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The myth of inevitable technological progress

129 points by laurex 7y ago

todipa 7y ago
An interesting parallelism can be drawn between those communities that embraced "progress" and those that didn't. Unfortunately or fortunately (depending on your views), communities that adopted technology thrived and are mainly in control of writing our history so yes, we do have an ingrained bias view.
- lm28469 7y ago
  > communities that adopted technology thrived and are mainly in control of writing our history so yes Define "thriving", if you mean maximising profit, consumption and pollution, then yes. Cancer also thrives right until the host dies, it doesn't mean it's a good thing
  - lostmsu 7y ago
    HDI is one possible measure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
montalbano 7y ago
A nice quote from the article: > Evolution doesn’t have meetings about the market, the environment, the customer base. Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered. Those making bold claims about a "natural evolution" of technology remind me of people who like to expound Adam Smith's "invisible hand" whilst ignoring Smith's warnings on the collusive nature of business and need for government oversight. As we acquire more control over our bodies and environment, so we must have more considered discussion on the direction we want to take as a species.
- themacguffinman 7y ago
  The article's line of reasoning is silly. Sure, technology does not personally hold meetings or lobby Congress, just like evolution doesn't personally have sex or eat other creatures; they just effectively kill everything that doesn't, so what's the difference? I find it insane that people really think they can directly control the direction of our species. Congratulations on, for example, having a great discussion about how surveillance and automated weaponry is bad and wrong and Americans, for example, should stop making it. Applause all around. Do you think China is having the same discussion? Do you think this discussion will somehow prevent China from using its surveillance and AI weaponry to usurp American dominance, spread and develop its technology unfettered, and render your neat little discussion completely worthless? Just like evolution, technology relies on the basic fact that there's always someone to pick up its mantle. There's actually no practical way to forever stop everyone from making market-efficient or gene-efficient choices, because those efficient choices inherently grant the power to surpass people like you who seek to stop it. I think the sooner people realize this, the more influence they gain over their destiny. Technology isn't completely untameable, but don't delude yourself into thinking you can directly control it or stop it. Feel free to focus your efforts on ethical and "good" technology, but remember that the only thing that actually matters in this cold universe is power and the technology that creates it. Ethical technology is worthless if it creates no power or efficiency. Decentralized tech is a perfect example of this. A lot of moral talk and hype - like discussion about what direction we want to take as a species - but most decentralized tech made so far is simply worse and tries to appeal to people's morality to adopt it. Is it any surprise that it has mostly failed? A "more considered discussion" is not the answer. Instead, make something that's more or equally efficient while also being better for society. Don't bring rhetorical or regulatory weapons to a tech fight. You won't win.
4ristotle 7y ago
> Evolution is a terrible metaphor for technology If you remove this assertion, the article is unnecessarily alarmist about all new tech.
sebringj 7y ago
The author wrote: "Evolution is driven by random mutations - mistakes, not plans." But...plans are often mistaken or go awry and random mutations are not actually mistakes as there is no plan. But to note, Elon has really been a driver to push space tech forward so it does take people to decide to do this, but zooming way back, there does seem to be an overall pattern of building things on top of other things and so forth, creating an ever increasing complex solution that enables humans to do more than ever before.
- helpPeople 7y ago
  Elon has contributed to space? I thought he was a military/nasa supplier. If anyone has insight, I'm interested.
  - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
    They provided the funding, but he pushed the cost of manufacture down so low that new things can be done with the same resources.
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  - dwaltrip 7y ago
    First organization to ever reuse an orbital booster, instead of rebuilding it from scratch for each launch. Among many other things (commercial crew, raptor engine, etc)
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- gms7777 7y ago
  They're mistakes in the sense that there is a "plan" -- replication of a genome with full fidelity. A mutation is an error/mistake in replication.
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scottlocklin 7y ago
I wrote something with a very similar title in 2009: https://www.takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_technological_progress/ https://www.takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_technological_pr... I've considered turning it into a book, since it is almost self-evidently true and saying it out loud seems to piss people off.
- zamfi 7y ago
  Frankly, the dismissals you use for insulin (“allow fat people to eat more sugar without slaughtering horses and pigs”) and smartphones (“can we really do anything with computers now that we couldn’t have done 30 or even 50 years ago?”) kind of destroy the legitimacy of your article. Readily available insulin (along with automated pumps) allows folks with type 1 diabetes (you know, not the “fat people”, but the almost-died autoimmune people) to live quasi-normal lives. The point of smartphones isn’t that they’re small versions of regular computers, the point is that they’re everywhere. Do you not see that as categorically different? You could not, for example, hail a cab from a mainframe in 1959. Whereas now you have a device in your pocket that connects you with a cabbie with a similar device in their pocket. The fact that they’re computers using radio networks (old tech that makes it “not progress” to you) is completely irrelevant. That’s to say nothing of the fact that in 1959 cabs wouldn’t stop for black Americans, or visit gay neighborhoods in the ‘80s, etc. etc. — smartphones have completely changed the landscape there. These kinds of dismissals are like sitting in 1959 saying that planes aren’t that fundamentally different from cars — sure they’re faster, but they’re still fuel-powered engines that take you from point A to point B! And they’re more expensive! Radio is just a telegraph with no wires! The smallpox vaccine is just so that those slummy “urban dwellers” can avoid spending time with cows while they’re kids! All technology development is path dependent, and looking at the path and saying “therefore this isn’t progress” is not a particularly valuable insight in my humble opinion.
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    Takimag audiences appreciate non politically correct jokes; a man writes for his audience. If you don't like it, well, I'm sorry you're so sensitive I guess. I'm not sorry for making jokes. That statement also makes an important point: diabetics had solutions back in the old days 40 years before 2009, and there sure were a lot less people with self-inflicted diabetes then. My dismissals are simply the magnitude of the difference. The comparison class for nerd dildos is ... the invention of the computer and networking technology in the first place in the decades before. The invention of the computer and associated networking technology is a vast increase in human power. Smart phones are a convenience, and a democratization of old technology; not a categorically new thing which insanely changes people's way of life. Even in 1969 (now that it's been 50 years), one could put a nickel in a pay phone and summon a cab. It worked about as well as Uber does in most circumstances. In cities, where you're most likely to use such services, you could also just wave at a taxi. I did it for 3 months earlier this year in Lisbon: it worked just fine, and was often faster than uber! The sad thing, to me, is people really think their networked electrical dingus is comparable to something like computers -to say nothing of antibiotics, the atom bomb, spaceflight and so on. I mean, you're in good company: no less a personage than Jerry Pournelle made the same argument you are making here. But it's still wrong!
pbreit 7y ago
If I could understand this article I think I would violently disagree.
peter303 7y ago
Progress is fairly recent idea. When you didnt see much difference between your life and your grandparents, then progress is not obvious. Plus some histories and myths have humans degenerating from a golden age- Eden, Atlantis, etc. Other have eternal cycles.
- hacknat 7y ago
  If you're interested in the history of the idea of progress there is a great journal article, by John Gray (Oxford philosopher), on the history of the idea of progress: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027925?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027925?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
- mbillie1 7y ago
  "Progress is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea."
- ThinkingGuy 7y ago
  In the United States, the idea seems to date back at least to the early years of independence: "I accost an American sailor, and I inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years." Alexis de Toqueville, "Democracy in America," 1840
foobar_ 7y ago
Technology has been the only change for the past 40000 years. Human nature not so much.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  There was little change over much that time. Human nature, or at least capabilities and behaviours, have shown several marked breakout points.
SuoDuanDao 7y ago
I don't think the important question is whether Progress is a myth - it has all the qualities and functions of one - but rather, whether it is a useful myth. Plenty of myths are highly useful, and I would happily argue the the myth of Progress has been a strong net positive. For one thing, it seems to me that rather than the author's sparring partners having misunderstood technology, she may have misunderstood evolution.
beat 7y ago
Reminds me of the old science fiction trope... "We asked if we can, we never asked if we should". The technology will happen, because sensors and AI and IoT are just... stuff. Stuff that's useful in non-threatening ways. So the question is, when does society push back? When do we start banning this sort of surveillance? Or will we? No, it's not inevitable. But that doesn't mean it won't happen.
AbrahamParangi 7y ago
It's funny because I think exactly the opposite: that evolution is self-similar with technology. I think adaptations are best understood as a kind of technology, learned with our genes rather than our minds. The nerve cell is a technology, enabling rapid communication across communities of trillions of other cells. Hemoglobin is a technology. Multicellularity is a technology. The mistake is maybe in assuming technological advance is monotonic. In the Polynesian diaspora, the bow and arrow was lost (probably due to island bottleneck effects). To appropriate a quote: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice". In both evolution and human technology, the arc is long and winding but it empirically bends towards greater complexity & capacity. You basically have to cover your eyes to claim otherwise.
- gumby 7y ago
  > In both evolution and human technology, the arc is long and winding but it empirically bends towards greater complexity & capacity. You basically have to cover your eyes to claim otherwise. Does it? The cockroach is more highly evolved than the human (many more iterations) and is quite well adapted, but does it exhibit "greater complexity & capacity"? The human hair louse can only live on humans and is a different species from the human pubic louse (which can also only live on humans): do you consider this increased complexity and capacity? That arc bends towards increased fitness in a given ecological/economic niche, but no more than that.
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  - leftyted 7y ago
    > That arc bends towards increased fitness in a given ecological/economic niche, but no more than that. We went from single-cell -> multi-cell. Has the reverse ever happened? Maybe "fitness in a given ecological niche" is linked to complexity in some deep way. I'm not sure how to define complexity. It isn't obvious that humans are "more complex" than cockroaches but it does seem obvious that humans and cockroaches are more complex than viruses and that life has become more complex over the last few billion years.
throwaway8291 7y ago
Technology gets better, alright. And there so many things, I can do today, I could not do just a decade ago. Hardware is fantastic, it's fast, almost never fails, it's lightweight and just works. The software side has been a great disappointment, on the other hand. Software spies on you, makes you a marionette of a corporation, it's getting more brittle in many parts. Many people in business do not care about security or some basic ethics and it's mirrored in the apps and tools we use. Imagine a world, where software respects every users privacy, most connections are safe by default and people feel ok about updating things, because things most of the times get better. It sounds like a utopia today. I really wanted to like software as a thing, but the current and the next decade do not look bright to me. On the contrary. We'll have many more abandoned devices, abandoned software, that some poor guy will depend on, more chaos, more junior developers who do not understand basic things, let alone caring about ethics or the consequences of what they are building. It's sad.
- ARandomerDude 7y ago
  To be clear, the article isn't denying that technology advances and has advanced. The author is correcting the subtle, prevalent mindset that views technological improvement as essentially a Darwinian process of blind progress. But technology isn't like that. It's inherently teleological. Somebody (or a group of somebodies) expends enormous effort to create technology on purpose for a purpose. TL;DR – just because I can build this doesn't mean I should.
PavlovsCat 7y ago
Yes, the idea of progress as a straight line is silly, it's like a tree that goes into all directions. All we can do is make progress along a certain route of branches, at the exclusion of others; for every door opened, countless doors close. To be able to gauge how "well" we're doing, how "good" our progress is, we would have to compare with all other branches we could have ended up on by now, and that is not possible.
acoil 7y ago
I think evolution is a valid way to look at technology as long as you are open to the idea that it may not be evolving to better serve us. You are simply a part of technologies environment- something it uses to reproduce and grow.
dlivingston 7y ago
> Those who run small businesses find it nearly impossible to walk away from Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, Etsy, even Amazon. Employers often mandate that their workers use certain apps or systems like Zoom, Slack, and Google Docs. “It is only the hyper-privileged who are now saying, ‘I’m not going to give my kids this,’ or, ‘I’m not on social media,’” says Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist at Accenture. “You actually have to be so comfortable in your privilege that you can opt out of things.” What an absolutely absurd thing to say. In the context of small business owners, your Facebook/Instagram/Yelp presence is no different than that of a "hyper-privileged" company, sans the advertising budget and amount of staffers who work on it. In the context of your employer, enterprise software like Google Docs and Slack are (ostensibly) different than their consumer counterparts, in terms of analytics, data collection, and advertising. Further, the "hyper-privileged" middle- and upper-managers at tech companies are far more likely to use these forms of enterprise software than the under-privileged classes in America. In the context of personal life, you are under absolutely no obligation, regardless of social caste, to join Instagram or Facebook and it's disingenuous to claim otherwise. There is a certain class of media, of which I count Vox as a preeminent example, which constantly use hyperbole and socially-charged arguments in contexts where it doesn't fit or make sense.
- emosupportfi 7y ago
  I agree that this probably could have been phrased in a slightly less charged way, but the truth of the matter is that these companies have such a large market share that a small business can't really afford to ignore those platforms, as it gives them an opportunity to reach far more customers than they could under more general marketing approaches. Whereas, larger companies may very well have the brand recognition to lean away from those platforms and comfortably absorb the lost potential business. It's that ability to survive that is being described as "privilege". Part of a pretty terrible linguistic shift around the idea of businesses as distinct individuals. And as a final note, what you're zeroing in on is a quote from Rumman Chowdhury, so it's probably not Rose Eveleth's words (The Vox Reporter), though she did absolutely choose to include them.
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  > In the context of personal life, you are under absolutely no obligation, regardless of social caste, to join Instagram or Facebook and it's disingenuous to claim otherwise. I've had an employer require me to make a facebook account. They let me use a fake name, but it seems like that decision was made during hiring by my immediate manager. Upper management only allowed it to continue because it was agreed upon during hiring. If I were required to use my real name, it would be impossible to stop actual acquaintances from seeing my profile. You're not obligated to work for a specific company, of course, but saying "nobody is obligated to clean toilets regardless of social class" would seem ignorant of the reality of working class life.
wrnr 7y ago
Most grows is not exponential, rather it is shaped like an S curve. A novel phenotype/technology flourishes by taking advantage of some free energy, but after the low hanging fruits have been picket the multitude of offspring has to compete for smaller returns.
api 7y ago
I think there does seem to be a drive toward "progress" in various ways over a long time span, but as they say in investing: nothing goes straight up and nothing goes straight down.
jkingsbery 7y ago
> “What already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.” I think one of the advantages of engineers studying history is that you understand that while the technology we build has never been done before, nothing is inevitable about any of this, and there's no reason to think it should go on forever by itself. Societies have lost literacy (see eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages). There are books that have been lost forever. Technologies have been forgotten until they were rediscovered. And studying history also shows that while technology might change, human nature does not.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Cirve is a thing. Ultimately logarithmic. It's generally cast as personal/individual, but applies to groups, organisations, and cultures as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve
jordanpg 7y ago
So what's the policy proposal here? Give some government agency release approval authority on all production software builds? There is a gross mismatch between the pace of change and the pace of any available mechanism for regulation. If this is indeed a problem, the solution will have to be a cultural one, not a technocratic one. In the meantime, this kind of criticism makes me roll my eyes and wonder how much the author actually knows about how hardware and software are actually developed in the year 2019.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
  This is Vox, so don't waste breath looking for a policy proposal.
andrewtbham 7y ago
This article is a straw man argument that conflates ideas that there is an inevitable progress in technology, like Moore's law, with a claim that you can do anything you want with technology because it's inevitable. This article is anti-technology, pro-regulation propaganda.
skybrian 7y ago
The main point rings true, similar to how people often take for granted things predicted by economics. But nothing the "invisible hand" does happens by itself. Opportunities don't get taken advantage of until someone does the work, and their decisions matter. Still, there is an evolution-like filtering process partially determining which companies succeed and which ones fail, and ignoring the effect of a company's environment (customers, suppliers, competitors, and regulators) on a product's success is missing something essential.
MadWombat 7y ago
> Technologists’ desire to make a parallel to evolution is flawed at its very foundation. Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans But this is not what the evolution metaphor is alluding to. Nobody in their right mind would argue that technological progress is driven by random mutations. But it is driven by market pressure. If something can be invented and sold, it will be invented and sold, be it invasive surveillance tools for your kids or Bluetooth enabled condoms. And market pressure is in some sense akin to evolutionary pressure where if there is a biological niche, some form of life will evolve to take advantage of it. That said, the argument about regulation is somewhat sound. Just because the current market for technological innovations is pretty much unregulated (at least as far as things like privacy are concerned), doesn't mean it has to stay that way. Back in the day pharmaceutical companies sold heroin laced cough drops and radioactive face creams, but then FDA was established and took control of drug safety. There is no theoretical reason why something similar cannot happen in the technology market. The problem, the way I see it, is that regulation is driven by perceived risk. It is easy to argue that pharmaceutical industry has to be regulated, since the danger of bad and/or inefficient drugs is fairly obvious to everyone. Arguing that technology has to be regulated is a lot harder, because the perceived risk of erosion of privacy is a lot lower and hard to quantify.
- ltbarcly3 7y ago
  > But this is not what the evolution metaphor is alluding to. Nobody in their right mind would argue that technological progress is driven by random mutations. I agree and will add that human evolution IS becoming plan driven, we are learning to fix genetic diseases, and keep people alive to reproduce despite genetic conditions (genetic diseases via various treatments, susceptibility to disease via antibiotics and vaccines and basically all of medicine). Soon we are likely to be making intentional changes to people's dna before they are born. So evolution itself is becoming planned.
ltbarcly3 7y ago
Why would we expect that any technology we have the ability to develop would be developed? Just because there are literally no counter examples? Why do we expect the sun to come up every morning? The choice is to let society absorb and adjust to technological innovations, or pretend you can stop them from happening and tilt at windmills while society adapts and absorbs those changes. The other option is to leave society and refuse to accept new technologies (while society adapts and absorbs them) like the Amish or Ted Kaczynski.
Animats 7y ago
His criticisms apply to capitalism, not technology. If you accept the Milton Freedman position that corporations have as their sole duty the enrichment of their shareholders, this is what you get.
buboard 7y ago
It's not a myth, it's the default state of humanoids to invent new tools all the time. What is the article suggesting, that we sit on our chair doing nothing? Everything humans do is progress forward so that thinking doesnt even make sense. > that they are fundamentally different from any other industry. They’re not. Yes, tech is fundamentally different from all other industries because it's not regulated. Regulation kills innovation thats why tech is progressing faster. Author makes the claim that tech is not random mutation like evolution, but then goes on to mention 1000 projects like smart diapers which are nothing than random mutations of existing products, most of them destined to die, leaving 1 or 2 which will thrive. That sounds a lot like evolution.
- 31073 7y ago
  I assume technology came out of specialization. Which is fueled by population growth.
  - buboard 7y ago
    it sure accelerated but technology has always been progressing since tool-making primates exist
- daotoad 7y ago
  The changes aren't random and generally small. It's closer to Lamarck than Darwin. Remember that successful products aren't necessarily good or beneficial. Tetraethyl lead in gasoline is one example. The Late nineteenth, early 20th century radium craze was full of other examples.
  - buboard 7y ago
    Mutations in nature also aren't random and generally small. Different types occur with different probability, and nucleotides are replaced with other nucleotides and not some new life form. But just like startups, mutations are blind to whether they will be beneficial or not. Lamarck's idea of inheritance is not really related to this.
- 7y ago
gerbilly 7y ago
I think people are tripping up on the word 'evolution' too much. The more important word in the article is 'inevitable'. Sometimes it's good to be reminded that there is nothing inevitable about everything in our lives becoming a surveillance platform.
Finnucane 7y ago
The article is displaying an ad with the tagline "The Evolution of Watching Movies in your PJs". I don't think the author is suggesting that you can stop technological change. The author is saying that it is fair to recognize the change often comes with a cost, and you can ask if you want to pay that cost. You can takes steps to mitigate those costs. Also, that the people who create and deploy these changes should recognize their own responsibility for it. They're not operating as blind natural forces, but deliberate human actions, and we can judge them as such.
miki123211 7y ago
I disagree with almost everything in this article. 1. The facial recognition on students case. This has been done in physical schools for decades. Teachers had been telling kids to pay attention forever. Now, after moving to virtual, a similar solution has been developed. Personally, I would be happy if I could use something like this for my own learning. Identifying the moments when I didn't focus, so that I could re-learn just what I need, is certainly useful and helps a lot. 2. People don't understand that privacy has a price. If Facebook weren't serving us targeted ads, it would be asking us money. I prefer seeing ads over paying money. 99% of people also do. This is evident by Facebook's success. Some things cannot even be done a different way. We can live without smart speakers. They're not really an essential thing in your lives yet. Still, people buy them. They prefer the loss of privacy, that carries almost no real consequences, over the inability to use a technology that helps them. 3. Regulation around drugs means drugs are expensive and development is slowed down. It's very hard to make new, revolutionary drugs, unless you're a big company. If you're a big company, sometimes you don't want to pursue a certain direction, as not to disturb the status quo and not to kill your golden goose. You're also extremely profit-driven, much more so than small inventors. This will be true about technology. When it gets regulated, any new developments that might benefit humanity will be slowed down or not pursued at all. we will also end up with way more monopollies than we have now. 4. You know, people who never went to america make progress too? Europe has their fair share of startups too. Sure, America was and is the center of technology, mostly for geopolitical/legal/historical reasons, but that doesn't mean anything. I completely don't get this argument. This article is a perfect example of the anti-big-tech crusade the mainstream media are pursuing recently, which is very alarming. I'm not saying there are no issues with the way current technology works. In my opinion, most of them stem from the fact that law, especially tax law, favors big companies with big armies of lawyers over small companies or even collectives. Those companies usually have shareholders and investors breathing on their necks, so they need to pursue every direction, no matter how unethical, that can bring them more profit. Corporate lock-in and the "move fast and break things" movement are also major issues. Privacy isn't one, though. People think of that surveillance done by machines is equivalent to surveillance done by people. I disagree. If I don't really get any negative consequences from Facebook having my data (and I see none), while getting a lot of positive consequences, I'm all for it.
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
I think our idea of what progress is needs to change. In my mind, the following are not progress: facial recognition, smart diapers, and surveillance devices. And handheld devices like iphones are a very minor progress. the problem with these things is they don't really enable anything new. So what if the diaper tells you that it's full, I could've done that just by sniffing it: bluetoothing it is NOT progress. Facial recognition on my door: now I don't need to pull out a key, big deal. Iphones: wow, now I can get a map on my phone. I used to just print them out and that worked fine, I could still get to my destination. admittedly having on the phone makes getting there a little easier - this is minor progress - saves me maybe a few minutes at most. Here are examples real progress: (these are all examples that save thousands of hours of labor, not just a few minutes) - being able to get to work faster or more cost effectively - lowering the cost of housing and bringing housing prices down. - technology to allow remote work (as if you were there in person) - lowering the cost of medical insurance and medical costs in general. - lowering the cost of education (this can be easily done if we get rid of the monopoly of the current institutions -> there are a ton of online schools and programs that would happily teach people at a much lower cost, if not free.)
- Kalium 7y ago
  It's perhaps possible that what tools enable isn't always obvious. Mobile phones mean mobile connectivity and computing. That means mobile monitoring of medical conditions becomes possible, making it possible to dramatically better assess and treat in a more timely fashion an array of conditions. That's very often a wonderful way to bring down prices, as preventing medical crises is much cheaper than handling them.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Execution matters, and handheld devices like iPhones have great eased execution. It's ludicrous to claim the ease of video calling and using the internet via sandboxed apps is not significant. There are huge efficiency gains made when a person can purchase their own travel, get medical help via their handheld device, ability to consume media without needing set top boxes and televisions, etc.
crimsonalucard 7y ago
Most technological progress is happening in terms of information processing. It's sort of abstract and dare I say illusory. In terms of things like space travel, energy or physical technology it feels like we hit a slowdown.
nitwit005 7y ago
There's been plenty of technological progress in the drug trade despite being illegal nearly everywhere, and a widespread perception of drugs being a social ill. It's inevitable that if there is enough demand for something, someone will make it. There will be people out there that don't care about the ethics. Some of those things can be constrained by regulation or social pressure, but only some of them.
proc0 7y ago
"This idea persists in part because Americans cannot resist the allure of “progress” i think the UK was a huge part of the information revolution in the 20th century, not to mention centuries of European technologies that had little to do with current American culture. I also suspect there will be new countries jumping in soon and contributing hugely to upcoming IT innovations. I don't think there's much doubt about technological progress at least in info-tech, the singularity is a different conversation that actually includes philosophical questions of consciousness.
mikelyons 7y ago
Evolution is present in all things, it is inevitable. All things evolve because all things are impermanent. The question is, is evolution of technology now only driven by profit and military defense? Or can evolution be driven by the desire for a better future that is more full of Love and less full of violence and fear. People are defining evolution too narrowly, look to see it happening all around you, socially, technically, geologically, comologically. Consciousness itself is evolving and that is why we are seeing the limits of Spiral Dynamics stage orange capitalism. What will our economic system evolve into when society evolves from orange to green? How will this affect our technological evolution? (this will be quite painful but necessary for our survival)

129 points by laurex 7y ago

An interesting parallelism can be drawn between those communities that embraced "progress" and those that didn't. Unfortunately or fortunately (depending on your views), communities that adopted technology thrived and are mainly in control of writing our history so yes, we do have an ingrained bias view.

lm28469 7y ago
> communities that adopted technology thrived and are mainly in control of writing our history so yes Define "thriving", if you mean maximising profit, consumption and pollution, then yes. Cancer also thrives right until the host dies, it doesn't mean it's a good thing
- lostmsu 7y ago
  HDI is one possible measure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index

montalbano 7y ago

A nice quote from the article: > Evolution doesn’t have meetings about the market, the environment, the customer base. Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered. Those making bold claims about a "natural evolution" of technology remind me of people who like to expound Adam Smith's "invisible hand" whilst ignoring Smith's warnings on the collusive nature of business and need for government oversight. As we acquire more control over our bodies and environment, so we must have more considered discussion on the direction we want to take as a species.

themacguffinman 7y ago
The article's line of reasoning is silly. Sure, technology does not personally hold meetings or lobby Congress, just like evolution doesn't personally have sex or eat other creatures; they just effectively kill everything that doesn't, so what's the difference? I find it insane that people really think they can directly control the direction of our species. Congratulations on, for example, having a great discussion about how surveillance and automated weaponry is bad and wrong and Americans, for example, should stop making it. Applause all around. Do you think China is having the same discussion? Do you think this discussion will somehow prevent China from using its surveillance and AI weaponry to usurp American dominance, spread and develop its technology unfettered, and render your neat little discussion completely worthless? Just like evolution, technology relies on the basic fact that there's always someone to pick up its mantle. There's actually no practical way to forever stop everyone from making market-efficient or gene-efficient choices, because those efficient choices inherently grant the power to surpass people like you who seek to stop it. I think the sooner people realize this, the more influence they gain over their destiny. Technology isn't completely untameable, but don't delude yourself into thinking you can directly control it or stop it. Feel free to focus your efforts on ethical and "good" technology, but remember that the only thing that actually matters in this cold universe is power and the technology that creates it. Ethical technology is worthless if it creates no power or efficiency. Decentralized tech is a perfect example of this. A lot of moral talk and hype - like discussion about what direction we want to take as a species - but most decentralized tech made so far is simply worse and tries to appeal to people's morality to adopt it. Is it any surprise that it has mostly failed? A "more considered discussion" is not the answer. Instead, make something that's more or equally efficient while also being better for society. Don't bring rhetorical or regulatory weapons to a tech fight. You won't win.

4ristotle 7y ago

> Evolution is a terrible metaphor for technology If you remove this assertion, the article is unnecessarily alarmist about all new tech.

sebringj 7y ago

The author wrote: "Evolution is driven by random mutations - mistakes, not plans." But...plans are often mistaken or go awry and random mutations are not actually mistakes as there is no plan. But to note, Elon has really been a driver to push space tech forward so it does take people to decide to do this, but zooming way back, there does seem to be an overall pattern of building things on top of other things and so forth, creating an ever increasing complex solution that enables humans to do more than ever before.

helpPeople 7y ago
Elon has contributed to space? I thought he was a military/nasa supplier. If anyone has insight, I'm interested.
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  They provided the funding, but he pushed the cost of manufacture down so low that new things can be done with the same resources.
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- dwaltrip 7y ago
  First organization to ever reuse an orbital booster, instead of rebuilding it from scratch for each launch. Among many other things (commercial crew, raptor engine, etc)
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gms7777 7y ago
They're mistakes in the sense that there is a "plan" -- replication of a genome with full fidelity. A mutation is an error/mistake in replication.
- 7y ago

scottlocklin 7y ago

I wrote something with a very similar title in 2009: https://www.takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_technological_progress/ https://www.takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_technological_pr... I've considered turning it into a book, since it is almost self-evidently true and saying it out loud seems to piss people off.

zamfi 7y ago
Frankly, the dismissals you use for insulin (“allow fat people to eat more sugar without slaughtering horses and pigs”) and smartphones (“can we really do anything with computers now that we couldn’t have done 30 or even 50 years ago?”) kind of destroy the legitimacy of your article. Readily available insulin (along with automated pumps) allows folks with type 1 diabetes (you know, not the “fat people”, but the almost-died autoimmune people) to live quasi-normal lives. The point of smartphones isn’t that they’re small versions of regular computers, the point is that they’re everywhere. Do you not see that as categorically different? You could not, for example, hail a cab from a mainframe in 1959. Whereas now you have a device in your pocket that connects you with a cabbie with a similar device in their pocket. The fact that they’re computers using radio networks (old tech that makes it “not progress” to you) is completely irrelevant. That’s to say nothing of the fact that in 1959 cabs wouldn’t stop for black Americans, or visit gay neighborhoods in the ‘80s, etc. etc. — smartphones have completely changed the landscape there. These kinds of dismissals are like sitting in 1959 saying that planes aren’t that fundamentally different from cars — sure they’re faster, but they’re still fuel-powered engines that take you from point A to point B! And they’re more expensive! Radio is just a telegraph with no wires! The smallpox vaccine is just so that those slummy “urban dwellers” can avoid spending time with cows while they’re kids! All technology development is path dependent, and looking at the path and saying “therefore this isn’t progress” is not a particularly valuable insight in my humble opinion.
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  Takimag audiences appreciate non politically correct jokes; a man writes for his audience. If you don't like it, well, I'm sorry you're so sensitive I guess. I'm not sorry for making jokes. That statement also makes an important point: diabetics had solutions back in the old days 40 years before 2009, and there sure were a lot less people with self-inflicted diabetes then. My dismissals are simply the magnitude of the difference. The comparison class for nerd dildos is ... the invention of the computer and networking technology in the first place in the decades before. The invention of the computer and associated networking technology is a vast increase in human power. Smart phones are a convenience, and a democratization of old technology; not a categorically new thing which insanely changes people's way of life. Even in 1969 (now that it's been 50 years), one could put a nickel in a pay phone and summon a cab. It worked about as well as Uber does in most circumstances. In cities, where you're most likely to use such services, you could also just wave at a taxi. I did it for 3 months earlier this year in Lisbon: it worked just fine, and was often faster than uber! The sad thing, to me, is people really think their networked electrical dingus is comparable to something like computers -to say nothing of antibiotics, the atom bomb, spaceflight and so on. I mean, you're in good company: no less a personage than Jerry Pournelle made the same argument you are making here. But it's still wrong!

pbreit 7y ago

If I could understand this article I think I would violently disagree.

peter303 7y ago

Progress is fairly recent idea. When you didnt see much difference between your life and your grandparents, then progress is not obvious. Plus some histories and myths have humans degenerating from a golden age- Eden, Atlantis, etc. Other have eternal cycles.

hacknat 7y ago
If you're interested in the history of the idea of progress there is a great journal article, by John Gray (Oxford philosopher), on the history of the idea of progress: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027925?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027925?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
mbillie1 7y ago
"Progress is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea."
ThinkingGuy 7y ago
In the United States, the idea seems to date back at least to the early years of independence: "I accost an American sailor, and I inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years." Alexis de Toqueville, "Democracy in America," 1840

foobar_ 7y ago

Technology has been the only change for the past 40000 years. Human nature not so much.

dredmorbius 7y ago
There was little change over much that time. Human nature, or at least capabilities and behaviours, have shown several marked breakout points.

SuoDuanDao 7y ago

I don't think the important question is whether Progress is a myth - it has all the qualities and functions of one - but rather, whether it is a useful myth. Plenty of myths are highly useful, and I would happily argue the the myth of Progress has been a strong net positive. For one thing, it seems to me that rather than the author's sparring partners having misunderstood technology, she may have misunderstood evolution.

beat 7y ago

Reminds me of the old science fiction trope... "We asked if we can, we never asked if we should". The technology will happen, because sensors and AI and IoT are just... stuff. Stuff that's useful in non-threatening ways. So the question is, when does society push back? When do we start banning this sort of surveillance? Or will we? No, it's not inevitable. But that doesn't mean it won't happen.

AbrahamParangi 7y ago

It's funny because I think exactly the opposite: that evolution is self-similar with technology. I think adaptations are best understood as a kind of technology, learned with our genes rather than our minds. The nerve cell is a technology, enabling rapid communication across communities of trillions of other cells. Hemoglobin is a technology. Multicellularity is a technology. The mistake is maybe in assuming technological advance is monotonic. In the Polynesian diaspora, the bow and arrow was lost (probably due to island bottleneck effects). To appropriate a quote: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice". In both evolution and human technology, the arc is long and winding but it empirically bends towards greater complexity & capacity. You basically have to cover your eyes to claim otherwise.

gumby 7y ago
> In both evolution and human technology, the arc is long and winding but it empirically bends towards greater complexity & capacity. You basically have to cover your eyes to claim otherwise. Does it? The cockroach is more highly evolved than the human (many more iterations) and is quite well adapted, but does it exhibit "greater complexity & capacity"? The human hair louse can only live on humans and is a different species from the human pubic louse (which can also only live on humans): do you consider this increased complexity and capacity? That arc bends towards increased fitness in a given ecological/economic niche, but no more than that.
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- leftyted 7y ago
  > That arc bends towards increased fitness in a given ecological/economic niche, but no more than that. We went from single-cell -> multi-cell. Has the reverse ever happened? Maybe "fitness in a given ecological niche" is linked to complexity in some deep way. I'm not sure how to define complexity. It isn't obvious that humans are "more complex" than cockroaches but it does seem obvious that humans and cockroaches are more complex than viruses and that life has become more complex over the last few billion years.

throwaway8291 7y ago

Technology gets better, alright. And there so many things, I can do today, I could not do just a decade ago. Hardware is fantastic, it's fast, almost never fails, it's lightweight and just works. The software side has been a great disappointment, on the other hand. Software spies on you, makes you a marionette of a corporation, it's getting more brittle in many parts. Many people in business do not care about security or some basic ethics and it's mirrored in the apps and tools we use. Imagine a world, where software respects every users privacy, most connections are safe by default and people feel ok about updating things, because things most of the times get better. It sounds like a utopia today. I really wanted to like software as a thing, but the current and the next decade do not look bright to me. On the contrary. We'll have many more abandoned devices, abandoned software, that some poor guy will depend on, more chaos, more junior developers who do not understand basic things, let alone caring about ethics or the consequences of what they are building. It's sad.

ARandomerDude 7y ago
To be clear, the article isn't denying that technology advances and has advanced. The author is correcting the subtle, prevalent mindset that views technological improvement as essentially a Darwinian process of blind progress. But technology isn't like that. It's inherently teleological. Somebody (or a group of somebodies) expends enormous effort to create technology on purpose for a purpose. TL;DR – just because I can build this doesn't mean I should.

PavlovsCat 7y ago

Yes, the idea of progress as a straight line is silly, it's like a tree that goes into all directions. All we can do is make progress along a certain route of branches, at the exclusion of others; for every door opened, countless doors close. To be able to gauge how "well" we're doing, how "good" our progress is, we would have to compare with all other branches we could have ended up on by now, and that is not possible.

acoil 7y ago

I think evolution is a valid way to look at technology as long as you are open to the idea that it may not be evolving to better serve us. You are simply a part of technologies environment- something it uses to reproduce and grow.

dlivingston 7y ago

> Those who run small businesses find it nearly impossible to walk away from Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, Etsy, even Amazon. Employers often mandate that their workers use certain apps or systems like Zoom, Slack, and Google Docs. “It is only the hyper-privileged who are now saying, ‘I’m not going to give my kids this,’ or, ‘I’m not on social media,’” says Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist at Accenture. “You actually have to be so comfortable in your privilege that you can opt out of things.” What an absolutely absurd thing to say. In the context of small business owners, your Facebook/Instagram/Yelp presence is no different than that of a "hyper-privileged" company, sans the advertising budget and amount of staffers who work on it. In the context of your employer, enterprise software like Google Docs and Slack are (ostensibly) different than their consumer counterparts, in terms of analytics, data collection, and advertising. Further, the "hyper-privileged" middle- and upper-managers at tech companies are far more likely to use these forms of enterprise software than the under-privileged classes in America. In the context of personal life, you are under absolutely no obligation, regardless of social caste, to join Instagram or Facebook and it's disingenuous to claim otherwise. There is a certain class of media, of which I count Vox as a preeminent example, which constantly use hyperbole and socially-charged arguments in contexts where it doesn't fit or make sense.

emosupportfi 7y ago
I agree that this probably could have been phrased in a slightly less charged way, but the truth of the matter is that these companies have such a large market share that a small business can't really afford to ignore those platforms, as it gives them an opportunity to reach far more customers than they could under more general marketing approaches. Whereas, larger companies may very well have the brand recognition to lean away from those platforms and comfortably absorb the lost potential business. It's that ability to survive that is being described as "privilege". Part of a pretty terrible linguistic shift around the idea of businesses as distinct individuals. And as a final note, what you're zeroing in on is a quote from Rumman Chowdhury, so it's probably not Rose Eveleth's words (The Vox Reporter), though she did absolutely choose to include them.
blotter_paper 7y ago
> In the context of personal life, you are under absolutely no obligation, regardless of social caste, to join Instagram or Facebook and it's disingenuous to claim otherwise. I've had an employer require me to make a facebook account. They let me use a fake name, but it seems like that decision was made during hiring by my immediate manager. Upper management only allowed it to continue because it was agreed upon during hiring. If I were required to use my real name, it would be impossible to stop actual acquaintances from seeing my profile. You're not obligated to work for a specific company, of course, but saying "nobody is obligated to clean toilets regardless of social class" would seem ignorant of the reality of working class life.

wrnr 7y ago

Most grows is not exponential, rather it is shaped like an S curve. A novel phenotype/technology flourishes by taking advantage of some free energy, but after the low hanging fruits have been picket the multitude of offspring has to compete for smaller returns.

api 7y ago

I think there does seem to be a drive toward "progress" in various ways over a long time span, but as they say in investing: nothing goes straight up and nothing goes straight down.

jkingsbery 7y ago

> “What already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.” I think one of the advantages of engineers studying history is that you understand that while the technology we build has never been done before, nothing is inevitable about any of this, and there's no reason to think it should go on forever by itself. Societies have lost literacy (see eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages). There are books that have been lost forever. Technologies have been forgotten until they were rediscovered. And studying history also shows that while technology might change, human nature does not.

dredmorbius 7y ago
The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Cirve is a thing. Ultimately logarithmic. It's generally cast as personal/individual, but applies to groups, organisations, and cultures as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve

jordanpg 7y ago

So what's the policy proposal here? Give some government agency release approval authority on all production software builds? There is a gross mismatch between the pace of change and the pace of any available mechanism for regulation. If this is indeed a problem, the solution will have to be a cultural one, not a technocratic one. In the meantime, this kind of criticism makes me roll my eyes and wonder how much the author actually knows about how hardware and software are actually developed in the year 2019.

kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
This is Vox, so don't waste breath looking for a policy proposal.

andrewtbham 7y ago

This article is a straw man argument that conflates ideas that there is an inevitable progress in technology, like Moore's law, with a claim that you can do anything you want with technology because it's inevitable. This article is anti-technology, pro-regulation propaganda.

skybrian 7y ago

The main point rings true, similar to how people often take for granted things predicted by economics. But nothing the "invisible hand" does happens by itself. Opportunities don't get taken advantage of until someone does the work, and their decisions matter. Still, there is an evolution-like filtering process partially determining which companies succeed and which ones fail, and ignoring the effect of a company's environment (customers, suppliers, competitors, and regulators) on a product's success is missing something essential.

MadWombat 7y ago

> Technologists’ desire to make a parallel to evolution is flawed at its very foundation. Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans But this is not what the evolution metaphor is alluding to. Nobody in their right mind would argue that technological progress is driven by random mutations. But it is driven by market pressure. If something can be invented and sold, it will be invented and sold, be it invasive surveillance tools for your kids or Bluetooth enabled condoms. And market pressure is in some sense akin to evolutionary pressure where if there is a biological niche, some form of life will evolve to take advantage of it. That said, the argument about regulation is somewhat sound. Just because the current market for technological innovations is pretty much unregulated (at least as far as things like privacy are concerned), doesn't mean it has to stay that way. Back in the day pharmaceutical companies sold heroin laced cough drops and radioactive face creams, but then FDA was established and took control of drug safety. There is no theoretical reason why something similar cannot happen in the technology market. The problem, the way I see it, is that regulation is driven by perceived risk. It is easy to argue that pharmaceutical industry has to be regulated, since the danger of bad and/or inefficient drugs is fairly obvious to everyone. Arguing that technology has to be regulated is a lot harder, because the perceived risk of erosion of privacy is a lot lower and hard to quantify.

ltbarcly3 7y ago
> But this is not what the evolution metaphor is alluding to. Nobody in their right mind would argue that technological progress is driven by random mutations. I agree and will add that human evolution IS becoming plan driven, we are learning to fix genetic diseases, and keep people alive to reproduce despite genetic conditions (genetic diseases via various treatments, susceptibility to disease via antibiotics and vaccines and basically all of medicine). Soon we are likely to be making intentional changes to people's dna before they are born. So evolution itself is becoming planned.

ltbarcly3 7y ago

Why would we expect that any technology we have the ability to develop would be developed? Just because there are literally no counter examples? Why do we expect the sun to come up every morning? The choice is to let society absorb and adjust to technological innovations, or pretend you can stop them from happening and tilt at windmills while society adapts and absorbs those changes. The other option is to leave society and refuse to accept new technologies (while society adapts and absorbs them) like the Amish or Ted Kaczynski.

Animats 7y ago

His criticisms apply to capitalism, not technology. If you accept the Milton Freedman position that corporations have as their sole duty the enrichment of their shareholders, this is what you get.

buboard 7y ago

It's not a myth, it's the default state of humanoids to invent new tools all the time. What is the article suggesting, that we sit on our chair doing nothing? Everything humans do is progress forward so that thinking doesnt even make sense. > that they are fundamentally different from any other industry. They’re not. Yes, tech is fundamentally different from all other industries because it's not regulated. Regulation kills innovation thats why tech is progressing faster. Author makes the claim that tech is not random mutation like evolution, but then goes on to mention 1000 projects like smart diapers which are nothing than random mutations of existing products, most of them destined to die, leaving 1 or 2 which will thrive. That sounds a lot like evolution.

31073 7y ago
I assume technology came out of specialization. Which is fueled by population growth.
- buboard 7y ago
  it sure accelerated but technology has always been progressing since tool-making primates exist
daotoad 7y ago
The changes aren't random and generally small. It's closer to Lamarck than Darwin. Remember that successful products aren't necessarily good or beneficial. Tetraethyl lead in gasoline is one example. The Late nineteenth, early 20th century radium craze was full of other examples.
- buboard 7y ago
  Mutations in nature also aren't random and generally small. Different types occur with different probability, and nucleotides are replaced with other nucleotides and not some new life form. But just like startups, mutations are blind to whether they will be beneficial or not. Lamarck's idea of inheritance is not really related to this.
7y ago

gerbilly 7y ago

I think people are tripping up on the word 'evolution' too much. The more important word in the article is 'inevitable'. Sometimes it's good to be reminded that there is nothing inevitable about everything in our lives becoming a surveillance platform.

Finnucane 7y ago

The article is displaying an ad with the tagline "The Evolution of Watching Movies in your PJs". I don't think the author is suggesting that you can stop technological change. The author is saying that it is fair to recognize the change often comes with a cost, and you can ask if you want to pay that cost. You can takes steps to mitigate those costs. Also, that the people who create and deploy these changes should recognize their own responsibility for it. They're not operating as blind natural forces, but deliberate human actions, and we can judge them as such.

miki123211 7y ago

I disagree with almost everything in this article. 1. The facial recognition on students case. This has been done in physical schools for decades. Teachers had been telling kids to pay attention forever. Now, after moving to virtual, a similar solution has been developed. Personally, I would be happy if I could use something like this for my own learning. Identifying the moments when I didn't focus, so that I could re-learn just what I need, is certainly useful and helps a lot. 2. People don't understand that privacy has a price. If Facebook weren't serving us targeted ads, it would be asking us money. I prefer seeing ads over paying money. 99% of people also do. This is evident by Facebook's success. Some things cannot even be done a different way. We can live without smart speakers. They're not really an essential thing in your lives yet. Still, people buy them. They prefer the loss of privacy, that carries almost no real consequences, over the inability to use a technology that helps them. 3. Regulation around drugs means drugs are expensive and development is slowed down. It's very hard to make new, revolutionary drugs, unless you're a big company. If you're a big company, sometimes you don't want to pursue a certain direction, as not to disturb the status quo and not to kill your golden goose. You're also extremely profit-driven, much more so than small inventors. This will be true about technology. When it gets regulated, any new developments that might benefit humanity will be slowed down or not pursued at all. we will also end up with way more monopollies than we have now. 4. You know, people who never went to america make progress too? Europe has their fair share of startups too. Sure, America was and is the center of technology, mostly for geopolitical/legal/historical reasons, but that doesn't mean anything. I completely don't get this argument. This article is a perfect example of the anti-big-tech crusade the mainstream media are pursuing recently, which is very alarming. I'm not saying there are no issues with the way current technology works. In my opinion, most of them stem from the fact that law, especially tax law, favors big companies with big armies of lawyers over small companies or even collectives. Those companies usually have shareholders and investors breathing on their necks, so they need to pursue every direction, no matter how unethical, that can bring them more profit. Corporate lock-in and the "move fast and break things" movement are also major issues. Privacy isn't one, though. People think of that surveillance done by machines is equivalent to surveillance done by people. I disagree. If I don't really get any negative consequences from Facebook having my data (and I see none), while getting a lot of positive consequences, I'm all for it.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

I think our idea of what progress is needs to change. In my mind, the following are not progress: facial recognition, smart diapers, and surveillance devices. And handheld devices like iphones are a very minor progress. the problem with these things is they don't really enable anything new. So what if the diaper tells you that it's full, I could've done that just by sniffing it: bluetoothing it is NOT progress. Facial recognition on my door: now I don't need to pull out a key, big deal. Iphones: wow, now I can get a map on my phone. I used to just print them out and that worked fine, I could still get to my destination. admittedly having on the phone makes getting there a little easier - this is minor progress - saves me maybe a few minutes at most. Here are examples real progress: (these are all examples that save thousands of hours of labor, not just a few minutes) - being able to get to work faster or more cost effectively - lowering the cost of housing and bringing housing prices down. - technology to allow remote work (as if you were there in person) - lowering the cost of medical insurance and medical costs in general. - lowering the cost of education (this can be easily done if we get rid of the monopoly of the current institutions -> there are a ton of online schools and programs that would happily teach people at a much lower cost, if not free.)

Kalium 7y ago
It's perhaps possible that what tools enable isn't always obvious. Mobile phones mean mobile connectivity and computing. That means mobile monitoring of medical conditions becomes possible, making it possible to dramatically better assess and treat in a more timely fashion an array of conditions. That's very often a wonderful way to bring down prices, as preventing medical crises is much cheaper than handling them.
lotsofpulp 7y ago
Execution matters, and handheld devices like iPhones have great eased execution. It's ludicrous to claim the ease of video calling and using the internet via sandboxed apps is not significant. There are huge efficiency gains made when a person can purchase their own travel, get medical help via their handheld device, ability to consume media without needing set top boxes and televisions, etc.

crimsonalucard 7y ago

Most technological progress is happening in terms of information processing. It's sort of abstract and dare I say illusory. In terms of things like space travel, energy or physical technology it feels like we hit a slowdown.

nitwit005 7y ago

There's been plenty of technological progress in the drug trade despite being illegal nearly everywhere, and a widespread perception of drugs being a social ill. It's inevitable that if there is enough demand for something, someone will make it. There will be people out there that don't care about the ethics. Some of those things can be constrained by regulation or social pressure, but only some of them.

proc0 7y ago

"This idea persists in part because Americans cannot resist the allure of “progress” i think the UK was a huge part of the information revolution in the 20th century, not to mention centuries of European technologies that had little to do with current American culture. I also suspect there will be new countries jumping in soon and contributing hugely to upcoming IT innovations. I don't think there's much doubt about technological progress at least in info-tech, the singularity is a different conversation that actually includes philosophical questions of consciousness.

mikelyons 7y ago

Evolution is present in all things, it is inevitable. All things evolve because all things are impermanent. The question is, is evolution of technology now only driven by profit and military defense? Or can evolution be driven by the desire for a better future that is more full of Love and less full of violence and fear. People are defining evolution too narrowly, look to see it happening all around you, socially, technically, geologically, comologically. Consciousness itself is evolving and that is why we are seeing the limits of Spiral Dynamics stage orange capitalism. What will our economic system evolve into when society evolves from orange to green? How will this affect our technological evolution? (this will be quite painful but necessary for our survival)