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I find it quite hard to understand the reasoning of people that downplay the affect the internet has had on our lives. I dont fall out of contact with the peop

I find it quite hard to understand the reasoning of people that downplay the affect the internet has had on our lives. I dont fall out of contact with the people I grew up with (at home or university / past jobs), I am flying out tomorrow to meet with good friends all of whom I would have never known if it wasnt for the internet, my career would not exist without the internet. The worlds knowledge is now categorised conveniently into a website which you can download and carry around wherever you go, that was science fiction 30 years ago. Almost the entire population of the world has access to enough knowledge and resources that they can become a leading expert in pretty much any field they want to. Sure we dont have our promised jetpacks and its easy to be dismissive because some people post inane stuff on twitter, but I find it really hard to believe the last 50 years is some form of lull in innovation, I cant imagine any other period of time being more exciting to live in.

benihana 15y ago
We have computers in our pockets that send a signal to space to locate us anywhere on the planet within a couple of feet, then tell us how to get where we want to go. We can communicate instantly, instantly with people on the other side of the planet. We have a network of satellites orbiting our planet giving us constant information about our world. Not many people predicted these things in popular culture/popular sci fi. These kinds of articles always seem like old people complaining that the future didn't turn out the way they expected. Instead of accepting that the biggest innovative breakthrough in the past 50 years was a global communication and information network, they complain that there hasn't been anything good happening.
- jasonwatkinspdx 15y ago
  The only problem with that criticism is that Neil Stephenson has known more about the internet earlier than nearly anyone commenting on this story. One of the central activities of 'team hero' in Cryptonomicon is laying undersea IP links. If you've read his books, it's obvious he has thought deeply about how the expansion of the internet affects everyone's lives. You are entirely missing what he is saying.
  - daleharvey 15y ago
    Instead of arguing by a proxy authority, why dont you explain what he 'really' meant, since it read fairly clearly to me
    - AJ007 15y ago
      The referenced article states: "'Everything got put on hold for a generation,' while civilization digested the Internet and figured out what it could be used for.'" So I still don't know the full context of the conversation, but that makes a lot more sense.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 15y ago
      Despite classic logics denial of authority, once you subordinate logic to observation (Bayes) then authority is actually a good positive indicator. Lack of authority however is a poor negative indicator. Long story short, authority only adds support indirectly, but that's useful more often than many would like to admit. I think you're simplifying this into a pro/con dilemma. Stephenson is obviously very pro internet. So what he's pointing out is really a lack of ambition in using the new computational and communication toolkit we've built. Digital economies are fundamentally different, despite the bubbles using this to hype absurdly bad traditional business plans, this basic characteristic remains. We have not even begun to explore the implications of that. We're too busy gratifying the desires born of an older world.
- Silhouette 15y ago
  Instead of accepting that the biggest innovative breakthrough in the past 50 years was a global communication and information network, they complain that there hasn't been anything good happening. And ironically, they do it via that very same network, without which their ideas would probably never be read by most of the people commenting in this discussion.
- rogerbinns 15y ago
  > ... that send a signal to space to locate us ... Pedants corner: No they don't. Satellites in space broadcast a signal and the phones pick up multiple signals using incredibly precise timers (speed of light matters) to work out the position.
  - richardburton 15y ago
    Pedant's corner ;)
    - rogerbinns 15y ago
      I guess technically it is now Pedants' corner ...
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
starpilot 15y ago
> Almost the entire population of the world has access to enough knowledge and resources that they can become a leading expert in pretty much any field they want to. It is estimated that less than half of the world uses the internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage. Having traveled the third world a bit, there are definitely huge swaths of civilization today that have not used the internet, and for whom even electricity is a luxury. Just because you have been greatly affected by the internet doesn't mean everyone has. Reading HN while working in a non-tech field (by HN standards) I constantly notice techies projecting their hyper-connected, Reddit/Facebook/Foursquare-filtered bubble onto others. Not everyone gives a damn about internet startups. Most people don't think "engineer" means "computer programmer." Seventy-five percent of the US uses landline telephones and I bet even more have never heard of Yelp. It's actually a low-tech world out there.
- daleharvey 15y ago
  I agree its very easy to project our own view on others, and I probably still do despite trying not to. But I am speaking from experience spending quite a bit of time in Morocco and various other relatively poorer countries, where when internet cafes are available, become quite the community hub
Dn_Ab 15y ago
I submitted this article not because I agreed with it but because I could not disagree with it. I am not satisfied with the internet as it is. I feel like what we have in the internet currently is amazing. It really does help level the world a bit, information is all important and anything that acts like a superconductor for it makes information hoarding and abuse of asymmetry very difficult. But there is something missing. It's not quite all there. It's like it is stuck in an amazingness uncanny valley. It could be so much more. And looking at multiple societies across history, where for some reason the tendency is for advancement to just stop - I don't want progress to get stuck where it is because people are too satisfied with how good things are. Because they can be much better. I just finished inhaling The Peace War and Marooned in Real time. It was written in 1984-86 but could have been written yesterday. The books explore not just what it would be like for one person to have the information of the world but also the productivity of a 20th century nation. We're at that critical stage between those two points now, and theres no reason to assume we will cross it. We could become too enamored with things that do not positively shift the gradient with respect to time. For example, the book also had Visors as I/O. A more advanced version of Google's Visors. Google's Visor demo showed it hooked up to Google+. I was not impressed. Maybe I am not the target audience. But consider, a grammar for audio recognition of a graphing calculator is not hard to write. Hook that up with something like Wolfram Alpha, something that can plot rotate, recognize gestures; that would have been impressive. Or basic searches in wikipedia. But I suppose not good advertising for google. Or imagine something that would be to the internet as Crysis 3 is to pong. Say, smart fashion. Tiny sensors embedded in clothes to measure things like temperature, ph levels, air pressure, wind speed, acceleration, etc. How much easier would physics be to teach if you could go outside and actually see magnetic fields. Throw a ball up and get told how many Newtons of force you used. The sensors could monitor health and connected to networks constant processing your biostats. Also free processing in the form of scattered monoliths (billed monthly with a basic allowance free). Every possible interaction involving information exchange (including money) between people or bureaucracies involve an API. Contracts in Haskell, Prolog or at least Python. Most regulation is done under noble intentions. But the human brain is just no good at using vast amounts of data and long chains of thought. With all the data from the APIs and computational contracts, the damage from unintended consequences would be minimized. Progress could increase in speed. These of course, are nothing concrete. But they are not so far fetched either. It is close, a perpetual 5 years away. So many amazing things are at the verge of occurring: 3D printing, ubiquitous computing, organ printing, synthetic biology, computer aided experiment design, questioning of p-values, more quantitative approaches to medicine and biology, cleaner nuclear fission, more efficient photovoltaics, organic circuits, asteroid mining. They are all on the verge, if we can push then the future really will be amazing. But only if we push. And possibly if we invent a Theory for Effective Preemptive and Efficient Interaction with Lumbering Disconnected Bureaucracies that works. Whenever I see the internet I see what it could be. And I am not satisfied. Maybe that is the correct opinion to hold.
gbog 15y ago
> I cant imagine any other period of time being more exciting to live in. You must be very much lacking imagination. Greek philosophers century, Chinese warring states, Italian Renaissance, French Lumieres, Worldwide exploration, all off them must have been much more exciting time. Discovering a new country with unknown people and animals, risking your own life and your team's every single day... Don't tell me it compares with inventing yet another way to procrastinate on the Web.
- daleharvey 15y ago
  Particularly coming from a relatively poor family, I wouldn't need to think twice. Those experiences would be great but statistically you would have died young with an uneventful life, likely never hearing about and definitely not seeing these amazing new places/things being discovered
  - gbog 15y ago
    I think during worldwide exploration or Napoleonic wars there was smaller social barriers.
- tg3 15y ago
  The Era of Warring States...covers the Iron Age period from about 475 BC to the reunification of China under the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC. [1] The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the period roughly from the 14th to the 17th century [2] The Age of Discovery...was a period in history starting in the early 15th century and continuing into the early 17th century [3] The examples you've provided are all compressed due to our lense being distant on a time scale. The information age, by comparison, is ~30 years old, and has led to the ability of half of the world to access knowledge that before now was hardly available to world leaders. The sheer scale of the population that the information age has impacted and will impact makes it much more exciting than the examples you cite. The fact that people of most social classes are taking part in the changes we're seeing makes it truly revolutionary. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warring_States_Period http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warring_States_Period [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Exploration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Exploration

benihana 15y ago

We have computers in our pockets that send a signal to space to locate us anywhere on the planet within a couple of feet, then tell us how to get where we want to go. We can communicate instantly, instantly with people on the other side of the planet. We have a network of satellites orbiting our planet giving us constant information about our world. Not many people predicted these things in popular culture/popular sci fi. These kinds of articles always seem like old people complaining that the future didn't turn out the way they expected. Instead of accepting that the biggest innovative breakthrough in the past 50 years was a global communication and information network, they complain that there hasn't been anything good happening.

jasonwatkinspdx 15y ago
The only problem with that criticism is that Neil Stephenson has known more about the internet earlier than nearly anyone commenting on this story. One of the central activities of 'team hero' in Cryptonomicon is laying undersea IP links. If you've read his books, it's obvious he has thought deeply about how the expansion of the internet affects everyone's lives. You are entirely missing what he is saying.
- daleharvey 15y ago
  Instead of arguing by a proxy authority, why dont you explain what he 'really' meant, since it read fairly clearly to me
  - AJ007 15y ago
    The referenced article states: "'Everything got put on hold for a generation,' while civilization digested the Internet and figured out what it could be used for.'" So I still don't know the full context of the conversation, but that makes a lot more sense.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 15y ago
    Despite classic logics denial of authority, once you subordinate logic to observation (Bayes) then authority is actually a good positive indicator. Lack of authority however is a poor negative indicator. Long story short, authority only adds support indirectly, but that's useful more often than many would like to admit. I think you're simplifying this into a pro/con dilemma. Stephenson is obviously very pro internet. So what he's pointing out is really a lack of ambition in using the new computational and communication toolkit we've built. Digital economies are fundamentally different, despite the bubbles using this to hype absurdly bad traditional business plans, this basic characteristic remains. We have not even begun to explore the implications of that. We're too busy gratifying the desires born of an older world.
Silhouette 15y ago
Instead of accepting that the biggest innovative breakthrough in the past 50 years was a global communication and information network, they complain that there hasn't been anything good happening. And ironically, they do it via that very same network, without which their ideas would probably never be read by most of the people commenting in this discussion.
rogerbinns 15y ago
> ... that send a signal to space to locate us ... Pedants corner: No they don't. Satellites in space broadcast a signal and the phones pick up multiple signals using incredibly precise timers (speed of light matters) to work out the position.
- richardburton 15y ago
  Pedant's corner ;)
  - rogerbinns 15y ago
    I guess technically it is now Pedants' corner ...

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

starpilot 15y ago

> Almost the entire population of the world has access to enough knowledge and resources that they can become a leading expert in pretty much any field they want to. It is estimated that less than half of the world uses the internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage. Having traveled the third world a bit, there are definitely huge swaths of civilization today that have not used the internet, and for whom even electricity is a luxury. Just because you have been greatly affected by the internet doesn't mean everyone has. Reading HN while working in a non-tech field (by HN standards) I constantly notice techies projecting their hyper-connected, Reddit/Facebook/Foursquare-filtered bubble onto others. Not everyone gives a damn about internet startups. Most people don't think "engineer" means "computer programmer." Seventy-five percent of the US uses landline telephones and I bet even more have never heard of Yelp. It's actually a low-tech world out there.

daleharvey 15y ago
I agree its very easy to project our own view on others, and I probably still do despite trying not to. But I am speaking from experience spending quite a bit of time in Morocco and various other relatively poorer countries, where when internet cafes are available, become quite the community hub

Dn_Ab 15y ago

I submitted this article not because I agreed with it but because I could not disagree with it. I am not satisfied with the internet as it is. I feel like what we have in the internet currently is amazing. It really does help level the world a bit, information is all important and anything that acts like a superconductor for it makes information hoarding and abuse of asymmetry very difficult. But there is something missing. It's not quite all there. It's like it is stuck in an amazingness uncanny valley. It could be so much more. And looking at multiple societies across history, where for some reason the tendency is for advancement to just stop - I don't want progress to get stuck where it is because people are too satisfied with how good things are. Because they can be much better. I just finished inhaling The Peace War and Marooned in Real time. It was written in 1984-86 but could have been written yesterday. The books explore not just what it would be like for one person to have the information of the world but also the productivity of a 20th century nation. We're at that critical stage between those two points now, and theres no reason to assume we will cross it. We could become too enamored with things that do not positively shift the gradient with respect to time. For example, the book also had Visors as I/O. A more advanced version of Google's Visors. Google's Visor demo showed it hooked up to Google+. I was not impressed. Maybe I am not the target audience. But consider, a grammar for audio recognition of a graphing calculator is not hard to write. Hook that up with something like Wolfram Alpha, something that can plot rotate, recognize gestures; that would have been impressive. Or basic searches in wikipedia. But I suppose not good advertising for google. Or imagine something that would be to the internet as Crysis 3 is to pong. Say, smart fashion. Tiny sensors embedded in clothes to measure things like temperature, ph levels, air pressure, wind speed, acceleration, etc. How much easier would physics be to teach if you could go outside and actually see magnetic fields. Throw a ball up and get told how many Newtons of force you used. The sensors could monitor health and connected to networks constant processing your biostats. Also free processing in the form of scattered monoliths (billed monthly with a basic allowance free). Every possible interaction involving information exchange (including money) between people or bureaucracies involve an API. Contracts in Haskell, Prolog or at least Python. Most regulation is done under noble intentions. But the human brain is just no good at using vast amounts of data and long chains of thought. With all the data from the APIs and computational contracts, the damage from unintended consequences would be minimized. Progress could increase in speed. These of course, are nothing concrete. But they are not so far fetched either. It is close, a perpetual 5 years away. So many amazing things are at the verge of occurring: 3D printing, ubiquitous computing, organ printing, synthetic biology, computer aided experiment design, questioning of p-values, more quantitative approaches to medicine and biology, cleaner nuclear fission, more efficient photovoltaics, organic circuits, asteroid mining. They are all on the verge, if we can push then the future really will be amazing. But only if we push. And possibly if we invent a Theory for Effective Preemptive and Efficient Interaction with Lumbering Disconnected Bureaucracies that works. Whenever I see the internet I see what it could be. And I am not satisfied. Maybe that is the correct opinion to hold.

gbog 15y ago

> I cant imagine any other period of time being more exciting to live in. You must be very much lacking imagination. Greek philosophers century, Chinese warring states, Italian Renaissance, French Lumieres, Worldwide exploration, all off them must have been much more exciting time. Discovering a new country with unknown people and animals, risking your own life and your team's every single day... Don't tell me it compares with inventing yet another way to procrastinate on the Web.

daleharvey 15y ago
Particularly coming from a relatively poor family, I wouldn't need to think twice. Those experiences would be great but statistically you would have died young with an uneventful life, likely never hearing about and definitely not seeing these amazing new places/things being discovered
- gbog 15y ago
  I think during worldwide exploration or Napoleonic wars there was smaller social barriers.
tg3 15y ago
The Era of Warring States...covers the Iron Age period from about 475 BC to the reunification of China under the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC. [1] The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the period roughly from the 14th to the 17th century [2] The Age of Discovery...was a period in history starting in the early 15th century and continuing into the early 17th century [3] The examples you've provided are all compressed due to our lense being distant on a time scale. The information age, by comparison, is ~30 years old, and has led to the ability of half of the world to access knowledge that before now was hardly available to world leaders. The sheer scale of the population that the information age has impacted and will impact makes it much more exciting than the examples you cite. The fact that people of most social classes are taking part in the changes we're seeing makes it truly revolutionary. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warring_States_Period http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warring_States_Period [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Exploration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Exploration