7 ms·

This is an area where you really have to be careful of recency bias. Consider that someone who was born in the early 1900s and lived to their 90s would have wi

by ska 4y ago

This is an area where you really have to be careful of recency bias. Consider that someone who was born in the early 1900s and lived to their 90s would have witnessed (just in the area of technology change): the introduction of electricity in the home, perhaps also seen their house go onto municipal water and sewage. The move from horse-drawn to automobiles. The introduction of flight. The introduction of broadcast radio, then the introduction of TV, then the introduction of the internet. Not to mention a sea change in agriculture, etc. It's tempting to think "wow things are so much faster now", but that was pretty damn fast. It's especially risky to base the idea of real rate of change on the current hot topics, that usually ends up being wrong (but not always).

ghaff 4y ago
Imagine you were teleported to today from just 30 years ago, when many of us had been working for quite a long time. Sure. Many aspects of daily life would seem pretty familiar. Cars aren't all that different. In a given city, many of the same shops would even be present. But, almost anything to do with obtaining and using information would be utterly alien.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Maybe to you, but 30 years ago I was already using the internet. BBSes were common in tech circles as well. We didn't have google, but there were search engines to look for files that you could then FTP. AOL was already nearing their peak, them and competitors were in many ways trying to be what the internet became. 30 years ago my dad was already calling in to work from home (2400 baud was not as good as being in the office, but when a customer has a problem at 3am that was the fastest way to fix the problem). 30 years ago people would get the details wrong, but they had already imagined today's world even if they couldn't actually take part in one of the forerunners to it.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I was very much into BBSs. Never AOL, although CIS. 30 years ago? I don't think I had an Internet connection though. (Had been barely exposed to it in school in the late 70s.) Got things like competitive spec information as a product manager from requesting it from analysts we paid a lot of money to for faxing us data sheets. Pricing info was very fragmentary. There were cell phones--barely--not sure when I got my first one as a rarely-used backup device. A mobile almost always connected world might have been something I might have imagined in some form as futurology but would probably have take different forms. See Pournelle's version of not-Wikipedia in Oath of Fealty for example.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      My local university had a free dialup number that you could use to telnet into anything on that supported telnet. There were a few BBSes on the internet, but I didn't know how to do anything with it. 29 years and 6 months ago I actually went to university for the first time and my dorm had terminals, plus some of my homework actually required that I do things that were on the internet. The first wifi connected laptops were also coming out at about that time. Nobody thought of phones as for more than voice yet (cell phones did exist, but the cost per minute was very high, and they only supported voice. They also didn't fit in a pocket). Like I said the ideas were all in place close enough that someone from 30 years ago would recognize everything as the future they imagined - but the details are very different between what they imagined and what the reality turned out to be.
- vkou 4y ago
  > But, almost anything to do with obtaining and using information would be utterly alien. Would it? I doubt it. Computers answering 'arbitrary' queries were a trope of popular fiction for a lot longer than the past 30 years, and computers answering limited queries were already commonplace. In the lifespan of someone who was an adult in 1993, computers went from being something that occupied most of a room to something that could be found in many offices. Also, the first cell phone was built in 1973. For the information age to be truly alien, you have to go back to a time well before Turing machines. 1933? Maybe even further past that, to before wireless communication. 1873?
- ska 4y ago
  Are you suggesting this is a bigger change than say, 1910-1940, or 1920-1950 to use your timeline? I don't really understand what you are trying to say in the above. Beyond that, most of the bones of the information systems were already there in 1993, you'll have to add at least another 20 years, if not pre-computer, to make it "alien". I think ubiquitous cell phones would be a surprise, but it's hard to argue that is a bigger change than say, automobiles.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Ubiquitous everyone carries a smartphone mobility that isn't plugged into centralized information sources should perhaps, in retrospect, been predictable in 1993 but I don't think it was obvious. It certainly wasn't 10 years earlier to the vast majority of people other than as a hand wavy Foundation-style Galactic Library (which tended to be the SF-type prediction). Also, don't take what I wrote to be "No one could have predicted this" but rather someone teleported in time would be just amazed about these aspects of ubiquitous information retrieval.
    - robryk 4y ago
      The "everyone carries a smartphone that can talk to various information sources" part was an easy extrapolation of things that already existed in 1994: Motorola Envoy, a ~tablet (well, PDA using parlance from those times) with a wireless modem, was released in 1994. General Magic, a company that aimed to build such a device, was created in 1990. I grant you that the existence of such easy to query information sources was probably less predictable.
    - ska 4y ago
      >Also, don't take what I wrote to be Again, this confuses me. I was pointing out that the current rate of change is not obviously more rapid than about 100 years ago. If you are trying to provide a counterexample I think you've failed to establish one, and if you weren't I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve, other than a generic "gee, the internet has come a long way in the last 30 years". I don't think anyone would claim it hasn't, but I don't get your point, I guess.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  30 years ago, 1993... isn't that when Bill Clinton's inauguration was live streamed over the internet? Or was that '97? ...either way, the internet was definitely up and coming around then.
  - lttlrck 4y ago
    I don't know about Bill, but in '93 I was downloading porn (and genuinely useful information) in the university lab from mainly academic sites. For reasons I forget we could not use ftp. The workaround was telnet in, cat meow.jpg | uuencode. Then copy the terminal output to a text editor, save and uudecode it open in xview. And wait for the jpeg to decode, line by line... All this on glorious HP PA-RISC workstations. The intervening years have been simplifying the access to information from NCSA mosaic to ChatGPT today. Amazing to watch it happen. But I will never forget the magic of uuencode.
richardw 4y ago
I think this is an area where you have to be careful of people-like-me bias. (Apologies :) Most people in the world didn’t have most of those things, but they now largely all have cellphones. Any child with access to the internet can access any piece of information on all of the items you mentioned. And now/soon any of those kids can speak with an electronic friend who can explain it to them in their own language. In short, a huge percentage of the world didn’t benefit and didn’t participate or compete or come up with ideas. I think it’s safe to say that generates more change, faster, for all of us.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  Cellphones are nice to have, certainly, but compared to safe piped water and electric light, they are a minor addition to quality of life. Ask anyone who has done without the latter two for extended periods of time.
  - richardw 4y ago
    The point is that the cellphone is a multiplier with which every person can improve their lives. That was true before the internet (see fishermen in Africa using phones to communicate about the best current fishing spots) and even more so now. If you put me on a desert island with an internet-connected phone that I could recharge once a day, I'd have a far better chance of surviving [1] than if you gave me a flushing toilet or a power point in my house. Obviously there are comparisons that will fail this, but this is to underscore the spectacular catalytic influence that everyone (roughly) has in their pocket. Our child's carer has a mom living in Zimbabwe, who has no power and running water. She used her cellphone to contact her child when she was sick, to get money, get a lift to a bigger hospital. She made her own choice on what she would buy and in this extreme case it was the smart move. [1] Help I'm on a desert island, here is my location. How do I gather water. Is this plant edible. Is that animal dangerous. How can I build a shelter.
- ska 4y ago
  I think you are vastly underestimating the changes that some of those technologies i mention had on the lives of nearly everyone in the planet. For good and for ill. Probably because they were “normal” when you became aware. Sure, lots of people didn’t have electrified houses, or cars, but very few weren’t deeply affected their rise. That doesn’t even get to into the radical economic shifts from agricultural methods and globalism (built on such technologies), or the political shifts that radio and then television brought, most places. You are correct I should have been more careful in how I stated it, it to sounds like everyone suddenly got a personal automobile and am electrified home. Fair enough, hit the point stands.
vic-traill 4y ago
Don't forget Man on the Moon and the atom bomb. The 20th century was one helluva inventive time, for better and worse.
Spooky23 4y ago
My grandfather grew up in rural Ireland. He remembered seeing an electric lamp for the first time circa 1916. 50 years later, he was rebuilding jet engines. At 85 he “retired” away from NYC and moved in my with aunt and uncle. He kept up with friends with ICQ and was navigating snowmobiles with GPS around 88. I think what we’re seeing today is a quickening of process. I don’t think the tech is the change, it’s like the Industrial Revolution — the change was how it empowered society. Are we heading for lives of less tool? Or some Asimov style distopian earth?
kjellsbells 4y ago
I wonder how much of the 20th century progress would have happened without two and a half wars (two world wars and a cold one). Flight for example went from cool novelty to quite useful weapon to essential part of strategy in, what, 30 years? Maybe that would not have happened without ww1 and ww2.
FredPret 4y ago
And landing on the moon!

by ska 4y ago

ghaff 4y ago

Imagine you were teleported to today from just 30 years ago, when many of us had been working for quite a long time. Sure. Many aspects of daily life would seem pretty familiar. Cars aren't all that different. In a given city, many of the same shops would even be present. But, almost anything to do with obtaining and using information would be utterly alien.

bluGill 4y ago
Maybe to you, but 30 years ago I was already using the internet. BBSes were common in tech circles as well. We didn't have google, but there were search engines to look for files that you could then FTP. AOL was already nearing their peak, them and competitors were in many ways trying to be what the internet became. 30 years ago my dad was already calling in to work from home (2400 baud was not as good as being in the office, but when a customer has a problem at 3am that was the fastest way to fix the problem). 30 years ago people would get the details wrong, but they had already imagined today's world even if they couldn't actually take part in one of the forerunners to it.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I was very much into BBSs. Never AOL, although CIS. 30 years ago? I don't think I had an Internet connection though. (Had been barely exposed to it in school in the late 70s.) Got things like competitive spec information as a product manager from requesting it from analysts we paid a lot of money to for faxing us data sheets. Pricing info was very fragmentary. There were cell phones--barely--not sure when I got my first one as a rarely-used backup device. A mobile almost always connected world might have been something I might have imagined in some form as futurology but would probably have take different forms. See Pournelle's version of not-Wikipedia in Oath of Fealty for example.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    My local university had a free dialup number that you could use to telnet into anything on that supported telnet. There were a few BBSes on the internet, but I didn't know how to do anything with it. 29 years and 6 months ago I actually went to university for the first time and my dorm had terminals, plus some of my homework actually required that I do things that were on the internet. The first wifi connected laptops were also coming out at about that time. Nobody thought of phones as for more than voice yet (cell phones did exist, but the cost per minute was very high, and they only supported voice. They also didn't fit in a pocket). Like I said the ideas were all in place close enough that someone from 30 years ago would recognize everything as the future they imagined - but the details are very different between what they imagined and what the reality turned out to be.
vkou 4y ago
> But, almost anything to do with obtaining and using information would be utterly alien. Would it? I doubt it. Computers answering 'arbitrary' queries were a trope of popular fiction for a lot longer than the past 30 years, and computers answering limited queries were already commonplace. In the lifespan of someone who was an adult in 1993, computers went from being something that occupied most of a room to something that could be found in many offices. Also, the first cell phone was built in 1973. For the information age to be truly alien, you have to go back to a time well before Turing machines. 1933? Maybe even further past that, to before wireless communication. 1873?
ska 4y ago
Are you suggesting this is a bigger change than say, 1910-1940, or 1920-1950 to use your timeline? I don't really understand what you are trying to say in the above. Beyond that, most of the bones of the information systems were already there in 1993, you'll have to add at least another 20 years, if not pre-computer, to make it "alien". I think ubiquitous cell phones would be a surprise, but it's hard to argue that is a bigger change than say, automobiles.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ghaff 4y ago
  Ubiquitous everyone carries a smartphone mobility that isn't plugged into centralized information sources should perhaps, in retrospect, been predictable in 1993 but I don't think it was obvious. It certainly wasn't 10 years earlier to the vast majority of people other than as a hand wavy Foundation-style Galactic Library (which tended to be the SF-type prediction). Also, don't take what I wrote to be "No one could have predicted this" but rather someone teleported in time would be just amazed about these aspects of ubiquitous information retrieval.
  - robryk 4y ago
    The "everyone carries a smartphone that can talk to various information sources" part was an easy extrapolation of things that already existed in 1994: Motorola Envoy, a ~tablet (well, PDA using parlance from those times) with a wireless modem, was released in 1994. General Magic, a company that aimed to build such a device, was created in 1990. I grant you that the existence of such easy to query information sources was probably less predictable.
  - ska 4y ago
    >Also, don't take what I wrote to be Again, this confuses me. I was pointing out that the current rate of change is not obviously more rapid than about 100 years ago. If you are trying to provide a counterexample I think you've failed to establish one, and if you weren't I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve, other than a generic "gee, the internet has come a long way in the last 30 years". I don't think anyone would claim it hasn't, but I don't get your point, I guess.
tmtvl 4y ago
30 years ago, 1993... isn't that when Bill Clinton's inauguration was live streamed over the internet? Or was that '97? ...either way, the internet was definitely up and coming around then.
- lttlrck 4y ago
  I don't know about Bill, but in '93 I was downloading porn (and genuinely useful information) in the university lab from mainly academic sites. For reasons I forget we could not use ftp. The workaround was telnet in, cat meow.jpg | uuencode. Then copy the terminal output to a text editor, save and uudecode it open in xview. And wait for the jpeg to decode, line by line... All this on glorious HP PA-RISC workstations. The intervening years have been simplifying the access to information from NCSA mosaic to ChatGPT today. Amazing to watch it happen. But I will never forget the magic of uuencode.

richardw 4y ago

I think this is an area where you have to be careful of people-like-me bias. (Apologies :) Most people in the world didn’t have most of those things, but they now largely all have cellphones. Any child with access to the internet can access any piece of information on all of the items you mentioned. And now/soon any of those kids can speak with an electronic friend who can explain it to them in their own language. In short, a huge percentage of the world didn’t benefit and didn’t participate or compete or come up with ideas. I think it’s safe to say that generates more change, faster, for all of us.

tuatoru 4y ago
Cellphones are nice to have, certainly, but compared to safe piped water and electric light, they are a minor addition to quality of life. Ask anyone who has done without the latter two for extended periods of time.
- richardw 4y ago
  The point is that the cellphone is a multiplier with which every person can improve their lives. That was true before the internet (see fishermen in Africa using phones to communicate about the best current fishing spots) and even more so now. If you put me on a desert island with an internet-connected phone that I could recharge once a day, I'd have a far better chance of surviving [1] than if you gave me a flushing toilet or a power point in my house. Obviously there are comparisons that will fail this, but this is to underscore the spectacular catalytic influence that everyone (roughly) has in their pocket. Our child's carer has a mom living in Zimbabwe, who has no power and running water. She used her cellphone to contact her child when she was sick, to get money, get a lift to a bigger hospital. She made her own choice on what she would buy and in this extreme case it was the smart move. [1] Help I'm on a desert island, here is my location. How do I gather water. Is this plant edible. Is that animal dangerous. How can I build a shelter.
ska 4y ago
I think you are vastly underestimating the changes that some of those technologies i mention had on the lives of nearly everyone in the planet. For good and for ill. Probably because they were “normal” when you became aware. Sure, lots of people didn’t have electrified houses, or cars, but very few weren’t deeply affected their rise. That doesn’t even get to into the radical economic shifts from agricultural methods and globalism (built on such technologies), or the political shifts that radio and then television brought, most places. You are correct I should have been more careful in how I stated it, it to sounds like everyone suddenly got a personal automobile and am electrified home. Fair enough, hit the point stands.

vic-traill 4y ago

Don't forget Man on the Moon and the atom bomb. The 20th century was one helluva inventive time, for better and worse.

Spooky23 4y ago

My grandfather grew up in rural Ireland. He remembered seeing an electric lamp for the first time circa 1916. 50 years later, he was rebuilding jet engines. At 85 he “retired” away from NYC and moved in my with aunt and uncle. He kept up with friends with ICQ and was navigating snowmobiles with GPS around 88. I think what we’re seeing today is a quickening of process. I don’t think the tech is the change, it’s like the Industrial Revolution — the change was how it empowered society. Are we heading for lives of less tool? Or some Asimov style distopian earth?

kjellsbells 4y ago

I wonder how much of the 20th century progress would have happened without two and a half wars (two world wars and a cold one). Flight for example went from cool novelty to quite useful weapon to essential part of strategy in, what, 30 years? Maybe that would not have happened without ww1 and ww2.

FredPret 4y ago

And landing on the moon!