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It doesn't really matter what my ancestors felt, it's blatently obvious that there's more going on right now, and faster than 10,000 years ago. Back then, you'd be lucky to see a single revolutionary invention in a lifetime. Now we're seeing them every decade, if not annually.

I don't disagree that my descendents will be justified in feeling the same way, as long as the exponential curve keeps on going and civilization doesn't end.




Is this really true? If someone from 1950s America time-travelled to the present day, is there anything at all that they conceptually couldn't fathom?

Maybe if you transported someone from 1950s China to present-day China, they would be more shocked, but a present day suburban home in 2021 is not all that markedly different than a 1950s home -- and neither is the workplace, the commute, the cars. Mostly replaced paper with screens and tvs with bigger, flatter tvs.

The most conceptually difficult thing would be understanding that wireless telegraphs with cameras are pocket-sized and everywhere.


In the 1950's people technology was still relatively grounded in people's understanding. Any intelligent person in the 1950s could understand how an automobile or refrigerator worked if they wanted to. In present day, people treat technology as magic. It's easy enough to figure out how to use your iPhone to FaceTime someone on the other side of the world, but it's nearly impossible to truly understand how it's done.


Funny you should mention refrigerator because I'm pretty sure barely any non engineer could understand reverse Carnot cycle, let alone electricity on multiple levels of abstraction (current/fields/kirkhoffs laws/electromagnetism)


On the scales we're talking about, I would include the 1950s as "present-day". I would include the last 300 years as "particularly special"


> is there anything at all that they conceptually couldn't fathom?

Well you set the bar artificially high with that phrasing. Is there ever anything people of the last couple thousand years would be literally unable to conceptually fathom? No. We know that from ancient texts, they would be able to grasp anything we have today (even if it might take more elaborate explanation). 1950s Americans, or any citizens around the world at the time, would be more than astounded by 3-4 billion people being essentially always connected on a gigantic, seemingly instantaneous global communications and commerce network. The modern smartphone would similarly astound, what they can do all-in-one and the quality of it (the audio, the video, the music, movies, news, communication, click-button services & purchasing, digitization of money, the quality of digital photographs and how many you can take with no regard for space, it would all astound). Someone from the 1980s would be just as astounded by a recent iPhone, they'd feel like a time traveler.

People in 2007 were truly astounded by the iPhone. It almost felt like a product delivered from the future. It put all industry jaws on the floor and reset the grid for everyone in the tech industry, without exception. Maybe people have now widely forgotten the shock effect it had, I haven't forgotten.

That said, the parent's claim was an exaggeration. We're not inventing/harnessing such extraordinary stuff every year. Maybe a few things of note per decade globally.

CRISPR, cracking the human genome, modern antibiotics, Internet, Web, transistor and microprocessor, software, computers including personal, space flight, powered flight, various engines, electricity and electric light, fossil fuels, nuclear power and weapons, various green revolution outcomes (food production), solar and a few key renewable energy technologies, the commercial/industrial laser, and so on.

There are several dozen things that can be added to that list from the last 100-150 years. A few per decade globally might be a reasonable peg.


> People in 2007 were truly astounded by the iPhone. It almost felt like a product delivered from the future. It put all industry jaws on the floor and reset the grid for everyone in the tech industry, without exception.

This is a large exaggeration. I was there as an adult. It was another cool piece of tech, sure, but come on.


I think it depends who you were. Some people went more or less directly to being always connected to an iPhone from a world of monochrome Nokias and portable CD (or cassette, even) players and the internet being on a PC tower in a separate room of the house, if you had it at home at all. The intermediate steps - laptops, Palm pilots, iPods - were far from universal, at least in my world.


I was already using a PDA by that time (pocket PC), and the technology was already there, so not like it came out overnight. The only thing Apple improved on was the UX.


"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed."

Most people were blissfully unaware of the existence of PDAs, much less how they worked or what they could do, and for them the iPhone might as well have emerged perfectly formed from an unspecified bodily orifice of Steve Jobs. The statement "It almost _felt like_ a product delivered from the future" is entirely justified.


> The statement "It almost _felt like_ a product delivered from the future" is entirely justified

Not in the American middle-class, upper middle-class, and wealthy.


who cares about them


People give too much credit to the iPhone. There where a lot of full screen smart-phones before the iPhone

The same with mp3 players before iPod.

Apples hardware and design is OK, but their marketing is in their own league, like for example a company selling flavored water bottles while there's good quality water taps available almost everywhere. They can take something that is already readily available and sell it for 2x the price, and at the same time make people think it's revolutionary.


>> truly astounded by the iPhone.

For some reasons I was not truly astounded at all. I had several smartphones before but I preferred smaller "cool" phones until iPhone 4.

The iphone became for phones what the ipod was for music players. Great device but not really from the future. I bought it for the web browser.

Even today I use my iphone perhaps at 10% of its power mostly for things that I do on my laptop anyway(mail, chat, web browsing) so

I'm actually astounded that I can't hook it to a monitor and use it as a computer/macbook so to me it seems we got stuck in the past.


One of my ancestors father was wealthy. They took long trips over the summer. One year, she came home and they had electricity. One year, they had a telephone. She saw one of the demonstrations of flight by the wright brothers. A global pandemic. No war is good, but I'd put the world wars as particularly bad. She saw people drive cars on the moon, on television!

~1905-1985 was a pretty good run.

Cell phones, the internet, mrna vaccines. There's probably tons of amazing stuff I'm overlooking. I don't think I would trade with Katherine. Although, I wish she was around for a few years longer so I could talk to her when I was closer to being an adult.

I don't think you could find a modern technology that would throw her for a loop. Maybe, but she's a cherry picked example.


Don't forget refrigeration and automobiles. 1885-1985 was an amazing century!


You're responding to a comparison to >10k years ago (8000BC) with '1950s America'?


> it's blatently obvious that there's more going on right now...

Blatantly obvious? Not to me. I'm a technologist (e.g. wrote a bunch of code the results of which you use every day) with a degree in history and in many ways ancient Greece seems more vital than today.


We’ve legit left the planet and put people on the moon. The past hundred years has absolutely been something special in the history of the human race


The person you're replying to seems to argue that the founders of our civilization were more vital than us, who are merely building upon their legacy.


I did say “seems more vital” because I have read a lot of the classics, for enjoyment and instruction, and find a lot of current writing on the topics discussed in classical literature to be derivative at best.

TBF there’s a survivorship bias in older work: the stuff people found useful has been more likely to survive. Also a more modern (i.e. anyone in the subsequent couple of millennia) has to say something new, not just repeat the old. Which is harder to do.

I’m not arguing that the current world isn’t amazing (went to the moon! Reduction in poverty and higher living standard! I’m typing this comment on an iPad!). Simply making the point that it’s hardly uniquely so (and arguably the 2021st century has so far not been the peak of technical or social development).

What is unusual of the current age is the widespread belief that the current times are somehow unusual.


It's a certainty that people in the future will look at us and say "they were merely building the future for us" and "right now is most important, not back then".

We have been saying this forever, and will continue to do so.


Well we are building on their legacy there’s no arguing than that. But I don’t think they’re more vital than us and I do think we are living in a more vital time.


By symmetry of the exponential curve, your ancestors would be just as justified.


I don’t think this is quite right. To take a European example, the ancient Romans discovered concrete, then successor civilizations largely forgot how it worked for ~500+ years. Not all eras of history even had a positive slope to the curve.


Another example of Rome. It took over 1000 years before another city in the world became as big as Rome in its heyday.


I'd put just a bit of water in your wine. You're basing your view on technology and technological output, but in other cultures and times it might be of zero value. Personally that's not what qualifies for a special moment in history (the potential ecological collapse is higher).

Also consider that technology, even in it's most beautiful form, is rarely seen by people. They live in a blur of tamed down ease of use. It's not necessarily an existential enlightenment for them (it also backfires a lot, people are leaving devices to go back to more time outside and sport, look at parkour and people living in the wild for instance)


> Now we're seeing them every decade, if not annually.

Where do you live? The last sorta revolutionary tech I saw in my life was the cellphone, and I strain to see that as actually revolutionary in any meaningful way, to be honest.


Hinge of history. Effective altruism folks look at it mathematicaly. Historians look at it historically. Most humans look at it with their senses.


Seeing revolutionary inventions is not the meaning of life though nor makes our time more precious than others.




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