8 ms·

“If total factor productivity had continued to grow at its 1957 to 1973 rate then we today would be living in the world of 2076 rather than in the world of 2014

• matthewdgreen 5y ago
  If you were expecting reactionless flying cars and literal hoverboards in 2015, you probably should have found a different source for your technology predictions than a Spielberg movie.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Ericson2314 5y ago
    But if you grandparents told you everything we can do with 10cm diameter pneumatic tubes should be done that with them by now, I have nothing to cushion the blow.
  • mycall 5y ago
    Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQzLrvz4DKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQzLrvz4DKQ
• rhapsodic 5y ago
  > Something definitely went wrong somewhere Yes, the TV and Movie industries created a lot of unrealistic expectations in your mind.
  • melling 5y ago
    1920-1970 1970-2020 I think most people would agree that in the 50 years before 1970, the world changed more?
    • lostmsu 5y ago
      I dunno. The only qualitative changes between 1920 and 1970 I am aware of are that by 1970 a single person went to space, and introduction of nuclear power.
      • orwin 5y ago
        I think my grandparents got electrity in the 60s and running water by 71. Also my grandfather took a commercial plane in 62 from France to visit a California factory that sold screws already packaged in boxes of 50. Weird, but he smelled a good idea. Also got paid leave in the 30s. That was huge.
      • asdff 5y ago
        And also the development of computers and the internet was pre 1970.
        • asdff 5y ago
          No idea why this factual statement sits at -1 but I guess that's the state of HN. ARPANET was 1969.
• drfxyjhdyfrhgc 5y ago
  >The world changed much more in the 50 years before I was born than 50 years after The world changed even more in the second 50 years, just not the western world.
• matkoniecz 5y ago
  > Blade Runner was 2019 I am glad that things went better than dystopic predictions.
  • mkr-hn 5y ago
    People always get confused about dystopias, it seems. Even Star Trek's Federation can be seen as a post-apocalyptic dystopia. You don't get to see much of life outside a few locations from the perspective of Starfleet's freakishly accomplished officers and mostly empty cities between warp nacelles, but I suspect things aren't as peachy as presented by Starfleet propaganda.
    • goatlover 5y ago
      They have replicator, transporter, force field and holodeck technology, with ships that can travel between solar systems in days or weeks time. Why would the Federation be dystopian? It's long after the events of WW3. In First Contact Geordi tell Zefram Cochrane that 50 years after contact with the Vulcans, war, disease and poverty on Earth would be eliminated. Picard tells Lilly in the same movie that money is no longer used. People work to better themselves. At least until the recent Star Trek, fans understood the Federation to be utopian. That was Gene Roddenberry's optimistic view of human potential. That we would get past our current issues. Q even puts the Enterprise crew on trial in TNG's first episodes for various historical crimes, and Picard is able to argue that humanity has evolved past much of that. It's only really with external threats and other cultures that the Federation's values are challenged, and sometimes compromised.
      • mkr-hn 5y ago
        You're talking canon. I'm talking fan theories. Canon is limited to the perspective of the people who had to go through the wringer of studio meddling and appeasing broadcasters. There's a reason Discovery is the first to have a gay relationship, trans character, and nonbinary character. Most of the people involved in the previous shows at least since TNG wanted to do that but couldn't get past all the interests in the way. I consider a world without people like me in it pretty dystopic because there's only two things that do that: suppression and genocide.
• marcosdumay 5y ago
  > I grew up watching the original Star Trek series in reruns in the 1970’s. I remember Star Trek canon says 2021 Earth was a hell due to World War 3, but I'm not sure that idea was already at the original series.
  • jfoutz 5y ago
    Kahn was from the 90’s, cryogenically frozen and set off in space at slower than light speed.
    • Igelau 5y ago
      And those pecs were the real deal.
  • revolvingocelot 5y ago
    Nah, we're still at the "gradual repression" stage of Star Trek's future history. WW3 starts in 2026, lasts twenty years, and kills a minimum of 800 million.
• wrycoder 5y ago
  Surfing the web, while constantly checking FB and Twitter.
• beefield 5y ago
  > Something definitely went wrong somewhere Yep. Not old enough to actually verify this, but somehow I have feeling that in the old days the smartest kids of the block were lured to figure out how to get to the moon and how to get electricity from splitting atoms. Then somehow, we as a society came up with this novel idea that maybe we should lure the smartest kids to figure out how to circumvent financial regulation. We all know how that went. Then, we decided that maybe it would be good that the smartest kids started to figure out how to make people click more ads. I almost feel like we deserve what is coming.
  • asdff 5y ago
    >lured to figure out how to get to the moon and how to get electricity from splitting atoms To be fair these things were only invested in because we wanted the capability to bomb eurasia to the stone age
  • RandomLensman 5y ago
    We also decided that the future is only full of hardship and misery. Policy goals are now often only about avoiding disaster or forms redistribution, not growing prosperity, health, happiness. Why would then people not just chose short-term gain?
  • varelse 5y ago
    Bread and Circuses are exponentially easier to create than innovation. Most innovation is punished or ignored unless it is timed well until it is "rediscovered" when it is desperately needed. Bread and Circuses pairs with anything anywhere at any time. And when innovation saved the world from a global pandemic you guys are still arguing about the tiny miniscule risk of side effects of a game-changing vaccine rather than getting back on the curve here. So great, enjoy your brave new world of amusing yourselves to death. That seems to be about all we're good at anymore.
    • mistermann 5y ago
      Perhaps if we were better at thinking we would be able to realize that the pushback on covid is a signal that something in the lower levels of the operating system may have some bugs in it. Instead, we react with simplistic heuristic narratives and emotion, and criticize others for a lack of intellectual capability. If the situation is not to our liking, perhaps we should consider addressing the root cause(s) so the same thing doesn't happen the next time a crisis pays us a visit.
• i_like_apis 5y ago
  Part of the issue with a stale rate of change is that industries get comfortable with successful products. Developing an electric self-driving car takes a monumental effort. It's easier to continue releasing a new internal combustion model every year. The factory only knows how to do one thing and it is expensive to change. So we may never have cars like the Jetsons. Fantasy also wants to over-estimate the future for dramatic effect.
• hartator 5y ago
  > Something definitely went wrong somewhere Printing infinite money might have fucked up the economy.
  • ikurei 5y ago
    Did we do that? Where are my infinite dollars then? My bank only shows a few thousand. Care to elaborate?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • Ericson2314 5y ago
      GP is exactly wrong. Spending begets riches. If no one is buying, the future isn't worth investing in. Conversely, if everyone is buying, tech will unleash material prosperity validating those larger dollar flows faster than "too many dollars" make us "go Weimar" and society falls part. The mistake has been relatively inefficient forms of stimulus that arguably prop up asset prices more than they increase spending, but hopefully the pandemic checks demonstrate us turning a new leaf there: they clearly worked better than whatever shit Larry Summers told Obama to do, as the original graph shows!
• ryanSrich 5y ago
  It’s because the smart people figured out you can make a shit load of money doing boring, not very technically difficult things. If NASA paid as much as a high level engineer at Google, we’d have terraformed mars by now.
  • spaetzleesser 5y ago
    I don’t think it’s the pay but the budget they can work with. If NASA had kept the same percentage of the federal budget it had during Apollo things would be much further.
    • Ericson2314 5y ago
      If stopped giving a shit about deficits and started spending more, we would get way richer (in real and monetary terms) and in fact pay down the old debt --- but it's truly not worth keeping track of anyways so let's just print the money as is our legal right and get back to the future.
    • pjscott 5y ago
      Apparently NASA's inflation-adjusted budget has been about half of its Apollo-era levels ever since the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA_budget_linegraph_BH.PNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA_budget_linegraph_BH.... That's not as much, of course, but it's hardly chump change -- and yet I can't help but think that they're a lot less than half as impressive as they were back then. Look at the Constallation program, meant to develop a crewed launch system as a replacement for the Space Shuttle. Five years after it started it was over budget and behind schedule, and after it was estimated to eventually cost more than the entire Apollo program it got canceled. Or look at the Space Launch System program, another rocket-making attempt: it started in 2011, has spent over $20 billion so far, was supposed to start launches in 2016, and might launch something next year. NASA's general level of competence seems to have dwindled over time. They can still do impressive things, but not nearly as impressive as you'd expect if the same budget had been given to 1960s NASA with 2021 technology.
      • 5y ago
• tomrod 5y ago
  I don't think its hard to determine. Broadly: Political gridlock, defunding of science endeavors, the Forever War on Terror, etc. Economically: increasing wealth disparity More specifically: brightest minds being thrown at the most profitable, versus the most socially beneficial, outcomes.
• dougmwne 5y ago
  I have a personal idea that we are undergoing a collective change overload which is causing us to back away from further innovation and change. It seems to me that all forms of excitement for future tech have turned to skepticism for the vast majority of people. At the same time, climate change is demonstrating the extreme dark side of technical progress. It seems that our legal, ethical and mental models need to catch up for a generation before we can begin envisioning new positive futures again.
• Azsy 5y ago
  Here are a couple of more reasons beside those mentioned: > Internet dopamine is a huge brain-drain > The world is far more complex now, i.e. were having to either clash with older systems/ideas or try updating legacy systems. > Age distributions show many more old people who usually want things to stay similar.
• Barrin92 5y ago
  i never thought of any of these franchises as particularly futuristic. Blade Runner is a sort of film noir detective story, star trek is more of a relocation in space and not time despite the superficial advance in tech, and BttF is, while literally moving through time, not really envisioning a future. Gibson and Stephenson were two of the people who actually tried to talk about the future, and they got a lot of things right. We didn't get the Jetsons type retrofuturism with flying cars and 60s suburbs on mars, but the internet alone has made the world a lot stranger than people imagine. Economics, GDP measurements and so on are very good at capturing the world of commodity production, and indeed not much has changed, but when you look at how information moves around today a great deal has changed, and gdp statistics don't capture it. the entire idea that 'the future' is measured in terms of economic output, where people are flying on huge rockets or something like that is itself a symptom of being stuck in the industrial age
• bb88 5y ago
  > So, I’d say we all expected quite a bit more. One other aspect is that engineering is hard. It's probably harder to become a millionaire through engineering than by becoming a banker, say.
• idiotsecant 5y ago
  >The world changed much more in the 50 years before I was born than 50 years after. Heavy disagree. It might seem that way but only because tech and science are so specialized now that the average person can't wrap their heads around all of it at once anymore. Society, technology, and culture are all changing faster now than at any point in human history.
• worrycue 5y ago
  > I grew up watching the original Star Trek series in reruns in the 1970’s. And you are still alive today, that means you lived through the transition from analog to digital and the arrival of the Information Age. That’s a pretty big thing that has happened.