Posted on 08/12/2010 3:05:50 PM PDT by B-Chan
Many of you will still be alive in 50 years. It’s interesting to think about what life will be like in 50 years technologically and otherwise. Predictions are risky, especially when they’re about the future, but I believe we can make some pretty good guesses. To predict a predictable future, you need to look at the past. What was technological life like 50 years ago? 50 years ago was 1959. The world of 1959 is pretty much the same world we live in today technologically speaking. This is a vaguely horrifying fact which is little appreciated. In 1959, we had computers, international telephony, advanced programming languages like Lisp, which remains the most advanced programming language, routine commercial jet flight, atomic power, internal combustion engines about the same as modern ones, supersonic fighter planes, television and the transistor.
I’d go so far as to say that the main technological innovation since 1959 has been space flight—a technology we’ve mostly abandoned, and it’s daughter technology—microelectronics. Computer networks came a year or two after 1959 and didn’t change very much, other than how we waste time in the office, and whom advertisers pay.
Other than that, man’s power over nature remains much the same. Most of the “advances” we have had since then are refinements and democratization of technologies. Nowadays, even the little people have access to computers and jet flight, and 1800s-style technology like telegraphy can be used to download pornography into their homes. Certainly more people are involved in “technological” jobs, and certainly computers have increased our abilities to process information, but ultimately very little has changed.
Now, if we’re sitting in unfashionable 1959 and doing this same comparison, things are a good deal different.
The rate of change between 1959 and 1909 is nothing short of spectacular. In that 50 years, humanity invented jet aircraft, supersonic flight, fuel-injected internal-combustion engines, the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, space flight, gas warfare, nuclear power, the tank, antibiotics, the polio vaccine, radio; and these are just a few items off the top of my head. You might try to assert that this was a particularly good era for technological progress, but the era between 1859 and 1909 was a similar explosion in creativity and progress, as was the 50 years before that, at the dawn of the Industrial revolution. You can read all about it in Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, though I warn you, if you’re in a creative or technical profession Murray’s widely ignored book is even more depressing than this essay. Murray didn’t restrict his attentions to technological progress: across the entire panoply of human endeavor (art, science, literature, philosophy, Mathematics) the indications are grim. You may disagree with the statistical technique he used (I don’t), but you can’t escape the conclusion—things are slowing down.
Certainly, people can be forgiven for thinking we live in a time of great progress, since semiconductor lithography has improved over the years, giving us faster and more portable computers. But can we really do anything with computers now that we couldn’t have done 30 or even 50 years ago? I don’t think life is much different because of ubiquitous computers. Possibly more efficient and convenient, but not radically different, much like things got after the invention of computers in the ‘40s. Now we just waste time in the office in different ways.
Remember the kind of “artificial intelligence” which was supposed to give us artificial brains we could talk to by now? The only parts of which work look suspiciously like signal processing ideas from, well, the 1950s. The rest of it appears to have degenerated into a sort of secular religion for nerds.
Looking forward, I can’t think of a single technology in the works today which will revolutionize life in the 21st century...
I agree with your assessment. His computer examples are the same as saying there is no advance involved in a fire hardened stick vs a machine gun bullet, both being weapons. The article is remarkably stupid.
I'll be 115.
I actually followed the link, he’s got a hilarious couple of paragraphs about how the SR-71 is faster than the F-22 therefore planes haven’t advanced. He completely ignores how the SR-71 as a spy plane was designed specifically to be too fast to shoot down and has no weapons taking up space and weight, and the F-22 being a fighter plane is designed to... well shoot stuff down and so has weapons and other things that would slow it down.
And he even dismisses medical advances, carefully ignoring MRIs and a bunch of other stuff.
Maybe it’s supposed to be a comedy piece.
Silly. Genetic engineering could have enormous consequences. It's not a gadget you can hold in your hand or ride downtown, but it's going to be a big change for some people.
Similarly, if we get transportation that doesn't depend on petroleum, it won't be as dramatic as seeing that first car or airplane coming at you, but it would mean a major change in the way the world works.
And if the "people" of 2100 aren't really human beings, but some new synthesis of man and machine, that would also be a major change.
BTW, John Lukacs used to play this game, but he'd go back even further. If you saw the coming of the railroad, the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane, he'd say, you saw the world change more than anyone who came along afterward would.
That's true. The shift from an agricultural to an industrial world was greater than anything we've seen since.
It doesn't mean that technological progress has stopped, though.
Nanotech and memsistors are two biggies that might make a huge leap. The LHC could also find some stuff for anti-gravity by 50 years as well. Hard to say at this point.
It kinda depends on what you want as well. Probably no moon bases thanks to hussein. Possibly a space elevator if nanotech works out though.
Secret, it's big oil that has determined MPG for the past 50 years as well.
It's a factor of fractions, so much kerosene/jetfuel/fuel oil v. the lighter stuff , gasoline , etc..
It all has to go somewhere, you can't compress a liquid, so the math has to be worked out in advance.
More likely it is a cranky old man than a comic.
Add that to "affirmative action," and the prohibition against legitimate criticism of a large part of our population, and you get lowered standards for nearly every human endeavor.
I heard many people complain about affirmative acction because they thought it was unfair. I always knew that a more insidious side effect would be a gradual erosion of meritocracy as the dominant ethos of our culture.
I'll be 81. Wanna hook up?
Technology is all, or almost all, about making more out of less, as the planet becomes increasingly overpopulated.
I’d go crazy without my Tivo, lol.. I don’t know how I made it without DVR’s until 1999.
When we sold the house in 1961, crime in the neighborhood was rampant, so we had to get keys made. Our next door neighbors, who were a very nice young black couple, had their house cleaned out by burglars while they slept. Two houses down a guy was sent to prison for murder. I was scared to death to leave the house. In 1961 I didn't see the quality of life you mention.
I will take my quality of life today over that of the '50s any day.
If he’s serious, then he can’t be argued with. He’ll say scramjets or space planes aren’t really knew since we’ve had paper gliders for 500 years or something.
All that stuff he listed being so great in from 09 to 59 was built on earlier stuff. Electricity led to the big leap for most of it. If he thinks history has many leaps as big as electricity and knowing the physical laws of the atom then, he’s going to be disappointed.
Mimi. I couldn't wait for each issue to show up!
Drivel to get some words on paper and get paid.
My I Phone has more power and network ability than anything that was even conceived in 1959 and it is obsolete
Did he mention GPS, satellite weather pictures, minimally invasive surgery. The latter turned things like gall bladder surgery from a major event to a one day deal.
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