6 ms·

Has technology really made your life significantly better? How many of us still get in cars and commute to work, sit in an office, as we are monitored by our b

Has technology really made your life significantly better? How many of us still get in cars and commute to work, sit in an office, as we are monitored by our boss, drive home through some awful commute. Then eat some processed food because we didn't have time to go to the grocery store and get some fresh food. I'm sure there are plenty on this site who telecommute and bike, but that's not the norm. A lot of what is If talked about on this site is really not a big deal: some new library to make some flashy display; or some new iphone/app thingy; or some new way to get eyeballs to look at a web page.

pjscott 14y ago
If you want to talk non-flashy technology, I use some: * Electricity keeps me warm in winter, and lets me see things in the dark without flame or moonlight. * Artificial fertilizers produced with the Haber-Bosch process are currently necessary for food cost to be a minor concern, rather than one of the great overriding imperatives of my life. * I got the knowledge-equivalent of a CS degree in high school, thanks to having a lot of spare time and an internet connection. * Books, once outlandishly expensive, were dirt cheap to print by the time I was a child. Reading a lot of them was one of the major influences on my life. I could name some more -- fast global travel, ubiquitous access to clean water, higher effective wealth because of cheap worldwide shipping, eyeglasses so I can see clearly -- but hopefully I've made my point.
michaelochurch 14y ago
How many of us still get in cars and commute to work, sit in an office, as we are monitored by our boss, drive home through some awful commute. Then eat some processed food because we didn't have time to go to the grocery store and get some fresh food. I'm sure there are plenty on this site who telecommute and bike, but that's not the norm. I hate to tell you this, but if you're in a developed country like the US, then take your socioeconomic percentile and call it X. You have a better life in 2012 than the Xth-percentile person of 1950, 1900, 1800, 1600, and on back. There's a strong tendency to compare the average person's life (which, compared to the expectations of a high-IQ person with access to technology and therefore superior alternatives, is admittedly quite shitty) now to the life of an aristocrat in the past, and therefore conclude that things were better, but that's wildly inaccurate. The malaise comes from a couple factors. First, most peoples' lives are still shitty, and what's becoming more clear is that this is unnecessarily so, thus showcasing the rottenness of human nature. It's no longer the fault of "scarcity". People just fucking suck-- they're greedy, petty, and would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. The useless and counterproductive power structures remain because there are assholes who really like holding power and don't care if they're playing a negative-sum game. We probably have one more violent class revolution (possibly worldwide) in our human story before we make it to the post-scarcity (ca. 2100?) world. Second, technological and economic growth have slowed down (not stopped, but slowed) over the past 30 years due to a lack of investment in basic research. Rather than accelerating toward a singularity, we've gone from 6% growth per year to about 4%. This is a slow patch, no doubt, but at least it's not decline.
- philwelch 14y ago
  I'd say an Xth percentile person in 2012 has a better life than an X+30th percentile person in 1950 at the very least. Most people haven't fully explored all the consequences of everything that's changed in the last 62 years, but they would be outraged to go back.
  - pjscott 14y ago
    What would it mean for a 79th percentile person in 2012 to have a better life than a 109th percentile person in 1950? Percentiles don't actually go that high.
    - philwelch 14y ago
      Yes, of course it tops out. Apologies for the lack of rigor.
    - xiaoma 14y ago
      Yes. Something proportional like 100-(100-x)/2 would make a more reasonable estimate. I don't think that's the point, though.
thenomad 14y ago
"Has technology really made your life significantly better?" I'm a professional filmmaker. It's what I've always wanted to do. I've also always wanted to make epic fantasy/sci-fi films. Currently, thanks to 3D animation, Machinima, motion capture, and a bunch of other things, I get to make movies in my bedroom that would have been flat-out impossible 25 years ago, and would have cost in excess of $10,000,000 15 years ago. So, yeah. Tech has made my life better.
dmpk2k 14y ago
I'd say vaccines and antibiotics have made my life vastly better. Let's compare: WW2 was the worst war we've ever had; it killed about 60 million people, or about 2% of the world population. The Spanish Flu in 1918 killed 3%. Smallpox killed 3-500 million people in the 20th century, or about 5-8x as many as WW2. Or how about the Black Death a few centuries before? Half the European population gone. It wiped out entire Asian cities too. Vaccines and antibiotics are miracles we take for granted; our ancestors would think us mad.
- TeMPOraL 14y ago
  > Vaccines and antibiotics are miracles we take for granted; our ancestors would think us mad. And we damn need to speed up the development, as antibiotics are starting to fail due to their overuse. We take the life without major pandemics for granted, but we will get a cold wake-up soon if we don't fight to maintain this.
  - JoeAltmaier 14y ago
    Wait; have you been reading the news? Several epidemics have swept the globe in recent years already. Did somebody wake up, and I missed it?
    - TeMPOraL 14y ago
      I meant serious pandemics like the ones dmpk2k mentioned. Most of the first worlders didn't fear any serious contagion for decades.
russell 14y ago
It sure has. I was born during WWII and grew up in the 50's and 60's in rural Maine. We did not have indoor plumbing or central heating. Our TV was black and white. Our phone was 8 party non-dial and I think transcontinental phone calls were something like $2 per minute. The first car I drove got 8 miles to the gallon. Our life was a little better than that of my great-grandparents. I am in good health in spite of diabetes and 3 minor heart attacks, because of advances in medical technology. I use insulin that was made available the year after my grandfather died from diabetes. I monitor my blood sugar with an instrument that wasn available a couple of decades ago. I have a pacemaker that wasnt available 50 years ago. I'm alive which is significantly beater than dead.
Vivtek 14y ago
Are you serious? Technology makes my life incomparably better. Let's just set a baseline that both of my children, 13 and 18, are alive due to medicine that didn't even exist a hundred years ago. But that's boring. I'm a translation freelancer whose customers are located in various places around the world; I get my work by email every day, process it using a translation memory that permits me to look up previous translations instantaneously and with the Internet available for instantaneous glossary searches (I no longer even own a paper dictionary - it takes too long to consult it), then send the work back, invoice by email, and receive money into my bank account in Indiana which I access from ATMs here in Budapest. I do all that right from my home, so I can work four hours a day and walk the dog whenever the weather is good, help my kids with their homework when they need it, and in general enjoy my time. Although I live in Budapest this year (and Puerto Rico for five years, Indiana for three), I talked to my father in Indiana face to face yesterday - I had to cut it off because we were going shopping, but that's fine because I can talk to him any time I want. The week before that I was able to talk to my mom, who just had a hip replacement; fifty years ago she'd simply be an invalid due to inflammatory disease, but with metal joints she's still active and able to walk. All that against the backdrop of the fact that I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a farm in Indiana. My life then was already incredibly blessed by technology - my grandparents lived twenty miles away, but we still saw them on a weekly basis, which wouldn't have been possible fifty years before that. I was able to go to school because agricultural productivity permitted me that free time. So yes. Technology has made my life better. It boggles the mind to imagine that people can believe it doesn't.
- JoeAltmaier 14y ago
  All good examples. But somebody made the observation that the most significant technology innovation to ever hit agriculture was the rubber boot. It let academics visit/study farms without getting dirty, starting the whole discipline on a road to modernization.
  - Vivtek 14y ago
    Your use of "but" is confusing me.

pjscott 14y ago

If you want to talk non-flashy technology, I use some: * Electricity keeps me warm in winter, and lets me see things in the dark without flame or moonlight. * Artificial fertilizers produced with the Haber-Bosch process are currently necessary for food cost to be a minor concern, rather than one of the great overriding imperatives of my life. * I got the knowledge-equivalent of a CS degree in high school, thanks to having a lot of spare time and an internet connection. * Books, once outlandishly expensive, were dirt cheap to print by the time I was a child. Reading a lot of them was one of the major influences on my life. I could name some more -- fast global travel, ubiquitous access to clean water, higher effective wealth because of cheap worldwide shipping, eyeglasses so I can see clearly -- but hopefully I've made my point.

michaelochurch 14y ago

How many of us still get in cars and commute to work, sit in an office, as we are monitored by our boss, drive home through some awful commute. Then eat some processed food because we didn't have time to go to the grocery store and get some fresh food. I'm sure there are plenty on this site who telecommute and bike, but that's not the norm. I hate to tell you this, but if you're in a developed country like the US, then take your socioeconomic percentile and call it X. You have a better life in 2012 than the Xth-percentile person of 1950, 1900, 1800, 1600, and on back. There's a strong tendency to compare the average person's life (which, compared to the expectations of a high-IQ person with access to technology and therefore superior alternatives, is admittedly quite shitty) now to the life of an aristocrat in the past, and therefore conclude that things were better, but that's wildly inaccurate. The malaise comes from a couple factors. First, most peoples' lives are still shitty, and what's becoming more clear is that this is unnecessarily so, thus showcasing the rottenness of human nature. It's no longer the fault of "scarcity". People just fucking suck-- they're greedy, petty, and would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. The useless and counterproductive power structures remain because there are assholes who really like holding power and don't care if they're playing a negative-sum game. We probably have one more violent class revolution (possibly worldwide) in our human story before we make it to the post-scarcity (ca. 2100?) world. Second, technological and economic growth have slowed down (not stopped, but slowed) over the past 30 years due to a lack of investment in basic research. Rather than accelerating toward a singularity, we've gone from 6% growth per year to about 4%. This is a slow patch, no doubt, but at least it's not decline.

philwelch 14y ago
I'd say an Xth percentile person in 2012 has a better life than an X+30th percentile person in 1950 at the very least. Most people haven't fully explored all the consequences of everything that's changed in the last 62 years, but they would be outraged to go back.
- pjscott 14y ago
  What would it mean for a 79th percentile person in 2012 to have a better life than a 109th percentile person in 1950? Percentiles don't actually go that high.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    Yes, of course it tops out. Apologies for the lack of rigor.
  - xiaoma 14y ago
    Yes. Something proportional like 100-(100-x)/2 would make a more reasonable estimate. I don't think that's the point, though.

thenomad 14y ago

"Has technology really made your life significantly better?" I'm a professional filmmaker. It's what I've always wanted to do. I've also always wanted to make epic fantasy/sci-fi films. Currently, thanks to 3D animation, Machinima, motion capture, and a bunch of other things, I get to make movies in my bedroom that would have been flat-out impossible 25 years ago, and would have cost in excess of $10,000,000 15 years ago. So, yeah. Tech has made my life better.

dmpk2k 14y ago

I'd say vaccines and antibiotics have made my life vastly better. Let's compare: WW2 was the worst war we've ever had; it killed about 60 million people, or about 2% of the world population. The Spanish Flu in 1918 killed 3%. Smallpox killed 3-500 million people in the 20th century, or about 5-8x as many as WW2. Or how about the Black Death a few centuries before? Half the European population gone. It wiped out entire Asian cities too. Vaccines and antibiotics are miracles we take for granted; our ancestors would think us mad.

TeMPOraL 14y ago
> Vaccines and antibiotics are miracles we take for granted; our ancestors would think us mad. And we damn need to speed up the development, as antibiotics are starting to fail due to their overuse. We take the life without major pandemics for granted, but we will get a cold wake-up soon if we don't fight to maintain this.
- JoeAltmaier 14y ago
  Wait; have you been reading the news? Several epidemics have swept the globe in recent years already. Did somebody wake up, and I missed it?
  - TeMPOraL 14y ago
    I meant serious pandemics like the ones dmpk2k mentioned. Most of the first worlders didn't fear any serious contagion for decades.

russell 14y ago

It sure has. I was born during WWII and grew up in the 50's and 60's in rural Maine. We did not have indoor plumbing or central heating. Our TV was black and white. Our phone was 8 party non-dial and I think transcontinental phone calls were something like $2 per minute. The first car I drove got 8 miles to the gallon. Our life was a little better than that of my great-grandparents. I am in good health in spite of diabetes and 3 minor heart attacks, because of advances in medical technology. I use insulin that was made available the year after my grandfather died from diabetes. I monitor my blood sugar with an instrument that wasn available a couple of decades ago. I have a pacemaker that wasnt available 50 years ago. I'm alive which is significantly beater than dead.

Vivtek 14y ago

Are you serious? Technology makes my life incomparably better. Let's just set a baseline that both of my children, 13 and 18, are alive due to medicine that didn't even exist a hundred years ago. But that's boring. I'm a translation freelancer whose customers are located in various places around the world; I get my work by email every day, process it using a translation memory that permits me to look up previous translations instantaneously and with the Internet available for instantaneous glossary searches (I no longer even own a paper dictionary - it takes too long to consult it), then send the work back, invoice by email, and receive money into my bank account in Indiana which I access from ATMs here in Budapest. I do all that right from my home, so I can work four hours a day and walk the dog whenever the weather is good, help my kids with their homework when they need it, and in general enjoy my time. Although I live in Budapest this year (and Puerto Rico for five years, Indiana for three), I talked to my father in Indiana face to face yesterday - I had to cut it off because we were going shopping, but that's fine because I can talk to him any time I want. The week before that I was able to talk to my mom, who just had a hip replacement; fifty years ago she'd simply be an invalid due to inflammatory disease, but with metal joints she's still active and able to walk. All that against the backdrop of the fact that I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a farm in Indiana. My life then was already incredibly blessed by technology - my grandparents lived twenty miles away, but we still saw them on a weekly basis, which wouldn't have been possible fifty years before that. I was able to go to school because agricultural productivity permitted me that free time. So yes. Technology has made my life better. It boggles the mind to imagine that people can believe it doesn't.

JoeAltmaier 14y ago
All good examples. But somebody made the observation that the most significant technology innovation to ever hit agriculture was the rubber boot. It let academics visit/study farms without getting dirty, starting the whole discipline on a road to modernization.
- Vivtek 14y ago
  Your use of "but" is confusing me.