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> Today we only have these little phone things. Only incremental progress, right? Cell phones have been available for 40 years, and ubiquitous for 25. Smartph
by 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 agoUnclear 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 agoI'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 agoStartrek 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 agoI'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 agoI 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 agoAdmittedly, back in the day if you got on a bus or train, everyone was reading books, magazines, and newspapers anyway.
- galaxyLogic 7y agoTrue. The difference is that now they have an interactive device to play with
- scottlocklin 7y agoFrom where I'm sitting: cell phone zombies aren't learning a damn thing. Unless you count staring at online ads as "education."
- galaxyLogic 7y agoIt 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 agoI 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 agoMy 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 agoYes, the cell phone is a platform for other, new innovations that were impossible before.