
Like Today, the 1920s Roared With Technology - robg
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/28/great-depression-roosevelt-hoover-opinions-columnists-thomas-f-cooley.html
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asciilifeform
Here we go again: another poor deluded soul who believes that today's social
networking toys are comparable with the truly revolutionary technological
advances of the past, such as the early electric appliances and the
automobile.

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DannoHung
Social networking toys? What, you mean smartphones, integrated GPS, augmented
reality, robotics, pervasive communications networks. None of these advances
strike you as important and potentially disruptive?

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run4yourlives
Relative though.

There's cell phone to iphone levels of disruption to the norm, and then there
is kitchen sink to washing machine levels of disruption.

If you look at tech, a comparable time period to the 20's would be the late
80's early 90's, where we went from basically the industrial age to the
information age in a matter of years.

What's happening now is nowhere close to the same scale.

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mixmax
What's happening now is the commoditization of the tech that started gaining
traction in the early 90's. Speaking from a macroeconomic standpoint this is
where all the fun is.

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run4yourlives
Depends on how you define fun, and where you sit. All the "fun" stuff from the
80's and 90's has turned into companies like Apple, Microsoft, Nokia and
Motorola. Their founders have been living what I'm sure they would consider
"fun" lives for quite a while. :-)

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mixmax
What I meant by fun was higher productivity, better utilisation of resources,
rise in GDP based on innovation and that sort of stuff.

What is fun to one is, well something else, to another. :-)

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dilettante
So, the productivity increases of the 20's in essential areas like food
production and household maintenance led to a rapid devaluation in the worth
of the products of that labor. Hmm, so the globalization and commoditization
of manufacturing labor and white collar labor is leading to the devaluation of
the products of current 'service economy workers', 'knowledge workers', etc.
So what is an unemployed 64 year old logic designer, programmer, and test
engineer supposed to turn to for work in the future?

