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Life wasn't that different in 1917, 1817 or even year 17. I started writing a reply but realized Nassim Taleb does a better job at explaining this than I could.

by oskarth 10y ago

Life wasn't that different in 1917, 1817 or even year 17. I started writing a reply but realized Nassim Taleb does a better job at explaining this than I could. Here's an excerpt from The Future will no be cool http://www.salon.com/2012/12/01/nassim_nicholas_taleb_the_future_will_not_be_cool/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/01/nassim_nicholas_taleb_the_fu... I am not saying that new technologies will not emerge — something new will rule its day, for a while. What is currently fragile will be replaced by something else, of course. But this “something else” is unpredictable. In all likelihood, the technologies you have in your mind are not the ones that will make it, no matter your perception of their fitness and applicability — with all due respect to your imagination. [...] Tonight I will be meeting friends in a restaurant (tavernas have existed for at least 25 centuries). I will be walking there wearing shoes hardly different from those worn 5,300 years ago by the mummified man discovered in a glacier in the Austrian Alps. At the restaurant, I will be using silverware, a Mesopotamian technology, which qualifies as a “killer application” given what it allows me to do to the leg of lamb, such as tear it apart while sparing my fingers from burns. I will be drinking wine, a liquid that has been in use for at least six millennia. The wine will be poured into glasses, an innovation claimed by my Lebanese compatriots to come from their Phoenician ancestors, and if you disagree about the source, we can say that glass objects have been sold by them as trinkets for at least twenty-nine hundred years. After the main course, I will have a somewhat younger technology, artisanal cheese, paying higher prices for those that have not changed in their preparation for several centuries.

griffman 10y ago
The problem with personal perspective is its inherently myopic... What Nassim describes can be considered a luxury event similar to going to a Renaissance fair to some. Your daily life is far more amazing than it was even 20 years ago. Here is my day: wake up to the sound of an alarm synchronized to a global satellite network with ~100 nanoseconds of GMT. turn on a light source powered by nuclear energy produced hundreds of miles away. put on clothing made of synthetic fibers that keep me warm and dry on a winter morning. heat up a food source, processed and irradiated of bacteria, enriched with extra nutrients and vitamins, using microwave energy. sit in front of a bank of liquid crystal displays showing 18+ million colors at 4k resolution. Read 20 different news articles from around the world while drinking my coffee, which was shipped and processed in a global trade market. made using water that was pumped to my house, going through ~10 different filters to remove toxins. Now that I'm done with my coffee I'm preparing for a weekly HD video conference with 20+ people around the world to discuss new technologies we have to prepare the network infrastructure for. I'll then spend time analyzing TeraBytes of data stored in a cloud database that is updated in realtime. The meeting was about how that dataset will be PetaBytes by next year and ExaBytes soon after. If predicting the future 200 years from now is arrogance, then saying nothing has changed is hubris. We are still trying to convince some people that evolution is real. That makes it hard to even consider the idea that we can predict the path evolution and technology will take. prediction and evolution rely on one thing, probability. Someone else in this thread brought up the Fermi paradox, the ultimate 50/50 split. After accepting that, you are either an optimist or a pessimist. A pessimist will never accept odds better than 50/50 cause failure happens. So be it. The probability that your, or ANY individual's, prediction of successful technological evolution is very low. If you are an optimist though, the probability of SOMEONE's vision of the future out of EVERYONE's ideas being a winner is near 100%. THAT is the power of survival of the fittest. THAT is why trans-humanists call this inevitable. We are optimistic of our chances. But we have to be open to new perspectives and adapt. I will embrace these technologies when they are available to me. I will even attempt to contribute. But I will also still enjoy drinking from Phoenician meal technology with friends. And paddling across a lake in a native American river craft. And chopping wood for a campfire in the forest. I like camping during my vacation. My daily life will continue advancing forward. You don't have to forget the past to live in the future.
- aquadrop 10y ago
  I think that's still too low level. On the higher view, in in average people still do this: Born on the planet; eat and sleep; raised by parents; work and try to get wealthy; find partner and create family with them; get old and die; This really hasn't changed much since the 2000 years ago. Romans had complex society with lawyers, education, citizenship, money and finances etc. Yes, big things happened: we became more mobile and information now travels much faster. But it still didn't change the most basic flow of life that much, it's some change but quantity still didn't materialized into quality. And we're now on the threshold where those things can really change. It's hard to predict how society as a whole will change because of this.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
Except that's a bullshit analogy. Restaurant's are are completely different today than they were even 10 years ago - from the POS to the bluetooth tracking, menu printing (or maybe even e-menu on an ipad like in airports), logistics for raw food delivery, availability of food, cost, sous vide in the kitchen...I can go on. Shoes are completely different - again, the cost, supply chain differences so you can get exotic materials, who and how made them. Sliverware metallurgy is totally different, availability is totally different. Point is, it is a totally myopic argument that misses what 99% of innovation is about. It's like saying - hey we still use fire, and eat with our original teeth and see with our original eyes, so I guess pretty much everything is like it was 2Million years ago.

by oskarth 10y ago

griffman 10y ago

The problem with personal perspective is its inherently myopic... What Nassim describes can be considered a luxury event similar to going to a Renaissance fair to some. Your daily life is far more amazing than it was even 20 years ago. Here is my day: wake up to the sound of an alarm synchronized to a global satellite network with ~100 nanoseconds of GMT. turn on a light source powered by nuclear energy produced hundreds of miles away. put on clothing made of synthetic fibers that keep me warm and dry on a winter morning. heat up a food source, processed and irradiated of bacteria, enriched with extra nutrients and vitamins, using microwave energy. sit in front of a bank of liquid crystal displays showing 18+ million colors at 4k resolution. Read 20 different news articles from around the world while drinking my coffee, which was shipped and processed in a global trade market. made using water that was pumped to my house, going through ~10 different filters to remove toxins. Now that I'm done with my coffee I'm preparing for a weekly HD video conference with 20+ people around the world to discuss new technologies we have to prepare the network infrastructure for. I'll then spend time analyzing TeraBytes of data stored in a cloud database that is updated in realtime. The meeting was about how that dataset will be PetaBytes by next year and ExaBytes soon after. If predicting the future 200 years from now is arrogance, then saying nothing has changed is hubris. We are still trying to convince some people that evolution is real. That makes it hard to even consider the idea that we can predict the path evolution and technology will take. prediction and evolution rely on one thing, probability. Someone else in this thread brought up the Fermi paradox, the ultimate 50/50 split. After accepting that, you are either an optimist or a pessimist. A pessimist will never accept odds better than 50/50 cause failure happens. So be it. The probability that your, or ANY individual's, prediction of successful technological evolution is very low. If you are an optimist though, the probability of SOMEONE's vision of the future out of EVERYONE's ideas being a winner is near 100%. THAT is the power of survival of the fittest. THAT is why trans-humanists call this inevitable. We are optimistic of our chances. But we have to be open to new perspectives and adapt. I will embrace these technologies when they are available to me. I will even attempt to contribute. But I will also still enjoy drinking from Phoenician meal technology with friends. And paddling across a lake in a native American river craft. And chopping wood for a campfire in the forest. I like camping during my vacation. My daily life will continue advancing forward. You don't have to forget the past to live in the future.

aquadrop 10y ago
I think that's still too low level. On the higher view, in in average people still do this: Born on the planet; eat and sleep; raised by parents; work and try to get wealthy; find partner and create family with them; get old and die; This really hasn't changed much since the 2000 years ago. Romans had complex society with lawyers, education, citizenship, money and finances etc. Yes, big things happened: we became more mobile and information now travels much faster. But it still didn't change the most basic flow of life that much, it's some change but quantity still didn't materialized into quality. And we're now on the threshold where those things can really change. It's hard to predict how society as a whole will change because of this.

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

Except that's a bullshit analogy. Restaurant's are are completely different today than they were even 10 years ago - from the POS to the bluetooth tracking, menu printing (or maybe even e-menu on an ipad like in airports), logistics for raw food delivery, availability of food, cost, sous vide in the kitchen...I can go on. Shoes are completely different - again, the cost, supply chain differences so you can get exotic materials, who and how made them. Sliverware metallurgy is totally different, availability is totally different. Point is, it is a totally myopic argument that misses what 99% of innovation is about. It's like saying - hey we still use fire, and eat with our original teeth and see with our original eyes, so I guess pretty much everything is like it was 2Million years ago.