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I think your analysis suffers from recency bias. Almost all inventions were incremental improvements on existing ideas and experiments, very few were huge Eure
by pyoung 10y ago
I think your analysis suffers from recency bias. Almost all inventions were incremental improvements on existing ideas and experiments, very few were huge Eureka! moments. Morse code was invented around 1840 and radio communication in around 1900. It took 60 years to go from wired to wireless. The first supercomputer was built in the 1960's and 50 years later we were walking around with internet connected computers in our pocket that had a few orders of magnitude more processing power than their early predecessors. That evolution took a lot of inventing to achieve, and it has fundamentally changed society. It may not have felt as transformative to you because you were alive to witness the transition and the different iterations that led us to where we currently are, but make no mistake, the level of technical advancement in the last 50 years is unparalleled to any other time in our history.
- Nomentatus 10y agoI like this comment, it may be true; it certainly should make us careful about making a final judgement. It's true of literature and art - what the next century decides was great about the last isn't obvious at the time, at all. Or not usually. If the next century lives largely in cyberspace, then we're in the golden age and No Man's Sky (a game I quite like, actually) and VR are epochal advances for all humanity. But overall, I'm a pessimist, Jane Jacobs book "Dark Age Ahead" (which is mostly about trends obvious back then) left a big impression on me.