11 ms·

What We Get Wrong About Technology

• whipoodle 9y ago
  Part of the problem is that we actually don't know what tomorrow will be like, so it's hard to pick the right soothsayer, if you will. Maybe another movie got the smartphone thing right but you never watched it. Rather than Blade Runner, I think Children of Men will turn out to be a much more prescient vision of what's to come. (Not the main plot line but everything surrounding it.) But like I said... we don't know.
• chi17 9y ago
  Payphones could make a comeback, and the "payphone" was really a public videophone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-YBYzo4XUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-YBYzo4XUY Deckard calls Rachael on a public videophone. from script: http://www.trussel.com/bladerun.htm http://www.trussel.com/bladerun.htm
  • Retra 9y ago
    Public videophones could be made right now, if we wanted. Problem is that nobody wants them because they are less convenient than the simpler alternatives.
    • chi17 9y ago
      The simpler alternatives involve having to pay a monthly fee or having to pre-pay for minutes. In the future, perhaps we won't have the luxury of paying for a lot of service we haven't yet used and might not need to use.
      • dmitriid 9y ago
        Welcome to the present, called "the rest of the world that's not the US" ;) (yeah, yeah, I know that many countries still have outrageous prices for networks, be it fiber or mobile).
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• autarch 9y ago
  Obligatory plug for everyone to read The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. It was published in 1975 and nails the technology of the 90s so accurately that it's quite freaky to read.
  • adjkant 9y ago
    In the same category a bit, Neuromancer. Note the publish date, 1984. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/888628.Neuromancer https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/888628.Neuromancer
    • icebraining 9y ago
      What did Neuromancer predict?
      • ThinkingGuy 9y ago
        Black denim :)
      • adjkant 9y ago
        There's an argument it inspired the internet or caused us to create it.
        • icebraining 9y ago
          Well, if it managed to inspire the creation of the Internet a decade after Cerf et all actually created it, that is truly remarkable!
          • adjkant 9y ago
            Sorry, not well said. Via Wikipedia: "In his afterword to the 2000 re-issue of Neuromancer, fellow author Jack Womack goes as far as to suggest that Gibson's vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the Internet developed (particularly the World Wide Web), after the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. He asks "[w]hat if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?" (269)."
• randomdrake 9y ago
  > Jennifer and the many other programmes like her are examples of a “voice-directed application” — just software and a simple, inexpensive earpiece. Such systems have become part of life for warehouse workers: a voice in their ear or instructions on a screen tell them where to go and what to do, down to the fine details. If 13 items must be collected from a shelf, Jennifer will tell the human worker to pick five, then five, then three. “Pick 13” would lead to mistakes. That makes sense. Computers are good at counting and scheduling. Humans are good at picking things off shelves. Why not unbundle the task and give the conscious thinking to the computer, and the mindless grabbing to the human? I remember reading in Scientific American a few years back, about a study that was very striking and against common intuition. In manufacturing, robots had overtaken humans at a particular task by a long shot. They were able to perform the completion of assemblies much quicker and with higher accuracy; humans coming in afterwards and applying finishes that required small hands, light touches, or hard to explain measurements. Robots > Humans. Humans finished what robots couldn't. What wasn't foreseen, however, was that there was an additional step to shave off even more time. Given some artificial intelligence, the robots could actually tell the humans when, and how, to do assembly during and as part of the assembly process. The robot figuring out the most efficient assembly, and instructing the human to do what it couldn't, was a third step of assembly efficiency not foreseen. It turned out: Robots + Humans > Robots > Humans.
  • taeric 9y ago
    I think that was a thread in I, Robot. My favorite is how the robots on the space colony don't believe the humans could have created them, due to how sophisticated they are.
    • _mhr_ 9y ago
      I believe this is the story with Cutie (nickname for QT-1) who invents a religion to justify its existence. The amusing thing was that the rituals of its religion consisted of making sure the space colony functioned properly, so the humans decided to leave the robot's faith alone. And the robot thought that the humans were mindless religious fools for believing in Earth: """The robot approached softly and there was sorrow in his voice. “You are going?” Powell nodded curtly. “There will be others in our place.” Cutie sighed, with the sound of wind humming through closely spaced wires. “Your term of service is over and the time of dissolution has come. I expected it, but -- well, the Master’s will be done!” His tone of resignation stung Powell. “Save the sympathy, Cube. We’re heading for Earth, not dissolution.” "It is best that you think so,” Cutie sighed again. “I see the wisdom of the illusion now. I would not attempt to shake your faith, even if I could.” He departed -- the picture of commiseration.""" --"Reason" by Isaac Asimov
• taeric 9y ago
  I'm torn. I like the essay, but it is just as excusable to know that using people to act the part of androids necessitates them being extra life like. Similarly, the point was a metaphor for the blurring between real and fake. So, easily distinguished fake would ruin that.
• donw 9y ago
  I suspect that it is easy to fixate on fantasies of massive technological leaps forward, because the truly revolutionary changes that underpin our lives are like air: so common that we overlook them all the time. If you were to sit down with a person from, say, 1750, and wanted to explain the modern world, you would probably tell them about things like antibiotics, cars and planes, snapchat, that sort of thing. All the big stuff that we think defines the modern era. What would probably really impress the hell out of them would be a supermarket, though. To a person from that time, the idea of being able to eat fresh peaches in the dead of winter would be just as magical as being able to instantly translate Russian into English, and yet it probably wouldn't occur to us to bring it up because fruit at the supermarket is just... obvious. So as we look forward, the question is, what will be obvious to people ten or twenty years from now?
  • jfarlow 9y ago
    And yet the supermarket is very much possible only because of the technologies behind planes, antibiotics and snapchat. It's curious. I think the hard part, as noted, is not necessarily the materialization of 'new tech', but very much how that tech plays with all the other new tech to produce a very new society. And in that you are exactly right, the most curious parts of that new society are not the technological tools themselves, but the social capabilities that spring from their convergence - the supermarket. I work at the convergence of tech and synthetic biology, and a huge 'miss' many suffer is a blindness to just how powerfully the two technologies will interconnect in the near future - and not the tech as the product, but the capabilities of their convergence. It's not that computers, AI and all that jazz will become small and invisible, nor that genomics and biology will become easy, but actually what will occur at their intersection. It's that fun space mixed with both where things get really interesting. And this is why reading sci-fi is fun for me. It allows an author to explore the clashes, implications and make prognostications on the outcomes of the convergence of multiple technologies with respect to relatable characters' choices in their lives.
    • donw 9y ago
      Absolutely; Neal Stephenson's latest book ("The Rise And Fall Of D.O.D.O.") touches on this, in asking what series of "small" changes it would take to unravel the modern world. Was a good read. From where you sit, what is the impact of the intermix between those two technologies? As a layperson, I can see tailor-made medications becoming cheap and common over the long run. Not only might that read "goodbye, cancer!", but also mitigate the resultant threat of biological warfare. After all, if you can cook up tailor-made anticancer and antiviral drugs in a machine at Walgreens, then you can counter a tailor-made bioweapon pretty easily. Food production is another obvious boost, so we might have a second Norman Borlaug that once again lifts the carrying capacity of Earth. We can probably also assume foods engineered to grow in extreme environments. From that, you also get biological air and water recycling for spacecraft, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
• Animats 9y ago
  The article mentions "Jennifer", which is the real-world implementation of Marshall Brain's "Manna 1.0". Here's a video of it in action.[1] This is another example of "machines should think, people should work.". The computer is the boss. That may be the future. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC-ReBX0icU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC-ReBX0icU
  • taneq 9y ago
    "People can do the work... so that machines have time to think." - B(if)tek.
  • ape4 9y ago
    I can see people absolutely hating Jennifer.
    • grondilu 9y ago
      I don't know. Consider Personal navigation assistants[1]. I totally feel like I've put my brain in storage when I use those things, yet I kind of like it. It's relaxing. We'll be to machines what horses are to their riders. I'm not sure horses hate their riders. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_navigation_assistant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_navigation_assistant
  • lukeholder 9y ago
    When I was younger I worked in a supermarket warehouse and picked items into a pallet for shipping to a store with a system just like this. (Woolworths Supermarkets, Western Australia) The voice had 4 speeds, and all the experienced pickers would have it turned up to the top speed. Once you were experienced enough though, you would learn the confirm codes for the different bays, and speak though the pick to the voice system 5 steps ahead just so it didn't slow down your pick. Workers that came from a paper sheet pick list in the previous factory prefered the paper as they could memorize the pick sheet with a single reading, and thus pick faster - and if they did want to double check at the end they had the sheet in front of them to do so.
  • gasbag 9y ago
• johngalt 9y ago
  Technology almost never advances directly. Predicting the future would be easy if things simply improved by 1% per year across the board. Tech advances are always a series of lateral moves. Where the last innovation allows for the next new thing. Or more commonly a massive expansion of an existing concept.
• noblethrasher 9y ago
  The Jennifer unit is straight out of the short story, "Manna"[1]. [1] http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
• CalChris 9y ago
  Blade Runner is 40s noir. The characters are noir. The wardrobe is noir. Rachael's haircut is noir. The cinematography is noir. Deckard is an ex-cop. The phone booth makes perfect sense.
• avyfain 9y ago
  If you enjoyed this article, Tim Harford (the author) also has a podcast series called 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy[0] which expands on pretty much every one of the inventions mentioned in the post. The episodes are roughly 10 minutes long, well produced, and always cite the source material. Worth listening to. [0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b1g3c/episodes/downloads http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b1g3c/episodes/downloads
• charlieflowers 9y ago
  When you're writing fiction, you have to choose which elements to emphasize to get your point across. Blade Runner wanted to be about questions along the boundary of "What is it to be human?" It didn't want to be about everyday technology (though it had to pay some lip service to that). So it didn't want to invest the reader's mental energy in the replacement for phone booths. (I think the author's point still stands, but that example doesn't support it).
• legulere 9y ago
  > plausible that LA would look much the same This is actually something I liked in contrast to earlier futurism. If I look around me here in Europe I see that buildings rarely get removed once they stand. The last time the face of cities here changed was after the Second World War. If I look at pictures from the 60s rarely anything changed, except maybe the introduction of some pedestrian zones.
  • duncanawoods 9y ago
    That seems overly broad - a surviving old city tourist area might be well preserved but elsewhere, post-war city rebuilding programs were cheap, rushed and ugly. Even later development is unloved because "high-design" of the time was infected by Brutalism. These already troubled urban centres were then hollowed-out by economic troubles in the 70s leading to areas of dereliction. Over the past few decades, urban regeneration programs have been widespread to remove the bleak post-war prefab concrete monstrosities. Unfortunately what is replacing them is cheap and uninspired compared to pre-1900 architecture so I can't see us valuing it that much in 100 years.
    • jameshart 9y ago
      We don't keep those buildings because we value their architecture, we keep them because we are using them.
      • duncanawoods 9y ago
        That isn't true. We protect valuable architecture with preservation orders. Usage isn't really a factor - tenants of actively used buildings will be given notice and the site redeveloped if doing so is legal and profitable.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
• lordnacho 9y ago
  I wonder if the great leap he mentions (1870-1970) is mostly from the discovery of electromagnetism. It would seem to be magical. Here's this thing that allows you to move huge amounts of power over vast distances, but deposit it in whatever tiny portions you like, in whatever room you want, and it's so easy you run the wires along your existing walls. The same force allows you to send both signal and power through thin air. And if you don't want it there, you can shield from it. Or you can make a motor quite elegantly by winding some wires. And you can manipulate it so finely that you can do calculations with teeny tiny amounts of it. And store the results. But one thing I was wondering was how much it depends on basic science. Now that we've discovered EM, have we exhausted the basic knowledge about the world? Is every tech going forward just refinements on particular aspects of nature, or is it unlimited how we combine things?
  • adrianN 9y ago
    Quantum computers are still in the "we have discovered the basic science, but the engineering is lacking" phase. If we'd manage to make them work as amazingly well as classical computers we could do some things we're currently struggling with much better. Foremost anything that has to do with quantum mechanical simulations, for example designing new drugs, creating useful protein nanomachines, predicting material properties... Another cool step up in terms of technology would be the manipulation of black holes. Black holes are, via Hawking radiation, excellent mass->useful energy converters. If we manage to create some small black holes we could for example travel much faster around the universe, without having to create and store dangerous amounts of antimatter.
    • caseymarquis 9y ago
      That sounds a bit dangerous to the lay person...
      • adrianN 9y ago
        Anything that makes a good propulsion system for a space ship is a bit dangerous.
• titzer 9y ago
  FTA: "Why not unbundle the task and give the conscious thinking to the computer, and the mindless grabbing to the human?" The article was pretty good overall, but this one's a pet peeve of mine. We're offloading our thinking to computers and this magical "AI" in hopes that all that hard work (and possibility for error!) is going to be avoided. But we're going to find out--or perhaps not, as we slip below the dumbness horizon, no longer able to formulate self-reflective thoughts ourselves--that thinking is joyful, fun, glorious, not laborious or error prone. And as "soft" AI advances, we just can't admit to ourselves that this, too, will fail to deliver. To wit: if something absolutely must be translated between language A and language B, in 2017 a bilingual person will still _absolutely mop the floor_ with machine translation. Google translate: "Zum Witz: Wenn irgend etwas absolut zwischen Sprache A und Sprache B übersetzt werden soll, wird im Jahr 2017 eine zweisprachige Person den Boden mit der maschinellen Übersetzung noch niemals stoßen." Bahaha.
  • vgh 9y ago
    Other than the idioms, that's a pretty good literal translation. Definitely understandable. I agree machine translation is weaker than human translation, but I don't understand your mockery of this example.
    • titzer 9y ago
      Outside of the grammar, the translation is pretty bad. It flubbed the main metaphor and didn't even get the prelude. This shows exactly why machine translation is bad. It doesn't actually understand anything. It does really well translating very commonly occurring phrases and grammar because it is based on parallel texts. It does absolutely terrible when one wanders outside this "mainstream". This is why you need a human; they understand metaphors. In fact, the "mop the floor with" metaphor has a literal translation but few Germans would use that as their first choice. Instead, it requires a choice of a different metaphor that expresses the same intent. Machine translators don't even use a dictionary. FFS "mop the floor with" can be defined to a first approximation as "trounce" and that does have some reasonable German translations. Stupid machine. (and it doesn't even understand mockery either).
• leonardoe 9y ago
  Intro to The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by G.K. Chesterton: "THE human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, "Keep tomorrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun."
• l5870uoo9y 9y ago
  What I think we often miss about technology is the underlying point here; no technological progress without social progress. We need a political movement to define a new social contract that ensures broad support for implementation of disruptive technologies. This is the essential challenge for our generation.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• 11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
  When I am thinking about technological advance in my lifetime, the first thing that comes to mind is Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon parking on a bridge and pulling his mobile phone out of the trunk. It was so cool... The reality, 35 years later, is the cheap, ubiquitous, high-speed, mobile access to the world's knowledge and in fact, access to most of humanity. When I press 'add comment', nearly 4 billion human beings can immediately upvote it. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
• EGreg 9y ago
  Why not unbundle the task and give the conscious thinking to the computer, and the mindless grabbing to the human? I could think of a few scary ones.
• stevebmark 9y ago
  For things like these you can just read the first sentence of each paragraph.