4 ms·

I wish I could find the attribution, but I read an interesting comparison - imagine somebody from 1880 who was transported to 1950, and imagine how shocked he w

I wish I could find the attribution, but I read an interesting comparison - imagine somebody from 1880 who was transported to 1950, and imagine how shocked he would be at the changes in the world: cars, washing machines, television, airplanes… now transport somebody from 1950 to 2019. He would be impressed, but not overwhelmed, at the changes that have occurred in the same time period. Besides the computer, most of what we have now is just better versions of what they had 70 years ago.

the-dude 7y ago
And worse versions too.
hhs 7y ago
Agreed, and there's a related point too: These days, strangely, ideas are getting harder to find and research productivity is poor. There was a neat discussion of this a few years ago [0], and here's the paper [1]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13211153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13211153 [1]: https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf
JamilD 7y ago
Not just technology, but the landscape of our cities too; suburbia, car culture, skyscrapers in the urban core; there haven’t really been radical transformations there either.
kyriakos 7y ago
Some technologies are not as obvious as the car but other science fields which are not immediate obvious have advanced a lot since the 1950s E.g medicine.
simonsarris 7y ago
I agree for the most part. If the time travelers go on public transportation in NYC or Boston, they see perhaps worse technology than they had 70 years ago. Airports work less well than 70 years ago, though air travel prices have decreased. Our diets work less well than 70 years ago. Agricultural and nutrition science have not materialized any benefits for the public w.r.t. obesity or diabetes. Though we have more life-saving tech. Diabetics live much better, but we have vastly more of them. (~10% of the USA is diabetic. CDC report in 2017: More than 100 million Americans have diabetes or prediabetes) Building a new house is more complicated and expensive per foot than 70 years ago. Though insulation is better. High trust societies work less well than 70 years ago. Trust is a resource, slowly renewable, and many places seem to have squandered it. There are a lot of such social technologies that have been working less well over time, I imagine. We may(?) now have fewer pleasant, human-scale built environments than existed in the 1950's. A huge obstacle in the US is that walkability invites social problems. So to have good cities, you must not tolerate social dysfunction. If you tolerate it, people will use car-dependent development to insulate themselves from it. At least, that seems to be what's happened.
cma 7y ago
Machine perception/recognition has basically been solved in the last decade or so. We've barely tapped into the implications of it yet.
18pfsmt 7y ago
You are missing both the polio vaccine and anti-biotics. FDR was afflicted by polio, and he was from a very wealthy family.

the-dude 7y ago

And worse versions too.

hhs 7y ago

Agreed, and there's a related point too: These days, strangely, ideas are getting harder to find and research productivity is poor. There was a neat discussion of this a few years ago [0], and here's the paper [1]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13211153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13211153 [1]: https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf

JamilD 7y ago

Not just technology, but the landscape of our cities too; suburbia, car culture, skyscrapers in the urban core; there haven’t really been radical transformations there either.

kyriakos 7y ago

Some technologies are not as obvious as the car but other science fields which are not immediate obvious have advanced a lot since the 1950s E.g medicine.

simonsarris 7y ago

I agree for the most part. If the time travelers go on public transportation in NYC or Boston, they see perhaps worse technology than they had 70 years ago. Airports work less well than 70 years ago, though air travel prices have decreased. Our diets work less well than 70 years ago. Agricultural and nutrition science have not materialized any benefits for the public w.r.t. obesity or diabetes. Though we have more life-saving tech. Diabetics live much better, but we have vastly more of them. (~10% of the USA is diabetic. CDC report in 2017: More than 100 million Americans have diabetes or prediabetes) Building a new house is more complicated and expensive per foot than 70 years ago. Though insulation is better. High trust societies work less well than 70 years ago. Trust is a resource, slowly renewable, and many places seem to have squandered it. There are a lot of such social technologies that have been working less well over time, I imagine. We may(?) now have fewer pleasant, human-scale built environments than existed in the 1950's. A huge obstacle in the US is that walkability invites social problems. So to have good cities, you must not tolerate social dysfunction. If you tolerate it, people will use car-dependent development to insulate themselves from it. At least, that seems to be what's happened.

cma 7y ago

Machine perception/recognition has basically been solved in the last decade or so. We've barely tapped into the implications of it yet.

18pfsmt 7y ago

You are missing both the polio vaccine and anti-biotics. FDR was afflicted by polio, and he was from a very wealthy family.