

The Myth of Technological Progress - ojbyrne
http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/the_myth_of_technological_progress/

======
mixmax
The article makes the mistake of comparing bleeding edge research of the 50's
to modern commonplace technology. Yes we had computers in the 50's, but we
didn't have one in every home and office. And none of them ran excel or World
of warcraft. Similar arguments can be made with the rest of his examples.

If you want a real comparison you should look at todays bleeding edge
technology or the commonday technologies of the 50's.

~~~
jimbokun
"And none of them ran excel or World of warcraft."

His argument is that Excel and World of Warcraft are not much of a qualitative
improvement over life in the 1950s.

~~~
mixmax
I think that a lot of businessowners and accountants would disagree strongly
about excel.

~~~
varjag
The business managed to get by with old paper books somehow until 1980s.
Granted, VisiCalc and its clones gave a boost to productivity, but it is not
ground breaking in same way the invention of lightbulb or construction of jet
engine was.

------
spot
"But can we really do anything with computers now that we couldn’t have done
30 or even 50 years ago?"

'nuff said. the author is probably just trying to be provocative. either that
or he's an idiot.

~~~
jimbokun
I note you didn't answer the question.

Computers add a little more convenience. Shopping is a little more convenient
than catalog shopping, maybe. You can be "friends" with people by looking at
their pictures and reading occasional snippets of text from them instead of
spending time with them in person. It is much easier to adopt a lifestyle of
sitting in an automobile seat, to sitting in a cubicle seat, to sitting in a
reclining chair in front of a television or a computer screen, than it was in
the 1950s. We've gone from listening to a transistor radio in our pocket to
listening to music on our iPod. That's an improvement in terms of choice and
convenience, but it that all we've got to show for the past 50 years?

What are the qualitative improvements in life since 1959? Taking just one
thing he mentioned in the 50 years before that, the invention of antibiotics,
is there anything in the past 50 years that compares in the impact to human
lives? (Note how he convincingly argues it was even the enabler of the sexual
revolution.)

~~~
bsaunder
To point out just one qualitative improvement the author completely discounts:
the internet.

"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."

Which, even according to his statement, happened in the 50 year window from
1959-2009.

You can't change facts to support your argument just because it's convenient.

Just imagine what your world would be like without google and email (just to
name two aspects of the internet). We wouldn't be having this debate (maybe
that wouldn't be a bad thing ;).

~~~
jimbokun
"Just imagine what your world would be like without google and email"

I would not be wasting time having this debate at my office, which is part of
his point. :)

I do not think just saying "The Internet, I mean, come on..." wins the
argument. There needs to be something showing that the Internet changes our
lives in ways similar to what radio, television, antibiotics and the atom bomb
changed lives in the first half of the 20th century.

I think part of the problem with making that argument is that the Internet and
computing technology is changing life much more appreciably in India and China
than it is here. It is allowing people in India to suddenly join the cubicle
dwelling, information processing, Western world work force in large numbers in
ways that are profoundly changing the lives of many people there. Walmart's
computerized, just in time inventory systems makes ordering products in China
and getting them to the right shelves in a timely manner feasible. That is
having perhaps an even more profound effect on the life of many Chinese. (This
also applies to many other developing countries, of course.)

So it may be that the technology advances are less noticeable here in the
U.S., where many of us were already working in offices and shopping at
department stores in the 1950s. But the way lives are changing in developing
countries is akin to the kinds of changes Americans experienced in the first
half of the 20th century.

------
DannoHung
Directed energy weapons, electric cars, wind power, quantum computers,
nanomachines, fabricators, etc etc.

Just because the leading edge _existed_ 50 years ago didn't mean it did shit
for anybody.

~~~
jimbokun
"...electric cars..."

"The Nash metropolitan got 40-mpg in real world driving tests, much like the
overrated hair shirt Toyota Prius."

The technology is more advanced, but is it a real qualitative improvement over
what we had 50 years ago?

He does explicitly mention nano-tech:

"Some wise acre is likely to pipe up and sing the glories of “Nanotech,” a
“subject” which was “invented” in K. Eric Drexler‘s Ph.D. thesis in 1989. In
the 20 years since he penned his fanciful little story, we have yet to see a
single example of the wondrous miniature perpetual motion machines Drexler has
been promising us “real soon now.” I wonder what his timeline for delivery of
this “technology” will be?"

Do you disagree with that assessment?

~~~
frig
All I can say is LOL to you. But seriously, may I ask you why you seem
convinced that the rate of technological progress has slowed? Whence the
vehement defense of the thesis?

The example of the cars is so completely bogus that it ought to be
embarrassing for a physicist (which Locklin is) to have written it; one would
expect them to know better.

It's about like saying:

\- between 1900 and 1950 we invented all this awesome new technology

\- but the information density of printed books (words-per-page) has remained
roughly constant from 1950 to 2000

\- ergo the rate of change must be declining

...in other words, compare:

\- in column A: an unqualified sense of "rate of progress" over some time
interval

\- in column B: a product whose performance on some metric is substantially
constrained by some combination of physics and rigid human factors

...and then point to lack of substantial improvement in the product's score on
the metric in column B as evidence for the deceleration of progress; it is at
heart only a qualitative improvement but there's no radical improvement to be
had in that area, so looking to it and wondering "why no radical improvements
in the information density of printed text?" says more about you than about
what's happening.

Now, why the car example is bogus:

There's only so much energy in a gallon of gasoline, and fuel-efficiency is
thus bounded to a pretty narrow range of variation.

Modern cars are larger and heavier than equivalent product categories of
yesteryear, mainly in response to safety regulations.

Just look at the Nash Metropolitan (conveniently parked in a standard USA
parking space for size reference):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nash_Metropolitan.jpg>

Or if you're not so good at depth perception:

[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef01156fb...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef01156fb8b753970c-500wi)

(next to a cooper mini for comparison).

There's no mystery here: the 40mpg car he picked out of the past got 40mpg b/c
it's a tiny car.

This isn't a case of some technological triumph of our forefathers being
abandoned by decadent successor generations; it's a case of the laws of
physics dictating the range of possible cars, and there being not all that
much stateside consumer demand for microcars like the metropolitan.

So yes: cars today are little different in fuel efficiency than cherry-picked
microcars of the 60s and 70s because the laws of physics haven't changed
between now and then; we're not driving 100mpg micromachines because no one
wants to buy them (yet).

I'd wager a fair amount that in a universe in which we _were_ all driving
microcars good old Locklin would be bitching about the forgotten musclecars
are of yesteryear, along the lines of his concorde complaint in the same
article.

~~~
jimbokun
"Whence the vehement defense of the thesis?"

I don't know what part of what I said was vehement.

After everything you said, I think you arrive pretty close to Locklin's
conclusion:

"Are cars better? They are certainly safer, and it’s easier to buy a very high
performance car than it was in 1959, but they don’t get much more efficient
than they were in 1959."

You give the reason _why_ cars are not much more efficient than they were in
1959 (heavier due to increased safety regulations, which Locklin also csites).
But nevertheless, driving a car in 2009 is a pretty similar experience, all
around, to driving a car in 1959 (except maybe more traffic). Compare that to
the difference between 1909, when cars went from being a novelty to the
primary means of conveyance. Are you seriously arguing that the difference in
everyday transportation between 2009 and 1959 is of greater magnitude than
that between 1909 and 1959?

~~~
frig
Your individual responses are not vehement; however, last time I looked you
had > half the responses in this thread (needless to say all taking the same
"side"), which suggests that for whatever reason this is an issue you have
strong feelings about. I was curious as to why.

In practical terms I think you (and Locklin) are committing a basic error of
comparing unlike quantities, perhaps unintentionally.

Take cars, again; I think I have you checked-and-mated. Here goes:

(i) you seem to believe that with respect to personal transportation 1909-1959
saw a "significant" change because cars went from novelty to primary means of
conveyance

(ii) you point out that cars haven't changed radically in 1959-2009; they are
neither radically "better" (according to a metric like fuel efficiency) nor is
the experience of driving 2009 cars radically different than 1959 cars

(iii) you now want to assert that the change in "everyday transportation" is
greater from 1909-1959 than from 1959-2009

The structure of this argument is:

\- the change you care about in (i) is SOCIAL CHANGE (in terms of lifestyles,
activity pattern, etc.)

\- the change you care about in (ii) is TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE (for which
Locklin used the proxy metric FUEL EFFICIENCY)

\- in (iii) you want to conclude that "amount of SOCIAL CHANGE" is declining

\- but (ii) is pretty much the definition of a "red herring": FUEL EFFICIENCY
and SOCIAL CHANGE don't have all that much to do with each other other than
being measurable quantities (loosely speaking)

It's a nice cognitive trick:

\- "progress" is a fuzzy word with lots of meanings in lots of places

\- you want to make people accept a statement about "progress" in a particular
context (overall technological progress)

\- you accomplish this by inserting a factual-but-unrelated statement
evidencing a lack of "progress" (in this case: in fuel efficiency)

\- this "primes" the brain to accept a semantically-similar conclusion without
adequate supporting argumentation

...and using FUEL EFFICIENCY as your metric is silly, especially from a
physicist: given that it can't be much better than it is given the constraints
at hand its lack of progress is a given, and it's only really useful in the
argument for its semantic priming effect.

A less kind summary of the proposition at hand is:

\- When cars became widely adopted they caused radical social change.

\- Incremental changes to cars have (obviously, lol) not caused similarly
radical social change (unsurprisingly)

\- Ergo the rate of technological progress is slowing down, as evidenced by
the lack of radical changes in cars (wut?)

This ought to be seen as a category error, full stop...but it's good enough to
pass muster as a rah-rah for the self-styled iconoclast brigade; that's some
mighty-fine reasoning-work there, Lou.

But, hey, let's keep running with it.

Even if you're completely right -- car-induced changes in everyday
transportation are insignificant in the 1959-2009 era -- you're looking at
stuff in a silly way.

I'm going to make the case for air transport being a comparable shift: air
transportation did not become easily affordable for consumers until the 70s or
80s or 90s (depending on who you ask and which country you were in).

Before it became affordable it was a luxury item (hence the term "jetset" for
the leisure class who could afford to travel around like that), and if people
traveled long-range they did so by boat, train, or automobile.

In the modern era air travel is often unbelievably inexpensive -- in some
parts of the world international tickets are on par with an expensive
restaurant -- to the point that long-distance travel by anything other than
plane is rare-to-nonexistent (depending on where you live and how you define
long-distance).

Is this a "significant" shift? I LOL at you, b/c:

\- if you say "no", you undercut what you claim in (i): that a change in
affordability (leading to wider adoption and also to use for a wider variety
of things than when it was expensive) counts as "progress"

\- if you say "yes" you save (i) so I assume you're going to say (i)

So within the category of "personal transportation" (a mild generalization
from "everyday transportation") we have had a significant technological change
in the 1959-2009 era.

You can argue it's less significant than the automobile-induced changes; I've
got stuff to do so won't participate but at least we're now comparing like
kinds (SOCIAL CHANGE and SOCIAL CHANGE instead of SOCIAL CHANGE and FUEL
EFFICIENCY).

But social change is a wiggly thing (and the perception of it is often colored
by value-judgments; witness Locklin talking about most technology just
enabling bad behavior); the appeal of the invalid argumentation strategy is
that by throwing in hard facts you make your opinions on relative magnitudes
of social change look more objective (and this will work up to the point at
which you get called out on the apples-to-oranges).

~~~
jimbokun
"Your individual responses are not vehement; however, last time I looked you
had > half the responses in this thread (needless to say all taking the same
"side"), which suggests that for whatever reason this is an issue you have
strong feelings about."

Just because the counter arguments were so poorly argued. Much of the counter
arguments were in the vein of "that guy doesn't think the Internet really
changed people's lives, he's obviously an idiot" "Yeah, you are so right, he's
obviously an idiot," instead of explaining ways in which the Internet has made
QUALITATIVE improvements to people's lives compared to 1959.

You finally get to the point of arguing that the wide availability of air
travel might be a qualitative improvement over what we had in 1959, but after
much nattering on about fuel efficiency and social change that still doesn't
change the fact that the experience of driving an automobile in 2009 is
largely similar to that of 1959. I might even agree with you on the airlines
point. What I object to is all of the "this guy is obviously an idiot" without
citing any obvious counter examples to his real points. In my experience,
Hacker News is usually better than that, with people employing bad arguments
getting called out even by people who happen to agree with the opinions. That
is not aimed exclusively at you, just the general tone of responses I was
reading here.

------
dctoedt
This guy ought to try a thought experiment: If it were possible, would he
willingly agree to _permanently_ trade places with a _random_ person who lived
in 1959?

That would serve as a summing function of sorts, to integrate all the
different components of life-goodness into one binary value: Yes I'd trade
permanently; or No, I prefer my life here-and-now.

(This is a variation on Gregg Easterbrook's thought experiment in his book,
The Progress Paradox.)

~~~
ajscherer
The random person element of your thought experiment strikes me as pretty
important because cost is one of the only ways I can think of to measure
technological progress. Simply picking two specific technologies from the same
sector and then stating an opinion that the progress isn't impressive doesn't
persuade me. What could possibly persuade me is answers to questions like
these: in present day dollars, how much would it cost to purchase one extra
year of life in 1909, 1959, and 2009? For N present day dollars, how long
would it take you to travel from New York to London in 1909, 1959, and 2009?
For $100 present day dollars, how many copies of a book can you make in those
each of years?

I think the author is right in that there are physical constraints on what
types of things are possible, so any improvements will only be of degree. Once
you have weapons that harness nuclear reactions, there aren't a lot of other
fundamental forces left to harness. Likewise once you have devices that can
reproduce sights and sounds (the two senses used for communication) all you
can really do is make those devices cheaper and bigger (or smaller). The
author didn't express that very well, choosing instead to cherry pick specific
inventions and present opinions as facts.

~~~
nate_meurer
Yes! Excellent, excellent point. The industrial revolution put a whole raft of
the "easiest" inventions within a century's reach. Internal combustion,
electricity, telegraphy, etc., these were waiting for just a few pieces of
basic core technology (like coke-fired smelting)) to fall into place before
they could erupt into mass deployment.

It makes perfect sense that refinement of existing technology would overtake
invention of new ones. I don't see how it could be otherwise given the
physical constraints you speak of; how many radical new sources of energy can
we come up with, aside from fusion?

------
nate_meurer
My biggest problem with this article is that he discounts technologies based
on their their most menial modes of usage, e.g. advanced telegraphy wasted on
p()rn. A lot of cynicism is certainly warranted, but he loses some credibility
with me by ignoring the higher uses of technology.

He brings up Lisp, which was interesting. I learned Lisp from the internet, in
less than a month, in my spare time, without taking time away from my work or
family. Pretty much _all_ the technical knowledge that I've gained over the
past eight years has come largely or entirely from online material, with far
less impact on my schedule than graduate school would have had.

And I bet that almost every commenter here has had much the same experience as
I.

~~~
jimbokun
That ties into the article about the $99 a month, all you can learn on line
university which was just on the front page of HN. That's the kind of thing
that has not had a profound impact on ordinary people's lives yet, but may
have a very profound impact in the near future.

------
wglb
I have been saying something of this sort for a while, but not as
articulately. We in the technology end of things are likely to think of our
impact as being highly "advanced". The example I like quote is that of my
grandfather, who was born in 1888 and lived for 94 years. During his lifetime,
he saw the popularization of the automobile, the application of radio, then
television, the deployment of air travel, and men walking on the moon. I have
argued that we are not likely to see changes of that magnitude over our
lifetime.

Another perspective is the impact of technology on rural life. During his
lifetime, we saw technology increase the productivity of the american farmer
by two orders of magnitude. No other segment of daily life experienced that
form of amplification. The impact of today's technology on say a clerk's life
is not as great.

As we work in this field, we see amazing things (one poster here quotes the
impact of Google), but few things have improved lives the way that the
technology of the sewer has.

------
dasil003
Technological progress is much faster now than it was then, the problem is
that we've already gotten the low-hanging fruit. The type of advance we need
to make a proportional impact to that of something simple like the internal
combustion engine is arguably impossible. If we invented an instant
teleportation device to anywhere on the planet it's not going to make as much
as an impact today as the difference between a year-long life-threatening
journey by ship and wagon.

------
edw519
_I could come up with all kinds of reasons why modern technologists aren’t as
good as they were: rotten educational facilities, modern tort law, endless
bureaucracy, the death of the lone inventor._

Unless one or two of us bypass all that crap and do a software startup.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
how shocking that all those things are directly related to government. >_>

well, a decrease in lone inventors is natural. when all the low hanging fruit
has been picked it takes standing on shoulders to reach the higher stuff.

------
herdrick
This guy is forgetting what life was like before Google.

