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> It’s hard to make a simple chart of how fast science and technology are advancing, the same way we can make a chart for economic growth. But I think that if w

> It’s hard to make a simple chart of how fast science and technology are advancing, the same way we can make a chart for economic growth. But I think that if we could, it would present a broadly similar picture as the economic growth chart. This is a common feeling but I think it is wrong. Consider the following intuition pump (due to astrophysicist Tom Murphy, one of whose blog posts is cited in the article). Take someone from 1880 and plop them down in 1950. Take someone from 1950 and wizard them into the modern day. Who has a harder time understanding the world? The one from the 50s may think our little black rectangles look a bit silly, but would suspect immediately that they are telephones and operate by radio. On the other hand, you'd have to teach the 19th century-dweller nearly all modern physics from the ground up. Of course our understanding of some fields (e.g. biology, artificial intelligence) has grown by leaps and bounds since 1950, but it is hard to argue these advances have changed the face of the earth or our civilizational prospects in the same way.

ben_w 3y ago
I think the 1880s person might have an easier time with smartphones. Tell them we figured out how to bind souls from beyond the veil into magic mirrors, and they'll immediately understand how it can show arbitrary images, video, sound, simulation. Show a smartphone to someone from 1950 who just saw the atom bomb a few years earlier and might have read Foundation — where Hari Seldon is introduced as being so mathematically inclined he not only has a calculator, but has used it so much the numbers have worn off the buttons — and they won't understand how a device the size of a single vacuum tube can create novel art in the style of the great masters (or whatever Spock's line was in the episode where they met an immortal who had actually been many of the great artists in Earth's history; gen-AI is certainly already causing upheaval, we have yet to find out if this will end up with something analogous to the way the industrial revolution lead directly to the invention of Communism), and best everyone at chess, and speak 40 languages (contrary to what you say, I believe this alone has changed the world significantly), and take photographs (let alone video), and have a built-in library of tens of thousands of books (true story: I got my dad a 1 gig USB stick at his request, when I gave it to him my gran asked how many books it could store, I said "about 600 the size of the Bible" and she was incredulous). Society may have learned a lot in that time, but it's been a very long time since any one of us saw the whole thing. - And if you do the same with medicine rather than hand radio, you get most DNA research from double helix on, successful organ transplants, the end of smallpox, MRI, IVF, oral contraceptives, and some vat-grown organs. What we do to mice would make us seem like either gods or demons, and I'm not sure which. GM food is pretty significant, too.

ben_w 3y ago

I think the 1880s person might have an easier time with smartphones. Tell them we figured out how to bind souls from beyond the veil into magic mirrors, and they'll immediately understand how it can show arbitrary images, video, sound, simulation. Show a smartphone to someone from 1950 who just saw the atom bomb a few years earlier and might have read Foundation — where Hari Seldon is introduced as being so mathematically inclined he not only has a calculator, but has used it so much the numbers have worn off the buttons — and they won't understand how a device the size of a single vacuum tube can create novel art in the style of the great masters (or whatever Spock's line was in the episode where they met an immortal who had actually been many of the great artists in Earth's history; gen-AI is certainly already causing upheaval, we have yet to find out if this will end up with something analogous to the way the industrial revolution lead directly to the invention of Communism), and best everyone at chess, and speak 40 languages (contrary to what you say, I believe this alone has changed the world significantly), and take photographs (let alone video), and have a built-in library of tens of thousands of books (true story: I got my dad a 1 gig USB stick at his request, when I gave it to him my gran asked how many books it could store, I said "about 600 the size of the Bible" and she was incredulous). Society may have learned a lot in that time, but it's been a very long time since any one of us saw the whole thing. - And if you do the same with medicine rather than hand radio, you get most DNA research from double helix on, successful organ transplants, the end of smallpox, MRI, IVF, oral contraceptives, and some vat-grown organs. What we do to mice would make us seem like either gods or demons, and I'm not sure which. GM food is pretty significant, too.