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> Like I said, “getting directions” used to be a service. Specifically, back then—and still today, in many places!—you’d be expected to retain the services of a

by vageli 6y ago

> Like I said, “getting directions” used to be a service. Specifically, back then—and still today, in many places!—you’d be expected to retain the services of a guide when you were in a foreign city/country. Who would often double as your translator, and potentially as your driver as well. So previously, travel to foreign destinations was something few could afford, since it required sourcing and hiring a local guide. It would seem our current solutions scale much better and at a lower unit cost, opening up the world to more people than could have experienced it before.

derefr 6y ago
Yes, correct. But that’s moving the goal-posts, kind of: “making something available to a wider audience” isn’t the same thing as making something possible. The original claim was that we’re now in a world where these things are possible. But really, we’re “merely” in a world where they’re more widely-available. They’ve been possible for a long time. What I wanted to highlight, was that technology making something possible, that was previously impossible, is actually quite rare. There really aren’t all that many innovations that come along and change the world in such a way that a time-traveller from the past, would need to learn an entirely new conceptual framework to understand how we do things now. Almost always, what we do now, maps in an obvious 1:1 way to what we used to do. Hailing a cab? You could hail a cab in Ancient Greece! In fact, it’s pretty hard to think of genuinely-novel things humans only started doing in the last 100 years, due to some technological enabler. Playing single-player interactive story-games, maybe — even the progenitor of the medium, the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, is AFAIK a 20th-century innovation.
- freewilly1040 6y ago
  The super rich framing isn't useful IMO, much of the advances in technology function to make things possible for people for whom that function was impossible for before. > You could hail a cab in Ancient Greece! Depends on who the "you" is. And choosing a super rich person as your point of reference is a pretty arbitrary choice (with underlying assumptions about society that are worth examining, I might add).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

by vageli 6y ago

derefr 6y ago

Yes, correct. But that’s moving the goal-posts, kind of: “making something available to a wider audience” isn’t the same thing as making something possible. The original claim was that we’re now in a world where these things are possible. But really, we’re “merely” in a world where they’re more widely-available. They’ve been possible for a long time. What I wanted to highlight, was that technology making something possible, that was previously impossible, is actually quite rare. There really aren’t all that many innovations that come along and change the world in such a way that a time-traveller from the past, would need to learn an entirely new conceptual framework to understand how we do things now. Almost always, what we do now, maps in an obvious 1:1 way to what we used to do. Hailing a cab? You could hail a cab in Ancient Greece! In fact, it’s pretty hard to think of genuinely-novel things humans only started doing in the last 100 years, due to some technological enabler. Playing single-player interactive story-games, maybe — even the progenitor of the medium, the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, is AFAIK a 20th-century innovation.

freewilly1040 6y ago
The super rich framing isn't useful IMO, much of the advances in technology function to make things possible for people for whom that function was impossible for before. > You could hail a cab in Ancient Greece! Depends on who the "you" is. And choosing a super rich person as your point of reference is a pretty arbitrary choice (with underlying assumptions about society that are worth examining, I might add).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]