7 ms·
It's rare I want to call someone with conservative technological estimates unrealistic. Usually I see the opposite. But I don't think Kasparov is on the mark he
by simonsarris 16y ago
It's rare I want to call someone with conservative technological estimates unrealistic. Usually I see the opposite. But I don't think Kasparov is on the mark here.
The cellphone was invented after that and has forever changed the way we reach people and fundamentally how they are reachable.
Do you remember life pre-cellphones? When you left your house you literally dropped off the map. There was no way of anyone knowing where you were or where you were going. Unless you let them know beforehand, there was no way for people to catch-up with you when you got there. All sorts of tiny events required massive planning.
Now when you leave the house, should you so please (and the vast majority do) you can be reached. Climbing a mountain? In another country? Nobody knows this? They can still contact you! You can be at a place you've never been before and your friend can contact you and meet you there!
I actually think this disrupts my zen a little bit; I'd rather not be reachable at all times. I rarely pick up my phone - maybe for my father, my brother, or my girlfriend. Everyone else can leave a message.
- varjag 16y agoYou have a point, although I feel you talk more about social disruption rather than technological. Switched communication and voice transmission over electromagnetic signal were genuine technology breakthroughs, and both are over a century old now. Cellphone is a combination of both, and while it was out of technical reach in 1900s, the concept still would've not sounded alien to the engineers of the time.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoUbiquitous cell phones are definitely a revolutionary development. This becomes obvious when you read or watch fiction of any sort. How many story lines would be completely disrupted by the presence of a cell phone? As it turns out, a great many, even for stories being written today, as many writers haven't fully absorbed the way things have changed.
- ladon86 16y agoWe have a long running series of phone ads in the UK which make fun of exactly this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlX9G7s2AnQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlX9G7s2AnQ
- weavejester 16y agoThe Orange ads are more about clueless producers ruining film ideas with rampant commercialism. I don't think there have been any Orange ads where a plot has been ruined due to the presence of a phone within the movie itself.
- gaius 16y agoWatch the Orange A-Team ad
- maukdaddy 16y agoOh thank you for that link. Just watched a few of their other commercials. Hilarious!!
- ugh 16y agoThis drives me nuts whenever I read anything by Connie Willis. Her time travel books play (partly, obviously) decades in the future yet there are constantly people running around and frantically looking for each other and not finding anyone. I always want to scream “Pick up your goddamn cellphone!” (Some of those were written in the nineties which explains their lack of cellphones but even her most recent books from this year have the same problem.)
- teamonkey 16y agoIt's weird that the lack of portable phones requires more suspension of disbelief than time travel. Maybe that's a testament to the writer. In Doomsday Book there are a few plot points where even an answering machine would have helped. Excellent books though, despite that.
- trafficlight 16y agoIt's not weird at all. If you have the technology to move your physical being between time periods, you can certainly move a few radio waves around.
- mechanical_fish 16y agoPity the poor artist who establishes their reputation in one medium, then sees the medium do a big shift. Willis probably could write books which fully encompass the cellphone-era worldview. But will they be Connie Willis books? Or will the loss of all those old tropes make her new style inevitably different from her best-selling old style? Think of PG Wodehouse, blithely writing novels set in early-twentieth-century England as late as 1975. (Though this example is a bit contrived, since some would argue that Wodehouse wrote about a society that never existed.) Or Bach, plugging away on his late Baroque masterworks years after the Baroque went out of style.
- jonhendry 16y ago"(Though this example is a bit contrived, since some would argue that Wodehouse wrote about a society that never existed.) " Just think of the Drones club as a bunch of bun-tossing elves.
- sofuture 16y agoIt's funny to watch Seinfeld with this in mind. Virtually every episode's plot is unbelievable given cell-phones.
- gaius 16y agoHaha yes, even Star Trek, they can travel at warp speed but the away team can't send an MMS back to the ship, the captain has to beam down personally and see for himself...
- DannoHung 16y agoUhhh.... http://www.google.com/images?q=Trek+communicator&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1289&bih=803 http://www.google.com/images?q=Trek+communicator&um=1...
- gaius 16y agoWhat am I looking at here? The Star Trek communicators are voice-only.
- jasonlotito 16y agoYou're forgetting that in those cases, beaming down was a result not of lack of video, but because of interference, or the classic "You have to see this for yourself" bit. More importantly, it made for a better show that way. Interstellar video was common enough, but I'd question the importance of having video conferencing on top of their voice only communicators. I'd go further, but then I'd be showing how much time I've wasted thinking about this. DS9>*, btw.
- polynomial 16y agoI seem to recall at least one episode where they showed the image of the person being communicated with in the communicator. Am I just imagining this? Or was it in one of the movie versions…?
- gaius 16y agoThey transmitted images from Georgie's vision thing once.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
- joe_the_user 16y agoVery interesting point. I feel like the situation is even more extreme in a sense. It seems like ubiquitous information disrupts a large percentage of all possible story plots. Most story plots hinge on ignorance and discovery. With no physical personification of ignorance, a plot is simply less compelling. Imagine - * Odysseus travels through exotic, distant lands, that he just forget to do Google earth on beforehand, * Why wait for Godot when you can just give him a call? * etc.
- bergie 16y agoYou could argue that ubiquitous information makes real life more bland, not just stories
- jhancock 16y ago"Do you remember life pre-cellphones? When you left your house you literally dropped off the map." Yes. I miss those days.
- sfphotoarts 16y agoyou can always leave your cell phone at home, but for many the cellphone is an integral part of going somewhere. planning en route, picking alternative an rendezvous etc.
- stcredzero 16y agoI've noticed that some groups of people never meet at the place previously discussed. It's like "Hey, let's go to X" really means let's go some as-yet undisclosed location downtown.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jerf 16y agoYour story is missing critical parts and makes no sense as written. It is unclear to me how not having a cellphone resulted in the law telling your brother's account that it is now mandatory for him to flee from the cops.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- trafficlight 16y agoThe parent's story is gone now, but your summary makes it sound awesome.
- vvpan 16y agoWith cellphones around people are never alone anymore. To my mind, this "aloneness" (does not mean you are feeling lonely, but could) is an integral part of a meaningful human experience.
- MoreMoschops 16y agoThe HN title of this needs fixing - I think Kasparov is talking about innovation within the U.S. (although the article itself is maddeningly unclear, saying "thinks the U.S. has become complacent when it comes to innovation" but then seeming to push a worldwide brush that the "last technology that could be thought of as revolutionary, he says, was the Apple II"; I think he meant in the U.S. and this is just sloppy journalism). You're spot on about mobile phones changing things; the first mobile phone network was in Japan, and the Nordic countries were second up. The revolutionary innovation, which Kasparov is talking about, was not within the U.S.
- evgen 16y agoThe first mobile phone network was done by NMT in Japan, but the first commercial mobile phone was invented by Martin Cooper of Motorola and the first call made on this phone was to the head of a competing program at Bell Labs.
- andreyf 16y agoIt's non-trivial to compare cell phones with the combustion engine or flight, but I think we can agree with Kasparov that more inventions of that magnitude are something we should strive for.
- itsnotvalid 16y agoYet engines are actually getting replaced by other alternatives, but those alternatives require different sets of infrastructure which are non-existent (such as for fuel cells or electric cars) Also, there are external forces driving the way to the opposite side of the story (aka keeping combustion engines, for money, of course) Sometimes I just think that the Americans use too much cars (one person driving a car with four seats is an insult to the nature.)
- anamax 16y ago> Sometimes I just think that the Americans use too much cars (one person driving a car with four seats is an insult to the nature.) I'm guessing that you'd be mad if more of us had multiple cars, one with one seat, one with two seats, one with three, and another with four. (An extra car just for gas mileage rarely saves money because $5-7k buys a lot of gas.) I would like to know how you know how many other people that driver will transport before returning home. After all, if they're going to need four seats at any point before they return, they need to start with four seats. BTW - most of those "four seat" cars actually have five seats.
- frobozz 16y agoThe obvious alternative is not to have several different cars, but to live closer to where you work, shop and play. Another alternative more obvious than keeping a garage full of differently-sized vehicles is to improve the fuel-per-passenger-mile ratio by banding together with other travellers who are going the same way. This is how buses and trains work.
- anamax 16y ago
- fhars 16y agoYou've got your chronology wrong, the cell phone was introduced 1973 (that's why the OpenMoko device was called Neo 1973), predating the Apple ][ by four years.
- fleitz 16y agoThe cell phone was not invented in 1973, that thing Michael Douglas carries around in Wall Street is called a brick.
- S_A_P 16y agoActually motorola unveiled the cell phone in 1973 and the brick phone design was pretty much unchanged from the beginning until the 80s when miniaturization began in earnest.
- stcredzero 16y agoAll sorts of tiny events required massive planning. We old-timers just used to call it "planning."