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Without medicine, I'd probably have died of a severe throat infection while hospitalized as a pre-internet teenager. Without the internet, I'd have vastly redu

Without medicine, I'd probably have died of a severe throat infection while hospitalized as a pre-internet teenager. Without the internet, I'd have vastly reduced choice in entertainment. I'll take the medicine. By many orders of magnitude. Now if we focus on "sufficiently long time scales" perhaps the internet is going to be the human invention that enables us to get where we need to be. But that's a guess. Perhaps I'm dim but I don't see how the internet is obviously more important than penicillin by orders of magnitude.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rlpb 3y ago
It's great that medicine managed to develop despite the Internet not being available at the time. But the next generation of medicine will only exist because of the Internet, and it will be orders of magnitude more advanced. In the long term, people will look back and say that although medicine did develop first, it only really got serious traction when the Internet and related technologies appeared. > Without the internet, I'd have vastly reduced choice in entertainment. This is facetious. Do you really believe that current medical care does not benefit from the Internet at all; that it's only used for entertainment?
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Anesthesia, antibiotics, or vaccinations - to take some examples - are all not "serious traction" as far as medicine is concerned? What part of medicine will be get serious traction from the internet?
  - toyg 3y ago
    One could argue that the development of any technology, including medicine, is augmented by the internet allowing people to instantaneously pool knowledge and skills across the entire world. There are obvious benefits to that - the rates of technological development seen since the invention of telephone and fast transportation are sky-high, compared to pretty much the rest of known human history, so it stands to reason that the internet will do the same but even better. Would have we seen a COVID vaccine (or rather, multiple vaccines) in a matter of mere months, without the internet? Probably not - it took decades to get a vaccine for influenza. Looking back, I don't think we'll look at it like "the internet allowed us to create technology X and Y", but rather "the internet turned our tech development rates, across the board, into hockey sticks steeper than we'd ever seen before".
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      So far we don't see that hockey stick from the internet in medicine or even most technologies. I doubt that the Covid vaccine was developed so quickly because of the internet. The internet might have shaved a little bit time off, but it wasn't instrumental in the vaccine developement as far as I understand it. The development was a huge effort between governments, corporations, and science sitting atop decades of research. Did it make certain communications easier - for sure, but I struggle to see that as anywhere as big as changed processes in testing and roll-out.
      - DistractionRect 3y ago
        Decades of research that was catalogued, indexed, and shared via the internet. We're talking about drastically cutting down on time people the world over would be collectively spending rediscovering the same things. Because of peer review, we can cut down on time wasted pursing things that are flawed. HN just recently followed the peer review process of LK-99 in basically real-time across the world. The results might seem trivial in hindsight, but it took leading experts the world over a bit of time to pin down and explain what was really being obversed. It probably saved the original authors years of work trying to refine and chase LK-99. History has shown the time and again, every advancement in communication has been a boon to human progress. Printing press, telegraph, transalantic//transcontinental telegraph cables, telephone, internet... There's plenty of papers posted here, and a lot of the break through papers are usually made on the shoulders of giants - connecting break throughs in seemingly disconnected disciplines/sub disciplines. HN sees this most frequently in maths papers, and the story is made easily digest able in breakdowns from quanta magazine. The internet has drastically accelerated the rate of human progress, and now we're on the cusp of removing the language barrier with automatic machine transmission.
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        I don't doubt the usefulness of the internet but where is the evidence of the "drastically accelerated rate of human progress"? Or rather what data is that translating into? Productivity growth it isn't. Life expectancy it isn't. Real wages it isn't necessarily. GDP growth it isn't really, either.
uticus 3y ago
I mean, great point, but the internet is more than entertainment, in the way that electricity and light is more than movies. Many people may use a significant portion of their electricity and lights on watching... whatever. But the statistical majority of use cases does not define the medium. Maybe a less controversial way to say it is "global communication is more important than medicine," but I still like the way patio11 said it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rlpb 3y ago

It's great that medicine managed to develop despite the Internet not being available at the time. But the next generation of medicine will only exist because of the Internet, and it will be orders of magnitude more advanced. In the long term, people will look back and say that although medicine did develop first, it only really got serious traction when the Internet and related technologies appeared. > Without the internet, I'd have vastly reduced choice in entertainment. This is facetious. Do you really believe that current medical care does not benefit from the Internet at all; that it's only used for entertainment?

RandomLensman 3y ago
Anesthesia, antibiotics, or vaccinations - to take some examples - are all not "serious traction" as far as medicine is concerned? What part of medicine will be get serious traction from the internet?
- toyg 3y ago
  One could argue that the development of any technology, including medicine, is augmented by the internet allowing people to instantaneously pool knowledge and skills across the entire world. There are obvious benefits to that - the rates of technological development seen since the invention of telephone and fast transportation are sky-high, compared to pretty much the rest of known human history, so it stands to reason that the internet will do the same but even better. Would have we seen a COVID vaccine (or rather, multiple vaccines) in a matter of mere months, without the internet? Probably not - it took decades to get a vaccine for influenza. Looking back, I don't think we'll look at it like "the internet allowed us to create technology X and Y", but rather "the internet turned our tech development rates, across the board, into hockey sticks steeper than we'd ever seen before".
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    So far we don't see that hockey stick from the internet in medicine or even most technologies. I doubt that the Covid vaccine was developed so quickly because of the internet. The internet might have shaved a little bit time off, but it wasn't instrumental in the vaccine developement as far as I understand it. The development was a huge effort between governments, corporations, and science sitting atop decades of research. Did it make certain communications easier - for sure, but I struggle to see that as anywhere as big as changed processes in testing and roll-out.
    - DistractionRect 3y ago
      Decades of research that was catalogued, indexed, and shared via the internet. We're talking about drastically cutting down on time people the world over would be collectively spending rediscovering the same things. Because of peer review, we can cut down on time wasted pursing things that are flawed. HN just recently followed the peer review process of LK-99 in basically real-time across the world. The results might seem trivial in hindsight, but it took leading experts the world over a bit of time to pin down and explain what was really being obversed. It probably saved the original authors years of work trying to refine and chase LK-99. History has shown the time and again, every advancement in communication has been a boon to human progress. Printing press, telegraph, transalantic//transcontinental telegraph cables, telephone, internet... There's plenty of papers posted here, and a lot of the break through papers are usually made on the shoulders of giants - connecting break throughs in seemingly disconnected disciplines/sub disciplines. HN sees this most frequently in maths papers, and the story is made easily digest able in breakdowns from quanta magazine. The internet has drastically accelerated the rate of human progress, and now we're on the cusp of removing the language barrier with automatic machine transmission.
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        I don't doubt the usefulness of the internet but where is the evidence of the "drastically accelerated rate of human progress"? Or rather what data is that translating into? Productivity growth it isn't. Life expectancy it isn't. Real wages it isn't necessarily. GDP growth it isn't really, either.

uticus 3y ago

I mean, great point, but the internet is more than entertainment, in the way that electricity and light is more than movies. Many people may use a significant portion of their electricity and lights on watching... whatever. But the statistical majority of use cases does not define the medium. Maybe a less controversial way to say it is "global communication is more important than medicine," but I still like the way patio11 said it.