4 ms·

The way that the writer defined of progress is part of the problem. If you go into a virgin forest and cut down all of the big trees... that's the easy stuff.

The way that the writer defined of progress is part of the problem. If you go into a virgin forest and cut down all of the big trees... that's the easy stuff. It's kind of absurd, then, to ask why the world isn't producing as much wood any more. The CPUs of the 1950s, which used thousands of vacuum tubes and took up whole floors of buildings, once seemed like a breakthrough. Today we only have these little phone things. Only incremental progress, right?

ardy42 7y ago
> Today we only have these little phone things. Only incremental progress, right? Cell phones have been available for 40 years, and ubiquitous for 25. Smartphones have been around for about 20 years, and have been in their fully-modern form for 13 years (dated from the iPhone). They've been pretty much static since then. Something tells me that in 20 years people will still be trotting out cell phones as a counterexample to claims that technological advancement has slowed down significantly.
- nl 7y ago
  Unclear if this is an argument for or against his "golden quarter" argument, but in any case: cell phones may have been roughly static for 13 years, but since then they've been a foundational innovation for things in the software space. For example, WhatsApp now lets people do very cheap, high quality, reliable video calls from anywhere on the earth.
  - skat20phys 7y ago
    I'm amazed at smartphones and videochatting to be honest, but at some level it's something that seems like a natural evolution of what was there before. For example, in a lot of ways we live in a sci-fi future, if the number of classic films featuring videochats as a sign of the future is any indication. On the other hand, those films did basically get the idea right, that there would be some screen with some little speaker and microphone that you'd talk to someone through. If you go back a bit further though, like to the 1910s, there wasn't any idea of that at all. It was off the collective radar completely. So in some sense, we are living in some continuation of the early 1970s, in the sense it was part of a future we could accurately envision. But we're not living in a continuation of the same era as pre "golden quarter" in that we aren't really entirely part of the future they imagined (I think 1945 isn't quite right, I'd push it back to pre-WWI). At least that's one argument. I wish we could go back and time and interview a bunch of people who lived like 1900-1960+ about this issue, and compare it to what people who were born in, say, 1950, might say about it now. FWIW, my sense is that people in the mid-twentieth century underestimated change in communication technology and overestimated change in transportation tech.
    - com2kid 7y ago
      Startrek had the idea of a pocket communicator. My smartphone is also a full navigation device, 3d scanner, barometer, and can morph my face in real time. Remember when facial morphs where crazy insane sci-fi stuff? Then they became "static image morphs that look like crap but wowee!" Now the only reason we don't have photo-realistic morphs in real time is because society has collectively decided that looking like a slobbering cartoon dog is a lot more fun.
- adrianN 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure that there were a lot fewer cell phones than people 25 years ago, even in rich countries. Today everybody has a cellphone, including in poorer countries.
- galaxyLogic 7y ago
  I was in subway today which I don't do everyday and what amused me was that 9 out of 10 people were looking at their cell-phones. This is a relatively new thing, everybody has their cellphone now and it is not just for making calls. Let's say in some way those 9 people looking at their cell-phone are learning something from it. Isn't that growth in education? Enormous growth in education.
  - WWLink 7y ago
    Admittedly, back in the day if you got on a bus or train, everyone was reading books, magazines, and newspapers anyway.
    - galaxyLogic 7y ago
      True. The difference is that now they have an interactive device to play with
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    From where I'm sitting: cell phone zombies aren't learning a damn thing. Unless you count staring at online ads as "education."
    - galaxyLogic 7y ago
      It is hard to know how much if anything they are learning but I think there is a good chance that they are learning more than if they did not have a cell-phone. In a sense even reading adds is "learning", you learn about new products that are out there and where to get them for what price. At least you are learning that someone is advertising such a product. How useful that is, is of course a different question.
      - scottlocklin 7y ago
        I dunno man, I used to see people reading books on trains. Pretty sure that's learning more than "reading" tinder or playing candy crush.
- com2kid 7y ago
  My phone does local facial recognition! Upload photos to the cloud and Google photos does facial recognition of my individual pets! Stupid? Maybe. But the technology and research to pull that off is impressive. Smartphone cameras alone have pushed entire fields of research forward. Fancy 3d cameras are now used to save fractions of a second unlocking a phone! Try going back a decade and saying that 3d scanning would be a minor line item component that is shoved in a tiny notch above an OLED screen, a screen that has an image quality beyond anything available back then outside of a research lab. Oh then show them a 108 megapixel senor. Then finish it off with one of the TPUs that is yet another barely mentioned component in every phone.
  - nl 7y ago
    Yes, the cell phone is a platform for other, new innovations that were impossible before.
nl 7y ago
Exactly. He credits his golden quarter things like antibiotics (penicillin was discovered in 1928 and was used by Allied forces during WW2) and electronics (vacuum tubes had been used since 1902) but calls the world wide web and cell phones incremental.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  It depends a lot on what a seminal vs an incremental development is defined. For example, was the internet seminal or incremental? Most people would say seminal, but most aspects of the internet were already in place at the time - as the telegraphy network.
  - nl 7y ago
    Exactly. I think almost everything is like that. For example the almost simultaneous development of jet engines by both allied and German airforces during WW2 makes it appear it was inevitable, incremental innovative.
Legogris 7y ago
Maybe part of the problem is that most of true progress and new discoveries in recent decades require a decent amount of understanding of some domain before one can appreciate how it's not just incremental. It's intuitive for anyone how an automobile is distinctly different than a locomotive. You need some understanding of computer science or physics to understand how quantum computing is different. At the same time, there was indeed an explosion of new foundations during the earlier 20th century (it's a stretch to claim it went on until the 70s) and it turns out we're not done just by formulating them, in order to explore and succeed in them as a society we need a couple of generations to let them sink in. Once we get there, I am sure we will have new paradigm shifts. Just wait until after the next global crisis when structures in societies have fallen apart and we have fresh ground to build on. Not that I think that's desirable, but I'm sure I'm not the only one getting pre-WW vibes right now.
asdff 7y ago
Forget the phone, how about a modern computing cluster. Imagine telling a vacuum tube operator your specs.
skat20phys 7y ago
My reaction to this is kind of similar to yours, and sort of in-between a lot of others'. A lot of posts here seem to be nay-saying the piece, but I'm not really sure that's right or wrong. The problem as I see it is it's not really clear how progress should be defined to address the sort of questions being asked in the article. Maybe someone has convincingly, and the article doesn't convey this, but without a clearer definition things seem to be a non-starter. I have some intuition that the question of the piece is not really nonsense, that there was something about the interwar and postwar period that was different. A lot of advances since then have been powerful incremental improvements on those postwar innovations, but incremental nonetheless. The one exception I personally maybe see is networked communications, which have really revolutionized a lot and are still disrupting things. But outside of that my sense is that life (in the US) hasn't changed in fundamental ways since, say, 1975. Things are really different in a lot of ways, but the basics are the same. Conversely, my sense is things are really different compared to 1915. On the other hand, I'm not sure any of my subjective senses of things are really accurate. I wasn't alive in 1915. So without quantifying anything convincingly this is all some armchair discussion. I do think these kinds of questions are important, and I suspect there's some way of getting at this, maybe with very high-level economic or public health data (I've read that the biggest increases in life expectancy in the last 200 years or so, for example, have not actually come from any medical procedure or tech advances, but rather public health advances). But I agree that the way we define things is critical, and it would be interesting to address the question of the article definitively positively or negatively.

ardy42 7y ago

> Today we only have these little phone things. Only incremental progress, right? Cell phones have been available for 40 years, and ubiquitous for 25. Smartphones have been around for about 20 years, and have been in their fully-modern form for 13 years (dated from the iPhone). They've been pretty much static since then. Something tells me that in 20 years people will still be trotting out cell phones as a counterexample to claims that technological advancement has slowed down significantly.

nl 7y ago
Unclear if this is an argument for or against his "golden quarter" argument, but in any case: cell phones may have been roughly static for 13 years, but since then they've been a foundational innovation for things in the software space. For example, WhatsApp now lets people do very cheap, high quality, reliable video calls from anywhere on the earth.
- skat20phys 7y ago
  I'm amazed at smartphones and videochatting to be honest, but at some level it's something that seems like a natural evolution of what was there before. For example, in a lot of ways we live in a sci-fi future, if the number of classic films featuring videochats as a sign of the future is any indication. On the other hand, those films did basically get the idea right, that there would be some screen with some little speaker and microphone that you'd talk to someone through. If you go back a bit further though, like to the 1910s, there wasn't any idea of that at all. It was off the collective radar completely. So in some sense, we are living in some continuation of the early 1970s, in the sense it was part of a future we could accurately envision. But we're not living in a continuation of the same era as pre "golden quarter" in that we aren't really entirely part of the future they imagined (I think 1945 isn't quite right, I'd push it back to pre-WWI). At least that's one argument. I wish we could go back and time and interview a bunch of people who lived like 1900-1960+ about this issue, and compare it to what people who were born in, say, 1950, might say about it now. FWIW, my sense is that people in the mid-twentieth century underestimated change in communication technology and overestimated change in transportation tech.
  - com2kid 7y ago
    Startrek had the idea of a pocket communicator. My smartphone is also a full navigation device, 3d scanner, barometer, and can morph my face in real time. Remember when facial morphs where crazy insane sci-fi stuff? Then they became "static image morphs that look like crap but wowee!" Now the only reason we don't have photo-realistic morphs in real time is because society has collectively decided that looking like a slobbering cartoon dog is a lot more fun.
adrianN 7y ago
I'm pretty sure that there were a lot fewer cell phones than people 25 years ago, even in rich countries. Today everybody has a cellphone, including in poorer countries.
galaxyLogic 7y ago
I was in subway today which I don't do everyday and what amused me was that 9 out of 10 people were looking at their cell-phones. This is a relatively new thing, everybody has their cellphone now and it is not just for making calls. Let's say in some way those 9 people looking at their cell-phone are learning something from it. Isn't that growth in education? Enormous growth in education.
- WWLink 7y ago
  Admittedly, back in the day if you got on a bus or train, everyone was reading books, magazines, and newspapers anyway.
  - galaxyLogic 7y ago
    True. The difference is that now they have an interactive device to play with
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  From where I'm sitting: cell phone zombies aren't learning a damn thing. Unless you count staring at online ads as "education."
  - galaxyLogic 7y ago
    It is hard to know how much if anything they are learning but I think there is a good chance that they are learning more than if they did not have a cell-phone. In a sense even reading adds is "learning", you learn about new products that are out there and where to get them for what price. At least you are learning that someone is advertising such a product. How useful that is, is of course a different question.
    - scottlocklin 7y ago
      I dunno man, I used to see people reading books on trains. Pretty sure that's learning more than "reading" tinder or playing candy crush.
com2kid 7y ago
My phone does local facial recognition! Upload photos to the cloud and Google photos does facial recognition of my individual pets! Stupid? Maybe. But the technology and research to pull that off is impressive. Smartphone cameras alone have pushed entire fields of research forward. Fancy 3d cameras are now used to save fractions of a second unlocking a phone! Try going back a decade and saying that 3d scanning would be a minor line item component that is shoved in a tiny notch above an OLED screen, a screen that has an image quality beyond anything available back then outside of a research lab. Oh then show them a 108 megapixel senor. Then finish it off with one of the TPUs that is yet another barely mentioned component in every phone.
- nl 7y ago
  Yes, the cell phone is a platform for other, new innovations that were impossible before.

nl 7y ago

Exactly. He credits his golden quarter things like antibiotics (penicillin was discovered in 1928 and was used by Allied forces during WW2) and electronics (vacuum tubes had been used since 1902) but calls the world wide web and cell phones incremental.

WalterBright 7y ago
It depends a lot on what a seminal vs an incremental development is defined. For example, was the internet seminal or incremental? Most people would say seminal, but most aspects of the internet were already in place at the time - as the telegraphy network.
- nl 7y ago
  Exactly. I think almost everything is like that. For example the almost simultaneous development of jet engines by both allied and German airforces during WW2 makes it appear it was inevitable, incremental innovative.

Legogris 7y ago

Maybe part of the problem is that most of true progress and new discoveries in recent decades require a decent amount of understanding of some domain before one can appreciate how it's not just incremental. It's intuitive for anyone how an automobile is distinctly different than a locomotive. You need some understanding of computer science or physics to understand how quantum computing is different. At the same time, there was indeed an explosion of new foundations during the earlier 20th century (it's a stretch to claim it went on until the 70s) and it turns out we're not done just by formulating them, in order to explore and succeed in them as a society we need a couple of generations to let them sink in. Once we get there, I am sure we will have new paradigm shifts. Just wait until after the next global crisis when structures in societies have fallen apart and we have fresh ground to build on. Not that I think that's desirable, but I'm sure I'm not the only one getting pre-WW vibes right now.

asdff 7y ago

Forget the phone, how about a modern computing cluster. Imagine telling a vacuum tube operator your specs.

skat20phys 7y ago

My reaction to this is kind of similar to yours, and sort of in-between a lot of others'. A lot of posts here seem to be nay-saying the piece, but I'm not really sure that's right or wrong. The problem as I see it is it's not really clear how progress should be defined to address the sort of questions being asked in the article. Maybe someone has convincingly, and the article doesn't convey this, but without a clearer definition things seem to be a non-starter. I have some intuition that the question of the piece is not really nonsense, that there was something about the interwar and postwar period that was different. A lot of advances since then have been powerful incremental improvements on those postwar innovations, but incremental nonetheless. The one exception I personally maybe see is networked communications, which have really revolutionized a lot and are still disrupting things. But outside of that my sense is that life (in the US) hasn't changed in fundamental ways since, say, 1975. Things are really different in a lot of ways, but the basics are the same. Conversely, my sense is things are really different compared to 1915. On the other hand, I'm not sure any of my subjective senses of things are really accurate. I wasn't alive in 1915. So without quantifying anything convincingly this is all some armchair discussion. I do think these kinds of questions are important, and I suspect there's some way of getting at this, maybe with very high-level economic or public health data (I've read that the biggest increases in life expectancy in the last 200 years or so, for example, have not actually come from any medical procedure or tech advances, but rather public health advances). But I agree that the way we define things is critical, and it would be interesting to address the question of the article definitively positively or negatively.