Amazing Technology?

[arton Rotaru]

2 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

In my country, speeding and murder are prohibited. Still happens.

;-).

I hope it doesn't make you murder someone as well, because of this.

[Madelaine McMasters]

50 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

I hope it doesn't make you murder someone as well, because of this.

If I ever do murder someone, I think its legality will be the last thing on my mind.

;-).

Edited May 7, 2017 by Madelaine McMasters

[arton Rotaru]

I had written something, but I'm unsure if it would be against the guidelines. So I'd rather leave it that.

[Madelaine McMasters]

20 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

I had written something, but I'm unsure if it would be against the guidelines. So I'd rather leave it that.

You're a tease!!!

Edited May 7, 2017 by Madelaine McMasters

[arton Rotaru]

Yeah. I'm sorry, but it would shed a bad light on me as well I guess.

[Klytyna]

The two most amazing pieces of technology in the last 1000 years are...

The Trip Hammer & Spectacles.

The Trip Hammer, an amazingly simple idea, you wonder why nobody thought of it earlier than 1300 c.e. as it has changed the face of technology. It made good quality iron and steel available in large quantities, at affordable prices, it enabled better ploughs, that increased soil fertility and crop yields, and created bigger food surplusses, allowing people more time to think and invent rather than scrabble not to starve.

The Trip Hammer is why the Japanese Honda Clan ordered 80,000 sets of armour from EUROPE rather than use japanese made, because thet superior Euro-Metal forged by Trip Hammers, would stop an arquebus ball, and japanese armour would not..

It's why people in London started throwing away broken eating knives rather than having new points ground on them, the start of OUR throwaway culture, metal blades cheap enough to throw away when they broke.

And spectacles... We take the ability to see for granted, Times past, craftsmen would work for years to reach Master level, only to have their careers curtailed due to bad eyesight, from all the long hours in bad lighting, spectacles changed that, effectively doubling the working life for skilled craftsmen doing fine work.

Most of the machinery, which eventually lead to the Industrial Revolution, was developed off the back of the Trip Hammer, and produced by people who wore spectacles to see clearly with, all those fine parts in chronometers, that made accurate navigation, and mapping possible, all that good quality metal that wouldn't explode when put under stress.

Human Technology didn't change that much from the start of the Iron Age through to 1300. These two 1300ish inventions changed everything, they created the Renaissance,  the Age of Reason, the Industrial Revolution, our Modern World.

Now, THAT is AMAZING TECHNOLOGY!.
 

[Pamela Galli]

Yes, there has been amazing technology throughout history. Like fire, that was a major one. Agriculture. Writing was a big one. The alphabet, genius. 

But the era we are living in now is different.  The exponential rate of technological evolution we are experiencing now has only quite recently outstripped human ability to even keep up with, much less adapt to.  What is amazing -- and incredibly disruptive -- is not just the tech itself but the rate of change now. 

 

[Klytyna]

6 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

Yes, there has been amazing technology throughout history. Like fire, that was a major one. Agriculture. Writing was a big one. The alphabet, genius.

But the era we are living in now is different.  The exponential rate of technological evolution we are experiencing now has only quite recently outstripped human ability to even keep up with, much less adapt to.  What is amazing -- and incredibly disruptive -- is not just the tech itself but the rate of change now.

 

There's a short story, by Harry Harrison? A short version of the history of mankind...

It does p-lace emphasis on the disruptive nature of technology in part, jokey references to tribes fighting over caves vs these new fangled houses, spears vs these new fangled bow things, and how the Elders had a tendency to take people who invented stuff and hang them over a fire, and then 5 generations later made them a tribal god.

We still do this today, for example the "Blessed St. Steve of Job " who seems to be regarded as some kind of Techno-Saint, despite not actually doing mucgh to create new technology at all. Those Apehole-Muck myPads? all the tech was created by others, nobody made them because... Why would you want one?

All 'St Steve' did was apply marketing hype and hey presto, nobody can survive without a myPad.

The myPod, an mp3 player that wont play mp3's and costs 4 times as much as real mp3 players, but hey every student had to have one, banks gave the damn things away free to students applying for loans. The myPhone, overpriced, with a screen that shatters if you look at the box before unpacking it.

Nobody remembers the names of the guys who designed the PC, or the names of the guys who made the first PC clone, nobody remembers the names of the guys who wrote QDOS, or OS/2, all they remember is Gill 'Master' Bates, the CEO of a small programming house who bought QDOS 1.0 and sold it to the makers of OS/2 who did most of the development of QDOS 6, then took OS/2 code and made a lame front end for QDOS 6, and hey presto Microbloat Win'Dont Hate.Doh.

Nobody remembers that Gill Bates broke the law and blackmailed PC dealers into preinstalling Microbloat Windont on every PC, orthat his company got fined a million bucks a day for this crime but carried on as the fine was less than the profits, and was a 'tax deductable business expense'.

Technology IS disruptive, and we end up remembering and honoring the wrong people for the wrong reasons while suffering the disruption. Computers have changed the world, destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs, far more than they ever created, and helped export jobs, because everything and everyone is a click away.

Self Driving Cars soun ds wonderful to some, but how many professional drivers will be laid off, with no hope of finding work, how many families will suffer because the corporate sponsored politicians won't want to pay welfare' to those whose lives have been destroyed by the latest new technology.

The Luddites of the Industrial revolution, didn't hate technology, they hated the crushing poverty caused by the loss of their jobs in a post war economic slump, and having to send their 8 yr old kids out to work in m,ills because those were the only people the mills would hire, because they were small enough and quick enough to crawl in and under the machines.

Technology is disrupting our pool of knowledge too, contrary to popular opinion ALL knowledge is NOT on Wikipedia.

The other day i did a search for "The Commanded Men", a term used to describe musketeers detached from their usual pike & shot regimentsd during the English Civil War, and formed into temporary all musketeer battalions, guess how many hits i got on a search engine for that term? As in how many were for that term not some totaly different thing...

We're losing knowledge, and access to knowledge, because some people think the internet is a replacement for reference libraries. We have people citing wikipedia pages in university papers, which are then cited in turn on the wiki page, there's even a term for it...

"Wiki Bubble"

Today, people seem to think 'debate' is more important than 'fact' and that 'Truth' is a popularity contest.

Please 'Like' this post  
 

[Caitlin Tobias]

19 hours ago, Pamela Galli said:

What technology amazes you? 

A lot, but I will keep it simple: my iPhone.

Not only can I call my Dad with it, but it also contains most of my books & my favourites music. In my car it is my navigator and when on my way back home I can use it to turn on the central heating - so the house is cozy and warm upon my return (or switch it off when I know I will be home later..). I can take pics and videos and share them with family and when I forget my bankcard I can use it to pay for my groceries in the supermarket.

And that's not all

[Monti Messmer]

Despite all the saying new technology creates new great workplaces, it doesn´t. After all the small shops around the corner vanished and all is done by Amazon we will see.

Smartphones are great but i still prefer face to face without auto-correction annoying me correcting all to the wrong ...

This funny new world is good for people who can afford it and the rest ...

Don´t get me wrong, i love all the new gimmicks but i could do without alot of them.

Where is the fun in go shopping, hunting, finding when you can type in search and others filter what you might want ? or often not.

Just have in mind the 2 hours offline for WhatsApp. So many people didn´t know what to do running around headless. That is not the great new world i want to live in 

Monti

[Ceka Cianci]

I think sliced bread was a pretty good one..

A guy was probably sitting there eating lunch  with Bread in one hand and Meat in the other..

 

Ya know, if I cut this one in half and put this in there,my hands would be a heck of a lot cleaner afterwards..

 

hehehehe

 

[LittleMe Jewell]

1 hour ago, Monti Messmer said:

Despite all the saying new technology creates new great workplaces, it doesn´t. After all the small shops around the corner vanished and all is done by Amazon we will see.

Smartphones are great but i still prefer face to face without auto-correction annoying me correcting all to the wrong ...

This funny new world is good for people who can afford it and the rest ...

Don´t get me wrong, i love all the new gimmicks but i could do without alot of them.

Where is the fun in go shopping, hunting, finding when you can type in search and others filter what you might want ? or often not.

Just have in mind the 2 hours offline for WhatsApp. So many people didn´t know what to do running around headless. That is not the great new world i want to live in 

Monti

For me, online shopping is one of the best things ever.  I absolutely detest going to RL stores, especially for clothing - trying on tons of things to only have a few actually fit properly.  

As to smart phones, meh.  My husband and I share a 1 GB plan and unless we are traveling, we seldom use half of that between the two of us.

The home internet on the other hand - while I can live without it for a while, an extended outage would be difficult since I now handle almost all of my financial stuff online.

[Ceka Cianci]

1 minute ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

For me, online shopping is one of the best things ever.  I absolutely detest going to RL stores, especially for clothing - trying on tons of things to only have a few actually fit properly.  

As to smart phones, meh.  My husband and I share a 1 GB plan and unless we are traveling, we seldom use half of that between the two of us.

The home internet on the other hand - while I can live without it for a while, an extended outage would be difficult since I now handle almost all of my financial stuff online.

What Black Friday? hehehehe

 

Ever since online shopping came along,I haven't did a real Black Friday.. I hated those..

Just sit back and click ,click,oh lets get that,Click,Oh he'll like that,Click.

ChaChing!

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

4 hours ago, Pamela Galli said:

Yes, there has been amazing technology throughout history. Like fire, that was a major one. Agriculture. Writing was a big one. The alphabet, genius. 

But the era we are living in now is different.  The exponential rate of technological evolution we are experiencing now has only quite recently outstripped human ability to even keep up with, much less adapt to.  What is amazing -- and incredibly disruptive -- is not just the tech itself but the rate of change now. 

 

Here's something to bear in mind - time always runs at the same pace, but our perception of it changes. Right now the iPhone is ten years old and really hasn't changed much. Now take a look at the twentieth century:

Over the weekend I watched a movie made and set in the mid-1950's. One of the characters restored and drove old cars - old "brass" cars from the pre-World War I era. That would make the cars about 40 years old. The car he drove looked completely out of place and would have trouble coping with driving conditions at that time.

Today, a forty-year-old car would be built in 1977.

I'm a fan of animation. The original Toy Story movie was made in 1995, or 22 years ago. Computer animated movies now look a lot better but Toy Story still holds up fairly well.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs came out in 1937 - a feature length animated Technicolor musical. Ten years earlier, animation consisted of eight-minute silent black and white shorts of characters largely made up of circles and blobs connected by "rubber hoses."

It doesn't seem that long ago that I was nonplussed by college students born in the 1990's. Very soon, they'll be born in the twenty-first century.

Doing the math like this is interesting, although sometimes a bit depressing. I was watching students at a party dancing to Nirvana and old hair bands and realized that for them, those bands would be the equivalent of Chuck Berry for me.

 

 

[Rhonda Huntress]

14 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

Hand-free car kits are allowed indeed.

Statistically there is only a slight difference between handheld and hands free.

Below is a 3 minute MythBusters segment covering it.

http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/hands-free-vs-handheld-minimyth/

I just wish the large sampling had a control with 15 people not using a phone at all.

[LittleMe Jewell]

Not really surprised - distracted is distracted. It is the 'concentrating on talking vs driving' that is the issue, not whether you have only one hand or two available for the driving.  I notice that when I'm in lots of traffic or in an unfamilar area, I have more difficulty talking to someone in the car while trying to concentrate on the driving and vice versa.  

Where I do think there is an issue with hands actually on the device is the people trying to text, video chat, or do a multitude of other things on the phone.  Those activities are far worse than talking because the eyes are truly leaving the road for various periods of time.

[Ceka Cianci]

2 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Not really surprised - distracted is distracted. It is the 'concentrating on talking vs driving' that is the issue, not whether you have only one hand or two available for the driving.  I notice that when I'm in lots of traffic or in an unfamilar area, I have more difficulty talking to someone in the car while trying to concentrate on the driving and vice versa.  

Where I do think there is an issue with hands actually on the device is the people trying to text, video chat, or do a multitude of other things on the phone.  Those activities are far worse than talking because the eyes are truly leaving the road for various periods of time.

Then add in some kids and you are all set..

hehehehe

[Love Zhaoying]

Dadburn you kids and your new-fangled "tech-knowledgey". Well, I tell you, it AIN'T! "Knowledgey", that is! Now get off my lawn!

[Rhonda Huntress]

Speaking of auto-breaking (not that anyone has brought it up, ya bunch of slackers), I'm still waiting for a scene in a movie where the hero wants to ram a gate but the auto-break kicks in.

[Rolig Loon]

When I was a sophomore, many years back, I had a course in the history of the US from 1850 to 1900.  I remember very few details after all these years, but I do remember the prof's unusual way of starting class each day.  He'd bring in a copy of the newspaper from some day during the period we were studying and he'd read a few of the "little" stories.  Not the front page stuff that was in our textbook, but -- I remember this one -- a note that the hardware store in town has just received a shipment of a new floor covering for kitchens .... linoleum.  It was an exciting new product, an amazing improvement for everyday life.  Linoleum made it easier to keep the floor clean and probably improved hygiene immensely. Amazing stuff.

Little stories like that get forgotten quickly because yesterday's amazing new technology becomes ho-hum very fast.  By the time my father was born, in 1918, a kitchen without linoleum (or a much better product) would have been unthinkable in most middle class homes.  My dad and I used to talk often about things that had changed in his lifetime, many of which were old hat by the time I was born. My kids are not amazed by color TV or seat belts, and their kids are not amazed by smart phones.  We only get amazed by change, and then we forget our amazement overnight. Our children are only amazed that we once lived in such dark, pre-modern times.

[Pamela Galli]

15 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

When I was a sophomore, many years back, I had a course in the history of the US from 1850 to 1900.  I remember very few details after all these years, but I do remember the prof's unusual way of starting class each day.  He'd bring in a copy of the newspaper from some day during the period we were studying and he'd read a few of the "little" stories.  Not the front page stuff that was in our textbook, but -- I remember this one -- a note that the hardware store in town has just received a shipment of a new floor covering for kitchens .... linoleum.  It was an exciting new product, an amazing improvement for everyday life.  Linoleum made it easier to keep the floor clean and probably improved hygiene immensely. Amazing stuff.

Little stories like that get forgotten quickly because yesterday's amazing new technology becomes ho-hum very fast.  By the time my father was born, in 1918, a kitchen without linoleum (or a much better product) would have been unthinkable in most middle class homes.  My dad and I used to talk often about things that had changed in his lifetime, many of which were old hat by the time I was born. My kids are not amazed by color TV or seat belts, and their kids are not amazed by smart phones.  We only get amazed by change, and then we forget our amazement overnight. Our children are only amazed that we once lived in such dark, pre-modern times.

For children this extreme acceleration of change that we have been experiencing for the last decade or so will be the norm. The rest of us are trying with various levels of success to adapt to it. 

I am reading this book on the subject for the second time, it is such an important overview of what is happening, like a guidebook on how to navigate a world that is evolving faster than most human beings adapt: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/books/review/thomas-friedman-thank-you-for-being-late.html The review is a good summary of the premise.

[Love Zhaoying]

16 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

By the time my father was born, in 1918, a kitchen without linoleum (or a much better product) would have been unthinkable in most middle class homes.  My dad and I used to talk often about things that had changed in his lifetime, many of which were old hat by the time I was born. My kids are not amazed by color TV or seat belts, and their kids are not amazed by smart phones.  We only get amazed by change, and then we forget our amazement overnight. Our children are only amazed that we once lived in such dark, pre-modern times.

I had to remove 6 layers of linoleum from my floors to get down to the wood.

[Rolig Loon]

5 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

For children this extreme acceleration of change that we have been experiencing for the last decade or so will be the norm. The rest of us are trying with various levels of success to adapt to it. 

[ .... ]

Yes, but my point is that most of the "amazing" change takes place in little things that we hardly notice even weeks or months after they appear for the first time. We notice the big milestones, like color TV, but life is full of linoleum, ballpoint pens, and whoopee cushions that feel like they have always been there. They aren't marked by world-shattering events.  They sneak in quietly, and suddenly the inkwells that were in our first-grade school desks aren't there and we don't have permanent black spots on our shirts.  And our younger sisters don't ever remember seeing an inkwell. Change is only amazing if we remember it, and we have remarkably short memories.

 

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Rolig Loon said:

By the time my father was born, in 1918...  My dad and I used to talk often about things that had changed in his lifetime...

Dad was born in 1920. He and I had those conversations, too. What I will never forget about them was not the things, big and small, that had changed during his lifetime, but his complete lack of nostalgia. He saw the world as ever changing, but more importantly, ever improving. He obtained that perspective by traveling the world when he was young, and staying interested in it throughout his life. The loss of American auto jobs when I was a child was good news for the developing nations he'd visited, and the lovely people who inhabited them. The banning of DDT was good for his young daughter, but potentially bad for children in malaria infested countries. He'd contracted malaria himself while overseas in the Navy, and hoped for an effective replacement for DDT. He'd have vibrated with excitement over the potential of CRISPR-Cas9.

It was through those conversations with Dad that I was introduced to the "Law of Unintended Consequences, Kiddo!" (LUCK!). It's not a law, of course, but it's the natural result of the often unavoidably incomplete consideration of a problem, due to short memories, nearsightedness or any number of human limitations. Oh, to have a LUCK! chat with him about CRISPR-Cas9!

Ever the daddy's girl, I continue his tradition of believing that, even though we don't know what the hell we're doing, we'll do better next time.

Edited May 8, 2017 by Madelaine McMasters

[Theresa Tennyson]

9 hours ago, Pamela Galli said:

For children this extreme acceleration of change that we have been experiencing for the last decade or so will be the norm. The rest of us are trying with various levels of success to adapt to it. 

I am reading this book on the subject for the second time, it is such an important overview of what is happening, like a guidebook on how to navigate a world that is evolving faster than most human beings adapt: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/books/review/thomas-friedman-thank-you-for-being-late.html The review is a good summary of the premise.

It's also a good summary of my premise. Note that he describes things being different from 1978. That's almost forty years ago.

Mulling this over, I realized there was a technology that changed the world spectacularly and at comparatively blinding speed in the 19th century, and we don't even think about it today because the technology itself is basically obsolete, but we use its direct successors every day, especially with the Internet:

The electric telegraph.

In 1844 the idea that you could send a message from Washington DC to Baltimore almost instantaneously was so mind-blowing that the first message on that line was "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT."

By 1861 (just seventeen years) you could send the same message just as quickly from Washington to San Francisco.

By 1866 (only five more years) it could go over the Atlantic Ocean to London and Europe.

Also, the telegraph is the direct ancestor of the telephone, digital data transmission, and radio. Bear in mind that before the telegraph, it would take days or months for these messages to arrive, depending on distances.

But today? We take all of this for granted.