10y ago

I'm not saying there is no value to incremental improvement, just that there is a qualitative difference between that and true invention and that the latter has stagnated since roughly the early 1970s. The former makes things faster/better/cheaper, while the latter makes things possible. You could still ship things across the ocean before containers. But before boats? I predict that when the current zeitgeist finally does shift we will once again see the invention of things currently considered impossible. I can't say exactly what those will be any more than a scientist in the 1700s could have envisioned radio, though I can certainly speculate. For an early candidate my money would be on the invention of a process to reliably reverse aging in living cells, and maybe something really radical in energy like a compact high density fusion reactor exploiting a novel approach to containment discovered through machine learning. In the long term I strongly suspect that there are fundamental issues with our current models of physics (the whole dark matter 'hack' and the lack of agreement between QM and GR) and that solving this might open the door to things currently considered impossible. BTW -- I think there have been a few fundamental inventions from 1970 to present. - Graphene, though I don't know quite enough about materials to know if this has clear antecedents. - The block chain, which seems like an actual novel mathematical discovery as well as a CS basic invention. It also seems pregnant with social implications since it might suggest a way to actually make communal self-governance by consensus work. - CRISPR/CAS9 All those happened in the past 10 years or so, which fits in with the idea that the dark age is on its way out.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
You're being ridiculous. I'm comparing the difference between a half century previous to shipping containers to the half century after. Boats have been around for thousands of years. Your argument is very narrow and rigid. What you call "incremental" innovations or new uses of old technologies can vastly outweigh the impact of novel technologies, some of which take decades to reach the average Westerner, let alone the average human being. Your argument also ignores the cumulative effects of fully utilizing existing technologies. The cure for polio existed long before coordinated efforts brought it to the brink of eradication. Likewise, chemical birth control has been around for 50 years, and the only thing stopping it from widespread adoption - and thus a significant decrease in unwanted births and excess human consumption of scarce resources - is money and political will. Another example - I really don't have all day but your line of argument is seriously flawed - is nuclear power. Modern reactors are safe and stable - the earthquake that flattened Fukushima left the reactor intact; it was the tidal flood that caused leakages - and we could produce a great deal of mostly-carbon-neutral energy with them, but we as a society choose not to. We don't need fancy new tech to make nuclear work, we just need funding and political will. I suspect you, by the name of API, is falling for the old adage: to a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail. Earth, humanity, and life itself is not an engineering problem with an engineering solution.
- unprepare 10y ago
  You seem to be arguing that innovation is good. api seems to be arguing that invention is good. these are not mutually exclusive ideas, and i dont see where api is saying the innovation is bad or we should have less of it, only that we should have more invention (and presumably, more of both)
acqq 10y ago
It sounds like an unsupported belief in the possibility of the "revolutionary" progress of technology which would still save the humanity in its present desire to keep "business as usual." I'm not optimistic about that. The way I see it, the premises on which the world currently runs are unsustainable, and there's no technological miracle that will change that. Fusion is very improbable, fission can't support the growth that people got used to during the last 100 years, fossil fuels are clearly very limited, the amount of food which can be sustainably produced is limited, etc.