A great example of how things were viewed at the time is the poem by AB "Banjo" Patterson: "Mulga Bill's Bycycle", first published in 1896.
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that caught the cycling craze;
He turned away the good old horse that served him many days;
He dressed himself in cycling clothes, resplendent to be seen;
He hurried off to town and bought a shining new machine;
And as he wheeled it through the door, with air of lordly pride,
The grinning shop assistant said, "Excuse me, can you ride?"
"See here, young man," said Mulga Bill, "from Walgett to the sea,
From Conroy's Gap to Castlereagh, there's none can ride like me.
I'm good all round at everything as everybody knows,
Although I'm not the one to talk - I hate a man that blows.
But riding is my special gift, my chiefest, sole delight;
Just ask a wild duck can it swim, a wildcat can it fight.
There's nothing clothed in hair or hide, or built of flesh or steel,
There's nothing walks or jumps, or runs, on axle, hoof, or wheel,
But what I'll sit, while hide will hold and girths and straps are tight:
I'll ride this here two-wheeled concern right straight away at sight."
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that sought his own abode,
That perched above Dead Man's Creek, beside the mountain road.
He turned the cycle down the hill and mounted for the fray,
But 'ere he'd gone a dozen yards it bolted clean away.
It left the track, and through the trees, just like a silver steak,
It whistled down the awful slope towards the Dead Man's Creek.
It shaved a stump by half an inch, it dodged a big white-box:
The very wallaroos in fright went scrambling up the rocks,
The wombats hiding in their caves dug deeper underground,
As Mulga Bill, as white as chalk, sat tight to every bound.
It struck a stone and gave a spring that cleared a fallen tree,
It raced beside a precipice as close as close could be;
And then as Mulga Bill let out one last despairing shriek
It made a leap of twenty feet into the Dead Man's Creek.
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that slowly swam ashore:
He said, "I've had some narrer shaves and lively rides before;
I've rode a wild bull round a yard to win a five-pound bet,
But this was the most awful ride that I've encountered yet.
I'll give that two-wheeled outlaw best; it's shaken all my nerve
To feel it whistle through the air and plunge and buck and swerve.
It's safe at rest in Dead Man's Creek, we'll leave it lying still;
A horse's back is good enough henceforth for Mulga Bill."
The Sydney Mail, 25 July 1896.
ViktorRay · 7m ago
This is basically a Black Mirror type story….but from 1896.
And it’s about bicycles.
Fascinating.
nickdothutton · 6h ago
During the early industrial revolution people used to present themselves for medical help after complaining that the incessant repetitive action and rotation of engines (e.g. beam engines) hundreds of miles away from them was sending them vibrations which disturbed their sleep. Of course they only started having this problem after reading about such contraptions in newspapers.
wrp · 4h ago
I know a consulting acoustical engineer who tracks down noise problems for companies and individuals. He goes on about the difficulty of even finding the source of low-frequency noise because of distance and vague directionality. In an extreme case, a rural family was tormented by a constant throbbing sound that turned out to be from a utility station 5 miles away.
strogonoff · 33m ago
It’s tempting to see it as people being hypochondriacs, but often when there is an issue only after learning about it you notice that it has been affecting you badly. Noise pollution and air pollution are but two most common examples.
Sure, positive mindset is important, but it can only take you so far when northern wind makes you cough because there is a dozen factories out there, or when you are chronically sleep-deprived because a noise source you might not even know exists switches on at ungodly hours.
Low-frequency sound waves can be brutal. Something can just happen to resonate where you are, but meters away everything is fine. To make things even more interesting, go low enough and you might not actually be hearing it per se, but feeling it with your body. Good luck explaining it to people who can enact change.
Relatedly, Benn Jordan investigated[0] certain sound that some refuse to believe is real yet others suffer from.
To anecdotally support this, a neighbor of mine likes to play their bass super loud at night sometimes. But what’s strange is that the sound is louder in my house than if I go out in the street to listen. Seems like the sound waves go through the ground and then use my house as a sounding board.
cobbzilla · 5h ago
Loud low sounds can travel very far, especially at night when it’s quiet. I can hear freight trains at night that are over 5 miles away. It wouldn’t surprise me if the beam engine was louder than a freight train, and that nights were even quieter in the early 20th century. Hundreds of miles is a bit much though.
mannykannot · 27m ago
I too can hear distant trains at night, especially if it is a still, clear night creating a low-level inversion to channel the sound.
There are several places in Britain (and elsewhere, I imagine) where beam engines have been preserved and are periodically run using live steam. the engines themselves are quiet by modern standards, though I believe the machinery they drove often produced a racket.
Various double-blind studies involving cell-towers also show no effect. Of folks claiming some kind of electromagnetic hypersensitivity, the greatest sensitivity seems to be whether they can see if a power-light is on or not.
Some may have real symptoms, but the cause is something else inside or outside them.
kjs3 · 2h ago
There is a dedicated group of people who believe any electromagnetic emission is affecting them negatively. Searching on "electromagnetic free zones" is quite the rabbit hole. And there's way more to them than the "5G is mind control forced on us by the Illuminati for the New World Order" crowd.
For examples of other books that show how much technology rapidly changed the world, I can't recommend "The Victorian Internet" [0] highly enough. (It describes the impact of the telegraph).
I remember reading the book in the mid to late 2000s and it felt so "current" in describing events of the day e.g.
- local newspapers were basically crushed by "international news" that arrived immediately
- the rate of commerce rapidly accelerated as people could communicate instantly around the world
- financial markets were impacted by the "low latency trading" of the day thanks to financial news being sent via telegraph.
- there is even a section about lawyers debating if contracts and marriages could be signed over the telegraph (like this on in particular as this was a debate in the early ecommerce days)
I was then shocked to find that it has been published in the 1990s. Really is a reminder that "new" technologies are often just updated versions of old technologies.
(NOTE: the link above takes you to a later edition)
AshamedCaptain · 5h ago
If you have children, I am often surprised how they seem to think that the previous generation was stone age. Particular example is that my daughter was surprised I would give orders to my broker via fax, and that the latency was practically the same they get on the free tiers of their online 2020s bank (this is France). My trusty old ThinkPad, which still boots as if 30 years hadn't passed, still has all such digitalized sent/received faxes I did in the 90s..
bigstrat2003 · 5h ago
Children in general have a very hard time grasping the idea that their parents' lives resembled their own at all. For another example, look how every generation of teenagers, without fail, thinks they are the first people in the world to invent having sex for fun. I myself didn't understand how my parents used to easily catch me in most of my attempts to get away with trouble, until I realized (as an adult) that they caught me so easily because they tried the same sorts of things as kids themselves. It's just human nature, I guess.
b7r6 · 2h ago
My late grandmother had a pithy turn of phrase when I would act like she "just didn't get it".
"Kiddo, every generation thinks they invented sex and fast music."
dylan604 · 5h ago
I heard an anecdote recently where the kids asked mom what it was like when they were a kid. Mom collected the mobile devices and turned off the internet.
api · 3h ago
What’s funny is that I hear today’s conservatives moral panicking about kids apparently not having sex or breaking the rules like they used to. The narrative goes that they are too busy just staring at screens and being placated.
Conservatives. I hear conservatives saying this. That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now.
I don’t know how true this fun recession is. The stats say there’s a kernel of truth to it but it’s being exaggerated, and if you talk to young people they say it’s as much about the high cost of anything as digital distraction. It’s become crazy expensive to do things in the real world.
Terr_ · 1h ago
> That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now.
I suspect that's because what they [0] overtly asked for was not what they actually desired. The true desire was to be obeyed, for their teens to eagerly mold themselves onto stated parental-priorities, disassociating with peers their parents had a bad feeling about, etc.
In other words, control, rather than outcomes.
[0] Here, I'm treating "conservative parents" as a persistent group identity, even though individual membership changes over the decades. The ocean-wave exists even when it's not the same water molecules, etc.
titanomachy · 2h ago
Blaming this on cost doesn’t really make sense. Sex and minor delinquency are extremely cheap forms of entertainment (as long as you successfully avoid pregnancy).
thomassmith65 · 5h ago
I occasionally notice that people younger than me seem more impressed by smartphones than me (and I assume, maybe incorrectly, my generation).
One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.
To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived through - and less qualitatively different than, for example, personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public.
My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll. People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio already had been playing for a decade.
Terr_ · 35m ago
> One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.
Probably over-analyzing this, but I can see why this might happen:
1. There's an ulterior motive of getting them to treat it safely, as it's one of the more-expensive and breakable things they might be carrying around, and they become obstreperous if it is unavailable.
2. It's probably the most immediate and tangible candidate. They probably aren't going to be around MRI scanners or cryo-cooled qubits or whatever.
tasuki · 4h ago
I'm 40 and very impressed by smartphones.
Back in my day, we had a separate (wired) telephone, a camera, a notepad, paper maps, a walkman, and a million other things. Now I just have a phone and it can do all that and lots more.
thomassmith65 · 4h ago
That's a valid observation, but we both lived through the advent of the modern PC, and the PC eliminated far more tools than that.
It's a convenience to carry around one smart phone instead of a dumb phone, a digital camera, and an iPod... but today that fills me with no more wonder than the advent of any of those three devices on their own.
TheOtherHobbes · 3h ago
Smart phones are a pinnacle product that combines materials science, supply chain management, electronic engineering, product design, graphic design, operating system design, application development, computer science, quantum electro-optics, digital signal processing, communication theory, satellite communication, and marketing - all in a small handheld device.
Not only are they absolutely miraculous, but they're commodity products that make the miracle seem routine and mundane.
thomassmith65 · 3h ago
When I watched the 2007 Apple keynote where Jobs announced the iPhone, it completely blew me away.
These days the smartphone doesn't fill me with awe anymore the same way many earlier and even subsequent inventions still do.
It's possibly because I could carry on quite easily without a smartphone. The greater loss would be for me to live without a mobile phone (of any variety), a computer, or a portable music player.
GolfPopper · 4h ago
I was born in the early 70s, and growing up in America's Mountain West had the reverse experience until personal computers and the internet arrived in the early 90s.
From the perspective of my childhood, technology (cars, planes, phones & faxes, rockets, computers, refrigerators and other household appliances, rock music, radio, movies, television, science fiction & fantasy, the machinery of war, factories, farming, medicine, etc) were all elements of society that had advanced in technological progress, but had "always been there". I, of course, knew that there was a world before all that - my great-grandfather, who lived into his 90s and whom I got to know well, had driven a stagecoach as a teenager - but all of those had entered something like their modern form during or in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and to me it seemed like there had been progress, but not systemic change, in all the time since. It helped that all the adults around me largely saw WWII as the defining event of modern history. There was "before the War" and there was "now" (which came after the war).
Partly that was result of being born at the right time - the space program was in full swing, computers were a staple of fiction and large business but no more, the counterculture had come and gone, etc. The world really seemed like a timeless place to me as a child, and then about the time I reached adulthood, the Cold War ended, and the Internet Era arrived, and the world changed (and continued to change).
villedespommes · 5h ago
Because it was in many ways, the same as a generation before that and one before that.
40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then.
All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
thomassmith65 · 4h ago
It sounds callous to dismiss any improvement to medicine as trivial, but frankly I grew up under the assumption that humanity would cure diabetes, cancer, blindness, deafness and perhaps death itself by the end of the millennium.
It's much more noteworthy to me how little medicine has changed than how much.
Telemakhos · 2h ago
I was talking with a historian of medicine who surprised me with the observation that the age of cures was past, and that we lived in the age of management. Antibiotics gave us cures, and vaccines eradicated diseases, but those advances had their limits: there is no penicillin for viruses or cancer. Advances since the mid-twentieth century have been more about managing conditions, which is much more profitable. Cure syphilis, and the patient goes away happy; treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.
kortilla · 47m ago
>treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.
This is oft-repeated but it doesn’t pass the smell test. All it takes is a single principled academic to blow the whistle if there was any active suppression of cures or even research on cures.
In order for that quip to hold water, literally everyone involved in medical research would have to be a corrupt monster maintaining a worldwide conspiracy to keep sick people coming back for more treatments.
thomassmith65 · 36m ago
There's no conspiracy to suppress cures, but research funding is more attainable the larger the eventual profit.
kjs3 · 3h ago
I guess I grew up in 'then', and that sort of 'assumption' is so depressing. But I get that some people only want to see medicine, and by extension science, as black-and-white.
"We haven't cured diabetes" (only made massive strides in control and management and came up with whole new classes of drugs that attack root causes). "We haven't cured cancer" (except the ones we have cured, the ones we came up with vaccines to prevent (HPV), and came up with all sorts of innovative and less unpleasant treatments extending lifespan with less side effects), "Haven't cured blindness or deafness" (except for the types we have cured).
And haven't cured death...well, I guess you got us there.
But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
owenversteeg · 2h ago
I agree with you that we’ve made progress. To me, the most impressive achievement has been nearly curing cystic fibrosis and our array of tools for dealing with HIV. And yet I think it’s important to be honest. The age-adjusted diabetes mortality rate per 100k has been pretty much flat for thirty years. Life expectancy growth has been meager and the US has fallen far behind Europe. Overall health/physical fitness/mental health seems to be on a steep decline. 90s and 2000s optimists had high hopes for the world. They would have good reason to be horrified at things today.
bee_rider · 1h ago
If we’re lagging behind Europe, that doesn’t seem to be an issue of progress, right? If they are ahead, then the tech must be here ready. And we’re a bit richer than them, so we could presumably afford to implement whatever policies they are doing. Living just seems to be a higher priority over there…
kortilla · 37m ago
Meh, it’s just a reflection of there not actually being much medical progress and lifestyle becoming the dominant tie breaker as the few breakthroughs we do have spread through the world.
“We can’t fix most damage to any organ so follow a lifestyle that minimizes it” is not a meaningful medical advance IMO.
thomassmith65 · 48m ago
That reaction to my comment seems like a pavlovian response - like a response to past interactions with social media culture warriors.
It's not a sound assumption that everyone must either be "impressed by the progress of medicine within my lifetime" or "anti-science".
kortilla · 39m ago
>But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
Good comment until here. This is a strawman.
There is a huge gap between the vision of what medical advances might have brought us with technological breakthroughs and what has actually materialized.
Cloning and stem cell research was supposed to let me grab a new organ whenever I needed it. Instead I’m still waiting for a poor person to get in a car wreck and be declared brain dead so they can scoop out whatever is useful.
Cancer is still killing half of my family members, just different kinds after a cancer breakthrough helped them with an earlier kind. Others are hit by strokes, heart failures, and the occasional horrific Alzheimer’s.
50 years I’ve heard doctors saying “it was just their time” as an excuse for some old person dying. The field barely has a grasp on human biology and we’re barely making inroads.
ics · 4h ago
At what age did you notice that? My daughter is 5 and more often than not assumes that life before her was exactly the same as she experiences. Once in a while though she’ll ask if we had iPads made of wood or something like that which is amusing.
bahmboo · 4h ago
Usually when they become teenagers. Smug little know-it-alls!
dylan604 · 5h ago
PBS did a special on how TV news came to dominance with coverage of the JFK assassination called "JFK: Breaking the News".
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
It’s about how if you think about distance as spacetime, that trains moved cities closer together by making the distance between them shorter. They shrink the world.
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham
About how Soviet era projects thought they could throw pure labor at massive scale engineering problems to overcome any problem, to their detriment.
WalterBright · 4h ago
I read that book. It is indeed a wonderful history, especially for people who think digital communications are something new :-)
EvanAnderson · 3h ago
An interesting thing about communication systems depicted in "The Victorian Internet" is that it was an internet. Messages could be routed between postal services, telegraph, bicycle messengers, pneumatic tube systems, etc.
bahmboo · 4h ago
I would also recommend "The Information" by James Gleick. It covers all of known history so of course the scope is much broader, but there are familiar themes that accompany communication breakthroughs e.g. a train with a fleeing bank robber moves faster than the speed of our communication so we are all going to die.
eszed · 5h ago
That book - first published in 1998 - was one of my favorites for a while. An overt theme was the the astounding parallels between early-internet culture and the social practices of telegraph operators. At night (particularly) they'd stay "online", shooting the breeze with each other, forming long distance friendships - even romances! - and semi-anonymously socializing in ways that felt immediately and intimately familiar to those of us were on the internet around that time. I think that 'net is nearly as dead as the telegraph, so I wonder how the book lands for readers who didn't experience that milieu.
wrp · 4h ago
The Penny Post, introduced in England in 1840, may have been an even greater catalyst of social change. Within urban areas, communication latency was surprisingly low. Londoners got five deliveries per day.
mhalle · 4h ago
You might also like "When Old Technologies Were New", which describes about how electricity and communication in the home changed society.
For instance, it tells the possibly apocryphal story of how the telephone allowed male suitors to call reach young women directly and thereby bypass both protective parents and long-time traditional romantic competitors. Getting a phone call was so exceptional that people had not yet built up any social defenses for it.
Doesn't make a lot of sense, since the same families that would have had a servant or parent answer the door would answer the telephone the same way. It's not like young misses were carrying phones in their skirt pockets. A more widely-accepted explanation for dating is economic: young women forced into apartment living and jobs in the city as their families lost the farm and couldn't keep their adult children anymore.
- Bailey, Beth L. (1988). From Front Porch to Back Seat. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Henry, O. (1906). "The Unfinished Story". The Four Million. McClure, Phillips & Co.
aspenmayer · 4h ago
https://amzn[.]to/4frEGyC is a referral link, and referral links are not canonical links, which the guidelines implore us to use.
The above url resolves to the following (which I have rendered safe/non-clickable by slightly mangling the url with “[.]” in place of “.”):
I love the show the Knick because it’s about the crazy medical advances during that period - it has the crazy innovation feel instead of the typical period setting - watch it if you can - Clive Owen and Steven Soderburgh
The acceleration is evident in public health trends as well, especially in perinatal and childhood deaths and infectious disease.
The last 150-200 years really is remarkable historically speaking. I don't think we've grasped what to do with it completely.
elcritch · 5h ago
I believe it'll take centuries before a new equilibrium is reached. There's likely a lot of challenges and strifes to come in this century alone.
ofalkaed · 5h ago
Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is an interesting read on this and explores the rapid changes in a far more human way than anything else I have read on the period. He renders it as the period when technology and knowledge ceased being things of the select few and become a large enough part of the average person's life, and this being what caused the real change; knowledge fundamentally changed society's relationship with the unknown and technology played a shell game with what is inconvenient. His treatment of photography and the development of film is really interesting and does an amazing job of showing what we lost as well as what we gained.
eschulz · 6h ago
I'm reminded of how time pieces such as sundials changed societies, and how some ancients almost lost their minds due to this new development.
“The Gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish the hours---confound him, too Who in this place set up a sundial
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small pieces
! . . . I can't (even sit down to eat) unless the sun gives leave. The town's so full of these confounded dials . . .”
― Plautus
go_elmo · 6h ago
Finally someone who understands me. Whatever becomes measurable, becomes controllable, which is the antidote to freedom, wildness, life (to some extent)..
sdenton4 · 5h ago
My favorite Samuel Delany story is about a woman in a village who invents writing, and teaches it to all the children. She makes a rule that you're never allowed to write down people's names, as it will inevitably lead to keeping records comparing people, and thus leading to strife...
le-mark · 4h ago
I haven’t read that one, do you know of a collection that has it?
sdenton4 · 3h ago
I believe it's in Tales of Neveryon, 'the tale of old venn.' The whole series is extremely incentive and goes on some very different directions... The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals in 'Flight from Neveryon' was also particularly mind blowing.
supportengineer · 5h ago
I’m ethically torn whether to upvote this
dylan604 · 5h ago
Being able to have simplicity of working on a task until it is done when society didn't have these per hour scheduling concepts. I remember hearing this referenced when learning about Amish and Native American cultures. Essentially, this is what were doing. When it is finished, we move on to next. No arbitrary start/stop time because some hand on a dial is pointing at a certain number.
jfengel · 3h ago
Note that Plautus was a comic writer, so you have to take it with a grain of salt. I'd treat is like a Seinfeld observational humor joke -- realistic but exaggerated.
verbify · 5h ago
> some ancients almost lost their minds due to this new development
Platus lived 254 – 184 BC. Sundials are from 1500BC. While it's a great quote, it certainly wasn't a new invention when he wrote it.
noosphr · 5h ago
Electric cars were invented in 1881 a full 4 years before the first internal combustion car.
whaleofatw2022 · 5h ago
Kinda interesting to ask what would have gone different if the infrastructure was in place to make electric cars 'good enough' as far as charging infrastructure.
ben_w · 4h ago
As I understand it, the core problem back then was the batteries would mass half the car and lose a third of their maximum capacity in just 500 charging cycles.
Back when cars were new, there was no infrastructure for petrol either, that was something you got in tiny quantities from a pharmacy. (The diesel engine can run on vegetable oil, but I don't think Mr Rudolf Diesel himself ever did that?)
userbinator · 4h ago
The batteries of the time were far less energy-dense and charged slowly. Lead-acid was the norm for EVs.
kjs3 · 3h ago
Infrastructure requires demand, and energy density and convenience of a contemporary battery versus gas engine means that no one was going to demand batteries when ICE was an option. We only figured the downside much later.
Being invented doesn't mean that they became commonly used. Many ancient inventions took thousands of years to rollout and be adopted by the vast majority of humans.
mitthrowaway2 · 5h ago
Perhaps, but the quote also doesn't read to me like someone ranting about a new invention, just one that he wished had never been invented. Just like I might find myself occasionally cursing whoever invented the idea of an office building, even though it predates me.
verbify · 5h ago
Sure, but is there anything in that quote that suggests it's a reaction to new technology rather than just a rumination on existing technology?
xandrius · 5h ago
Yep, they definitely could have bought it from Amazon.
bee_rider · 1h ago
I don’t really get what this comment is suggesting. It is seemingly sarcastic, because obviously Amazon didn’t exist at the time. But Amazon didn’t invent the concept of long distance trade…
inglor_cz · 5h ago
The Mediterranean was a tightly connected civilizational region, so if a certain invention was in use anywhere, it would spread at the speed of a sailing ship to the rest of the coast.
Already prior to the rise of the Roman Empire, there was a massive network of Phoenician and Greek colonies that would trade with one another constantly, from Cadiz to the Levant. The sea was a highway to them.
Amazon did not exist, but cunning merchants absolutely did, and they knew how to make money by selling attractive goods.
WalterBright · 4h ago
Using a vertical stick to track the sun's position goes back much, much further.
zzo38computer · 5h ago
I do believe that time keeping, computers, and other technology are overused and overly relied on. (There is also damaging other stuff due to these technology, which is another issue. There are other issues too; these are clearly not the only thing.) They have their uses, but should not be excessive at the expense of anything else. If they fail, then you won't do unless you know and have not destroyed the older possibility, and if they do not fail, then you may be trapped by them. You should not need to know what time it is to sit down to eat, or to wake up and to sleep, etc.
cgh · 5h ago
Anyone interested in a fictional take on this period could consider Pynchon's "Against the Day", although it is no light challenge. It takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the years following WW1 and, appropriately, tells a sprawling, disorienting story that feels overwhelming at times.
wileydragonfly · 5m ago
Came for insufferable comments, left satisfied.
The last paradigm shift was radio, everything since then has been evolution and miniaturization.
leeoniya · 5h ago
> “Automobilism is an illness, a mental illness. This illness has a pretty name: speed... [Man] can no longer stand still, he shivers, his nerves tense like springs, impatient to get going once he has arrived somewhere because it is not somewhere else, somewhere else, always somewhere else.”
Previously:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
-- Blaise Pascal (~1650)
owenversteeg · 1h ago
For some good writing on boredom, check out Joseph Brodsky’s In Praise of Boredom - a short speech from 1989.
teamonkey · 4h ago
Pascal’s quote rings differently today.
ksenzee · 2h ago
I'm curious how. We have a lot more potential distractions now, but the same inability to just be.
ChrisMarshallNY · 6h ago
If I remember correctly, the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics; which, I guess, was kind of a big deal, back then.
JJMcJ · 6h ago
They manufactured bicycles, then the apex of precision mass produced products, and they also had a quite scientific approach to the design of their aircraft, with wind tunnels, for example.
They were also the first to understand that steering the airplane was best done by warping the airfoils. Now we do it with rudders and elevators and flaps, then they did the whole surface.
WalterBright · 4h ago
They were also the first to devise a mathematical propeller theory that enabled them to have 90% efficient propellers. The flat propellers used by others were only 50% efficient.
BurningFrog · 5h ago
Nice! I never realized that they were working in the "hi tech" of the time.
Their accomplishments make more sense to me now!
JJMcJ · 2h ago
They are sadly underestimated as technologists.
le-mark · 3h ago
The wing warping patent applied to flaps too, as Curtis found after a long legal battle.
I remember reading Theodore Roosevelt's biography by Edmund Morris and being shocked how he was basically able to text everyone he needed to be in contact with while president through the telegraph system.
If you think america moved too fast in the beginning of the century, try Russian Empire. Not only the same technological marvels as everywhere in the west, but also three revolutions and several wars. Change of government from monarchy to parlamentarism to socialism.
Also, countless posts, painters and new genres of art.
If you know Russian, Dusk Of The Empire podcast is pretty cool.
> Blom begins with Stravinsky, whose famous orchestral work The Rite of Spring was inspired by ancient Russian dance rituals. A melange of old folk music and arresting dissonance, the piece’s first performance in Paris 1913 triggered one of the most infamously violent reactions of any concert-hall audience in history. As Blom puts it bluntly, “all hell broke loose”:
> “During the first two minutes the public remained quiet,' Monteux [a musician] later recalled, “then there were boos and hissing from the upper circle, soon after from the stalls. People sitting next to one another began to hit one another on the head with fists and walking sticks, or whatever else they had to hand. Soon, their anger was turned against the dancers and especially against the orchestra... Everything to hand was thrown at them, but we continued playing. The chaos was complete when members of the audience turned on one another, on anyone supporting the other side. A heavily bejewelled lady was seen slapping her neighbour before storming off, while another one spat in her detractor's face. Fights broke out everywhere and challenges to duels were issued.”
There’s something about the image of a concert hall full of rich, fancy people erupting in a melee that is just delightful
Aidevah · 29m ago
The main reason for the commotion during the Paris premiere seems to be the publicity which whipped up the audience on both sides and made a clash inevitable. The Russian ballet had been playing the snobbery of the Paris audience for Stravinsky's two previous ballets, but misjudged the response in the third.
The subsequent performances, the London premiere, and the Paris concert premiere in 1914 all went off without a hitch. And the status of the Rite has only steadily increased ever since.
As Taruskin says, the music of the Rite is actually not very difficult to appreciate[1]:
> While it was at first a sore test for orchestra and conductor, and while it took fully half a century before music analysts caught up with it, The Rite has never been a difficult piece for the audience.
> The sounds of the music make a direct and compelling appeal to the listener’s imagination, and the listener’s body. In conjunction with Stravinsky’s peerless handling of the immense orchestra they have a visceral, cathartic impact. They leave—and to judge from the history of the score’s reception, have always left—most listeners feeling exhilarated. It is only the mythology of The Rite that would suggest anything else.
The excellent book, “Rites Of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age”—which uses this infamous incident as a jumping-off point from which to explore Modernity as an incipient artistic and social phenomenon that accelerates during the interwar period—concludes that this account of the crowd’s reaction was, at the very least, highly embellished, and not dissimilar to tall tales about crowds fleeing from the Lumière brothers’ image of a train bearing down upon them. But since these stories are contemporary to the events, they do nevertheless tell us something important about the spirit of the age.
andrewparker · 6h ago
If this is your cup of tea, it's worth reading about the Astor Place riots over Shakespeare performances in NYC
Basically two seperate Theatre movements, one favored by the posh thr other favored by the working class. The two scenes came to an actual riot on Astor Place and lead to the wealthy retreating from class mixing.
GOD_Over_Djinn · 6h ago
I most certainly will, thank you for the suggestion!
eszed · 5h ago
> concert hall full of rich, fancy people
Not to harsh your schadenfreude buzz, but this is not the right image. Classical music was mass culture at the time.
Opera, in particular, was popular with all classes. (There's a delightful sequence in, I think?, "The Leopard" of brick-layers coming to blows over the merits of one singer versus another.) Recordings of famous singers were the first "hit" gramaphone records. Enrico Caruso sold out concerts all over the world - and (in legend, at least) sometimes gave impromptu balcony concerts to disappointed punters gathered in the street below.
russellbeattie · 6h ago
You know, I just listened to it [1] and I can see why there was such a strong visceral reaction to the piece! "Dissonant" is definitely the right description. It's almost painful to listen to, especially if you were expecting normal concert music. Is it enough to cause a riot? Maybe!
USA had a nearly constant per person economic growth rate of 2%/year in the last ~150 years, perhaps going as far back as the beginning of industrial revolution.
Extrapolating such curves into the future suggests the current AI revolution is simply the last and latest node in a string of revolutions and it's nothing special.
If you think about it, having the world's all information at your fingertips (google), and in your pocket (iphone) might have been equally revolutionary. And before that came TV, radio, car, train, boat, plane, electricity, gas engine, steam engine etc as revolutions.
There's nothing that suggests the economic output per person is accelerating beyond the historical 2%/year. What could be reasons? Perhaps limited electricity, compute, AI model quality, computer speed etc.
So, the more analytical side of me thinks what we're experiencing is nothing extraordinary. It's just another revolution in a string of many :)
Obviously, my other, the more human side gets scared and feels afraid about the meaning of life, and humanity's place in it.
visarga · 5h ago
Yes, for information and reference we already had Wikipedia and billions of web pages indexed in Google, searchable by keyword. For questions we had reddit, StackOverflow and forums. For chatting we had social networks, chatting with real humans. For image we had only search, but within billions of images. Faster than gen AI, and made by humans. For code we had hundreds of thousands of repos.
We already had the genAI goodies for 2 decades. It's not going to be such a shocking change.
dgfitz · 5h ago
Statistical next-token predictors that aren’t even correct some of the time, and are currently crafted to pass tests, isn’t what I would consider revolutionary.
They’re neat tools. They help some people (a much, much smaller group of people than most think) be a bit more productive.
If LLMs are considered revolutionary, we are stagnating.
russellbeattie · 6h ago
I can't imagine what it would have been like to grow up with horse and carriages only to see us landing on the moon before you die. That's some serious societal whiplash.
I do like to imagine future generations looking back on the era of the internal combustion engines with absolute horror.
"You won't believe this, but for like 200 years, any time a person wanted a machine to move stuff, those apes would carry around tens of gallons of some crazy toxic combustible fluid which they'd spray into a heavy block of metal then bung 20,000 volts of electricity through it to make it explode. Just to spin a wheel! Then they'd pump the poisonous fumes out from the rear of the machine like a cloud of evil flatulence. Into the same air they breathed! There were literally billions of these machines all over the planet. Everyone owned one! There was so much of it, the planet started getting hotter! It was crazy!!"
Projectiboga · 4h ago
Tech changed at a much faster and drastic pace then compared to now. Another example the first ever nightclub opened and ran from the early 1870s until 1910.
The Haymarket Historical Marker https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=121028
vbezhenar · 5h ago
I'm envy of people of the past having real freedom in their lives. I wouldn't be surprised that future generation would envy of us, who have the freedom to move fast anywhere.
mjamesaustin · 5h ago
That will pale in comparison to how future generations view plastics.
Imagine if we ate and drank out of lead paint containers constantly for decades before discovering their health impacts. That's basically what has happened with plastics.
teamonkey · 4h ago
Lead was used as a sweetener in food for hundreds of years
kaelwd · 1h ago
And pewter cups and plates for thousands
SoftTalker · 5h ago
Plastic isn’t remotely as toxic as lead
ben_w · 5h ago
Indeed.
Here's one for you: There's a 10–15% chance, even barring radical life extension tech, that I'll live long enough to see the moon completely disassembled by von Neumann replicators.
There's several things that it depends on which are TRL 1-3, but are known to be at least theoretically possible. Based on how long it takes to get other things from TRL 1 to working device, I think it's most likely to take longer than my current remaining life expectancy even to be even odds, but not by such a large margin as to be infinitesimal odds.
nathan_compton · 4h ago
This seems enormously optimistic to me, both as a technological assertion and a cultural one. Like even if we could build self-assembling nano-machines (nota bene: we can't even build self assembling macroscopic machines) why would we use them to disassemble the moon? I mean a 0.1 % chance, maybe. But 10% chance? Nuts.
ben_w · 4h ago
Culturally? Nuts, sure, but you've been following the news right? Humans are nuts.
> we can't even build self assembling macroscopic machines
TRL-1 tends to imply such statements :)
… although, is that actually true? For macroscopic, I mean? Given factories exist and robot arms are part of them, are you sure nobody has used a robot arm to assemble an identical robot arm from a pile of robot arm parts? I've not heard of anyone actually doing so, but are you sure that's never been done?
nathan_compton · 4h ago
Essentially, completely sure. Also, purely energetically, disassembling the moon basically could not occur on the timescale of a few years.
This can only be done if the VN machines are able to form a useful cloud away from the moon immediately after they've disassembled the surface layer. If they aren't allowed to do that, it would take 415 millennia: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.244e29+J+%2F+%281kW%2...
But you can make it twice as fast by getting the first layer to lift the second layer to cislunar orbit, then combine the power of both layers; then four times as fast etc. etc.
I don't know the upper limit before the main constraint is cooling.
ryankrage77 · 4h ago
Dismantling the moon would disrupt the Earth's orbit, so the most likely version of this scenario is not beneficial/benign (e.g, grey goo scenario), so you need to factor in the chance that you'll be dissasembled before you see it happen to the moon.
ben_w · 4h ago
> Dismantling the moon would disrupt the Earth's orbit
Not by itself. I basically agree with your broader point, of course, but on this particular detail, if someone's goal is to turn the moon into something like a Culture Orbital with the Earth at the centre*, the overall momentum of the system doesn't need to change.
* Or the old barycentre at the centre. This is also a terrible idea, please don't do this. Apart from anything else, mistakes are inevitable and large chunks of moon/O will rain down on us.
komali2 · 3h ago
> Physicians warned that "diseases of the wheel" came by "the almost universal use of the bicycle" and that "serious evils" might befall the youth who rode without restraint. Moralists condemned women who “pedaled along gleefully, having discarded their corsets and put on more practical clothing, including trousers.”
Modern takes on gender roles feel as deeply unserious to me as this take. Whenever I hear about the tradwife trend or hear some pundit blaming the "fertility crisis" on women liberation it sounds just like these 20th century takes.
louwrentius · 6h ago
I’m not anxious about rapid technological change.
I care about the fact that technology is used to undermine democracy and destroy social cohesion.
rjbwork · 5h ago
Yeah but like 23 dudes can have more money than god, so this is a moral imperative.
marc_abonce · 6h ago
Based on the title I thought that the article was going to include the Mexican Revolution, which also started in 1910.
abbadadda · 5h ago
> Disoriented by the speed of modern times, Europeans and Americans suffered from record-high rates of anxiety and a sense that our inventions had destroyed our humanity.
Were they wrong?
BurningFrog · 5h ago
If they're right, our humanity was destroyed long before any of us were born.
So... how would we know?
chairmansteve · 5h ago
Maybe "destroyed" is too strong a word. I would say "suppressed" is better, at least for some people.
Spend 3 days in deep nature, or meditate etc, and you can uncover your humanity....
lm28469 · 5h ago
Yeah our lives are mostly noise, we flip between working and "chilling" with virtually no inbetween idleness anymore.
Go look at the clouds, or better the stars, for some time. But don't do it tool long because you might start wondering why the fuck you're wasting so much time and energy fulfilling other people's TODO lists
djeastm · 5h ago
Humanity had its inherent problems well before any technology was invented.
saulpw · 5h ago
Yes but technology exacerbated them. The great wars of the 20th century killed 10s of millions of people, 10x more per year than any other conflict.
bawolff · 4h ago
Maybe, but what about per capita? More people participating equals more people killed, but at the same time i dont think you need high technology to engage in a mass slaughter, swords work just as well.
saulpw · 2h ago
A sword can kill one person at a time. A gun can kill 10 people at a time. A bomb can kill a hundred people. A nuclear bomb can kill thousands.
You can certainly commit mass slaughter with less technology. But then you need either a) more people to do the slaughtering, or b) more time. Technology makes it possible for a few people to slaughter many people in very little time.
teamonkey · 4h ago
Man-made climate change is also new experience for humanity.
WalterBright · 4h ago
Even ancient wars wiped out whole peoples. Like the Carthaginians.
Eisenstein · 3h ago
We could kill the same number of people today with a single conventional air strike.
WalterBright · 11m ago
Percentage of population-wise, I presume we are killing far fewer people.
Macha · 4h ago
One example that was recently pointed out to me: the first 737 was closer in time to the wright brothers first flight than to today
_carbyau_ · 4h ago
I mean, did you check that?
Wright brothers:[0] 1903
"They made the first controlled, sustained flight of an engine-powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903"
737-100 :[1] 1967
"the initial 737-100 made its first flight in April 1967"
1967 - 1903 = 64
2025 - 1967 = 58
So in three years your statement will be true. As of now, it is false - unless you count the start of 737 development time I guess?
PS: This is also "backed up by Gemini" with the google search phrase "is first 737 flight closer to first wright brother flight than now?" .... but I'd rather do the math.
_carbyau_ · 1h ago
Huh. I'm an idiot. For some reason I figured that in three years time the "time between wright brother first flight and 737 flight" would vary by 3 years. But no. That is a constant.
So to revise my statement, in six years your statement will be true....
My apologies.
robocat · 3h ago
Is there a reason so many articles are referencing the book Abundance?
Neeek · 37m ago
The article's author co-wrote Abundance.
Merrill · 4h ago
A favorite book on the period is "Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914" by Frederic Morton. Freud's city was one of the centers of Europe's neuroses. It was also a center of political ferment under the lid weighted down by the Hapsburg monarchy.
Notably, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, and Tito were all there at the same time.
labrador · 5h ago
I recently finished an audiobook that describes the history of cocaine and opiate use in that era. The drugs were unregulated until addiction became an issue. I'm interested in how drugs shape our society so I appreciate books like this that fill in the missing history.
David Farber - Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed [Audiobook]
It was extremely widespread in Russian Empire too. To the extent that not only poets and artists used morphine and cocaine, but also some high ranking officials. One of the police chiefs, for example, was both morphinist and alcoholic.
gus_massa · 5h ago
> cultural critics of the early 1900s were confident that it was unnatural for people to move so quickly
Google says that horses can go up to 70 km/h (45mi/h). Did cars (and bicicles) go so fast then?
mitthrowaway2 · 5h ago
In the book The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the ways the eponymous Count flaunts his unfathomable wealth is by posting many horses to wait for him in advance all along the highways, allowing his carriage to travel all across France in a single night by continually changing to fresh horses. Even his wealthy rivals are astonished by this feat. So while it may have been technologically possible it would have been very expensive.
Animats · 3h ago
> Google says that horses can go up to 70 km/h (45mi/h).
That is the fastest speed for a Thoroughbred racehorse over a mile. It's not sustainable for long. The horse record for 100 miles is 17MPH, on a really good Arabian.[1] 6MPH is a good working pace for a horse. 8-12 MPH at the trot, which can be kept up for a hour or two by many horses in good condition.
According to this [0] thread, typical car travel speeds were between 10 and 20 mph. They even mention specifics like:
> in 1904 in NYC the limit was set to 12 mph inside of the city and 15 mph outside of it.
With that 12 mph figure being a little under the average running speed of the record holder marathon runner (26.2 miles in 2 hours flat, so 13.1 mph).
Now of course, most people are not record holding athletes, so sustaining these speeds on foot is not really happening for most. But you can definitely at least keep up for the duration of a sprint. So no real need for a horse even, your own legs can make do, despite these speeds being supposedly unnatural.
You can also sustain these speeds with a bicycle today, not sure about the bicycles of then.
That's basically a full out sprint for a relatively fast horse. Most can't sustain that for long and definitely not with a lot of load. Steam, gas, and diesel engines were and are capable of sustaining that for long durations with greater load, hence why it seems so jarring. Especially for large loads, even the earliest trucks were probably moving must faster than draft horses.
ceejayoz · 5h ago
No one said it was a rational objection.
bgwalter · 5h ago
In other news, radioactivity was embraced to the point that radium was used everywhere (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls) and shoe stores were offering x-rays.
Today, even the Internet's positive impact is wildly debated, the LLM copyright issues are wildly debated and no data exists for the long term impact of LLM usage on the reasoning faculties (if you tell me that the article was not posted to discredit LLM skeptics, I have a bridge to sell you).
perching_aix · 4h ago
And then radiation became a staple in medicine with the proliferation of radioimaging and radiosurgery. But then the Therac 25 thing and Chernobyl happened, and we're in this scare #2 era since.
It would seem to me that the public sentiment of stuff is not very trustworthy in general, especially at its typical intensity. Both when it's negative or positive. The word "multimedia" still makes me gag a little, for example.
ares623 · 6h ago
Thankfully nothing horrible happened in the next 10 years or so
cs702 · 6h ago
Yeah.
Anyone with even a vague awareness of history is aware of the historical parallels.
Let's hope saner heads will prevail in these times of rapid change.
bravesoul2 · 5h ago
Can be break the systems that keep leading us to the next such war. For example the lack of true representation for the people. The seige of governments by the rich and "elite". Stupid decisions made by people who kill their kids for a buck (referencing climate change). Dismantling of international conventions that were the result of people from a harder time saying "hold on... this is too fucked".
readthenotes1 · 6h ago
No doubt exacerbated by, and in turn promoting, neuroasthenia
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that caught the cycling craze; He turned away the good old horse that served him many days; He dressed himself in cycling clothes, resplendent to be seen; He hurried off to town and bought a shining new machine; And as he wheeled it through the door, with air of lordly pride, The grinning shop assistant said, "Excuse me, can you ride?"
"See here, young man," said Mulga Bill, "from Walgett to the sea, From Conroy's Gap to Castlereagh, there's none can ride like me. I'm good all round at everything as everybody knows, Although I'm not the one to talk - I hate a man that blows. But riding is my special gift, my chiefest, sole delight; Just ask a wild duck can it swim, a wildcat can it fight. There's nothing clothed in hair or hide, or built of flesh or steel, There's nothing walks or jumps, or runs, on axle, hoof, or wheel, But what I'll sit, while hide will hold and girths and straps are tight: I'll ride this here two-wheeled concern right straight away at sight."
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that sought his own abode, That perched above Dead Man's Creek, beside the mountain road. He turned the cycle down the hill and mounted for the fray, But 'ere he'd gone a dozen yards it bolted clean away. It left the track, and through the trees, just like a silver steak, It whistled down the awful slope towards the Dead Man's Creek.
It shaved a stump by half an inch, it dodged a big white-box: The very wallaroos in fright went scrambling up the rocks, The wombats hiding in their caves dug deeper underground, As Mulga Bill, as white as chalk, sat tight to every bound. It struck a stone and gave a spring that cleared a fallen tree, It raced beside a precipice as close as close could be; And then as Mulga Bill let out one last despairing shriek It made a leap of twenty feet into the Dead Man's Creek.
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that slowly swam ashore: He said, "I've had some narrer shaves and lively rides before; I've rode a wild bull round a yard to win a five-pound bet, But this was the most awful ride that I've encountered yet. I'll give that two-wheeled outlaw best; it's shaken all my nerve To feel it whistle through the air and plunge and buck and swerve. It's safe at rest in Dead Man's Creek, we'll leave it lying still; A horse's back is good enough henceforth for Mulga Bill."
The Sydney Mail, 25 July 1896.
And it’s about bicycles.
Fascinating.
Sure, positive mindset is important, but it can only take you so far when northern wind makes you cough because there is a dozen factories out there, or when you are chronically sleep-deprived because a noise source you might not even know exists switches on at ungodly hours.
Low-frequency sound waves can be brutal. Something can just happen to resonate where you are, but meters away everything is fine. To make things even more interesting, go low enough and you might not actually be hearing it per se, but feeling it with your body. Good luck explaining it to people who can enact change.
Relatedly, Benn Jordan investigated[0] certain sound that some refuse to believe is real yet others suffer from.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_ctHNLan8
There are several places in Britain (and elsewhere, I imagine) where beam engines have been preserved and are periodically run using live steam. the engines themselves are quiet by modern standards, though I believe the machinery they drove often produced a racket.
Some may have real symptoms, but the cause is something else inside or outside them.
I remember reading the book in the mid to late 2000s and it felt so "current" in describing events of the day e.g.
- local newspapers were basically crushed by "international news" that arrived immediately
- the rate of commerce rapidly accelerated as people could communicate instantly around the world
- financial markets were impacted by the "low latency trading" of the day thanks to financial news being sent via telegraph.
- there is even a section about lawyers debating if contracts and marriages could be signed over the telegraph (like this on in particular as this was a debate in the early ecommerce days)
I was then shocked to find that it has been published in the 1990s. Really is a reminder that "new" technologies are often just updated versions of old technologies.
0 - https://amzn.to/4frEGyC
(NOTE: the link above takes you to a later edition)
"Kiddo, every generation thinks they invented sex and fast music."
Conservatives. I hear conservatives saying this. That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now.
I don’t know how true this fun recession is. The stats say there’s a kernel of truth to it but it’s being exaggerated, and if you talk to young people they say it’s as much about the high cost of anything as digital distraction. It’s become crazy expensive to do things in the real world.
I suspect that's because what they [0] overtly asked for was not what they actually desired. The true desire was to be obeyed, for their teens to eagerly mold themselves onto stated parental-priorities, disassociating with peers their parents had a bad feeling about, etc.
In other words, control, rather than outcomes.
[0] Here, I'm treating "conservative parents" as a persistent group identity, even though individual membership changes over the decades. The ocean-wave exists even when it's not the same water molecules, etc.
One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.
To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived through - and less qualitatively different than, for example, personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public.
My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll. People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio already had been playing for a decade.
Probably over-analyzing this, but I can see why this might happen:
1. There's an ulterior motive of getting them to treat it safely, as it's one of the more-expensive and breakable things they might be carrying around, and they become obstreperous if it is unavailable.
2. It's probably the most immediate and tangible candidate. They probably aren't going to be around MRI scanners or cryo-cooled qubits or whatever.
Back in my day, we had a separate (wired) telephone, a camera, a notepad, paper maps, a walkman, and a million other things. Now I just have a phone and it can do all that and lots more.
It's a convenience to carry around one smart phone instead of a dumb phone, a digital camera, and an iPod... but today that fills me with no more wonder than the advent of any of those three devices on their own.
Not only are they absolutely miraculous, but they're commodity products that make the miracle seem routine and mundane.
These days the smartphone doesn't fill me with awe anymore the same way many earlier and even subsequent inventions still do.
It's possibly because I could carry on quite easily without a smartphone. The greater loss would be for me to live without a mobile phone (of any variety), a computer, or a portable music player.
From the perspective of my childhood, technology (cars, planes, phones & faxes, rockets, computers, refrigerators and other household appliances, rock music, radio, movies, television, science fiction & fantasy, the machinery of war, factories, farming, medicine, etc) were all elements of society that had advanced in technological progress, but had "always been there". I, of course, knew that there was a world before all that - my great-grandfather, who lived into his 90s and whom I got to know well, had driven a stagecoach as a teenager - but all of those had entered something like their modern form during or in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and to me it seemed like there had been progress, but not systemic change, in all the time since. It helped that all the adults around me largely saw WWII as the defining event of modern history. There was "before the War" and there was "now" (which came after the war).
Partly that was result of being born at the right time - the space program was in full swing, computers were a staple of fiction and large business but no more, the counterculture had come and gone, etc. The world really seemed like a timeless place to me as a child, and then about the time I reached adulthood, the Cold War ended, and the Internet Era arrived, and the world changed (and continued to change).
40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then.
All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
It's much more noteworthy to me how little medicine has changed than how much.
This is oft-repeated but it doesn’t pass the smell test. All it takes is a single principled academic to blow the whistle if there was any active suppression of cures or even research on cures.
In order for that quip to hold water, literally everyone involved in medical research would have to be a corrupt monster maintaining a worldwide conspiracy to keep sick people coming back for more treatments.
"We haven't cured diabetes" (only made massive strides in control and management and came up with whole new classes of drugs that attack root causes). "We haven't cured cancer" (except the ones we have cured, the ones we came up with vaccines to prevent (HPV), and came up with all sorts of innovative and less unpleasant treatments extending lifespan with less side effects), "Haven't cured blindness or deafness" (except for the types we have cured).
And haven't cured death...well, I guess you got us there.
But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
“We can’t fix most damage to any organ so follow a lifestyle that minimizes it” is not a meaningful medical advance IMO.
It's not a sound assumption that everyone must either be "impressed by the progress of medicine within my lifetime" or "anti-science".
Good comment until here. This is a strawman.
There is a huge gap between the vision of what medical advances might have brought us with technological breakthroughs and what has actually materialized.
Cloning and stem cell research was supposed to let me grab a new organ whenever I needed it. Instead I’m still waiting for a poor person to get in a car wreck and be declared brain dead so they can scoop out whatever is useful.
Cancer is still killing half of my family members, just different kinds after a cancer breakthrough helped them with an earlier kind. Others are hit by strokes, heart failures, and the occasional horrific Alzheimer’s.
50 years I’ve heard doctors saying “it was just their time” as an excuse for some old person dying. The field barely has a grasp on human biology and we’re barely making inroads.
https://www.pbs.org/video/jfk-breaking-the-news-d7borr/
Similarly, CNN essentially became the mainstay with live coverage of the start of Desert Storm in '91.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Gulf_War
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
It’s about how if you think about distance as spacetime, that trains moved cities closer together by making the distance between them shorter. They shrink the world.
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham
About how Soviet era projects thought they could throw pure labor at massive scale engineering problems to overcome any problem, to their detriment.
For instance, it tells the possibly apocryphal story of how the telephone allowed male suitors to call reach young women directly and thereby bypass both protective parents and long-time traditional romantic competitors. Getting a phone call was so exceptional that people had not yet built up any social defenses for it.
https://a.co/d/fnBimUx
- Bailey, Beth L. (1988). From Front Porch to Back Seat. Johns Hopkins University Press. - Henry, O. (1906). "The Unfinished Story". The Four Million. McClure, Phillips & Co.
The above url resolves to the following (which I have rendered safe/non-clickable by slightly mangling the url with “[.]” in place of “.”):
https://www.amazon[.]com/dp/B07JW5WQSR?bestFormat=true&k=the...
Here is a non-referral link to the same product page:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JW5WQSR
The book has its own Wikipedia page, which would have been a non-commercial option, which would lessen any potential conflict of interest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet
https://youtu.be/08V4RHGuGqE?si=pyXBEJ4PpR0o1M5r
The last 150-200 years really is remarkable historically speaking. I don't think we've grasped what to do with it completely.
“The Gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish the hours---confound him, too Who in this place set up a sundial To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small pieces ! . . . I can't (even sit down to eat) unless the sun gives leave. The town's so full of these confounded dials . . .” ― Plautus
Platus lived 254 – 184 BC. Sundials are from 1500BC. While it's a great quote, it certainly wasn't a new invention when he wrote it.
Back when cars were new, there was no infrastructure for petrol either, that was something you got in tiny quantities from a pharmacy. (The diesel engine can run on vegetable oil, but I don't think Mr Rudolf Diesel himself ever did that?)
Already prior to the rise of the Roman Empire, there was a massive network of Phoenician and Greek colonies that would trade with one another constantly, from Cadiz to the Levant. The sea was a highway to them.
Amazon did not exist, but cunning merchants absolutely did, and they knew how to make money by selling attractive goods.
The last paradigm shift was radio, everything since then has been evolution and miniaturization.
Previously:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
-- Blaise Pascal (~1650)
They were also the first to understand that steering the airplane was best done by warping the airfoils. Now we do it with rudders and elevators and flaps, then they did the whole surface.
Their accomplishments make more sense to me now!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
If you know Russian, Dusk Of The Empire podcast is pretty cool.
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCL7ox52jCNuMcckQSc0o5HQ#botto...
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> Blom begins with Stravinsky, whose famous orchestral work The Rite of Spring was inspired by ancient Russian dance rituals. A melange of old folk music and arresting dissonance, the piece’s first performance in Paris 1913 triggered one of the most infamously violent reactions of any concert-hall audience in history. As Blom puts it bluntly, “all hell broke loose”:
> “During the first two minutes the public remained quiet,' Monteux [a musician] later recalled, “then there were boos and hissing from the upper circle, soon after from the stalls. People sitting next to one another began to hit one another on the head with fists and walking sticks, or whatever else they had to hand. Soon, their anger was turned against the dancers and especially against the orchestra... Everything to hand was thrown at them, but we continued playing. The chaos was complete when members of the audience turned on one another, on anyone supporting the other side. A heavily bejewelled lady was seen slapping her neighbour before storming off, while another one spat in her detractor's face. Fights broke out everywhere and challenges to duels were issued.”
There’s something about the image of a concert hall full of rich, fancy people erupting in a melee that is just delightful
The subsequent performances, the London premiere, and the Paris concert premiere in 1914 all went off without a hitch. And the status of the Rite has only steadily increased ever since.
As Taruskin says, the music of the Rite is actually not very difficult to appreciate[1]:
> While it was at first a sore test for orchestra and conductor, and while it took fully half a century before music analysts caught up with it, The Rite has never been a difficult piece for the audience.
> The sounds of the music make a direct and compelling appeal to the listener’s imagination, and the listener’s body. In conjunction with Stravinsky’s peerless handling of the immense orchestra they have a visceral, cathartic impact. They leave—and to judge from the history of the score’s reception, have always left—most listeners feeling exhilarated. It is only the mythology of The Rite that would suggest anything else.
[1] https://avant.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/Richard-Taruskin-Res...
Basically two seperate Theatre movements, one favored by the posh thr other favored by the working class. The two scenes came to an actual riot on Astor Place and lead to the wealthy retreating from class mixing.
Not to harsh your schadenfreude buzz, but this is not the right image. Classical music was mass culture at the time.
Opera, in particular, was popular with all classes. (There's a delightful sequence in, I think?, "The Leopard" of brick-layers coming to blows over the merits of one singer versus another.) Recordings of famous singers were the first "hit" gramaphone records. Enrico Caruso sold out concerts all over the world - and (in legend, at least) sometimes gave impromptu balcony concerts to disappointed punters gathered in the street below.
1) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EkwqPJZe8ms
Extrapolating such curves into the future suggests the current AI revolution is simply the last and latest node in a string of revolutions and it's nothing special.
If you think about it, having the world's all information at your fingertips (google), and in your pocket (iphone) might have been equally revolutionary. And before that came TV, radio, car, train, boat, plane, electricity, gas engine, steam engine etc as revolutions.
There's nothing that suggests the economic output per person is accelerating beyond the historical 2%/year. What could be reasons? Perhaps limited electricity, compute, AI model quality, computer speed etc.
So, the more analytical side of me thinks what we're experiencing is nothing extraordinary. It's just another revolution in a string of many :)
Obviously, my other, the more human side gets scared and feels afraid about the meaning of life, and humanity's place in it.
We already had the genAI goodies for 2 decades. It's not going to be such a shocking change.
They’re neat tools. They help some people (a much, much smaller group of people than most think) be a bit more productive.
If LLMs are considered revolutionary, we are stagnating.
I do like to imagine future generations looking back on the era of the internal combustion engines with absolute horror.
"You won't believe this, but for like 200 years, any time a person wanted a machine to move stuff, those apes would carry around tens of gallons of some crazy toxic combustible fluid which they'd spray into a heavy block of metal then bung 20,000 volts of electricity through it to make it explode. Just to spin a wheel! Then they'd pump the poisonous fumes out from the rear of the machine like a cloud of evil flatulence. Into the same air they breathed! There were literally billions of these machines all over the planet. Everyone owned one! There was so much of it, the planet started getting hotter! It was crazy!!"
Imagine if we ate and drank out of lead paint containers constantly for decades before discovering their health impacts. That's basically what has happened with plastics.
Here's one for you: There's a 10–15% chance, even barring radical life extension tech, that I'll live long enough to see the moon completely disassembled by von Neumann replicators.
There's several things that it depends on which are TRL 1-3, but are known to be at least theoretically possible. Based on how long it takes to get other things from TRL 1 to working device, I think it's most likely to take longer than my current remaining life expectancy even to be even odds, but not by such a large margin as to be infinitesimal odds.
> we can't even build self assembling macroscopic machines
TRL-1 tends to imply such statements :)
… although, is that actually true? For macroscopic, I mean? Given factories exist and robot arms are part of them, are you sure nobody has used a robot arm to assemble an identical robot arm from a pile of robot arm parts? I've not heard of anyone actually doing so, but are you sure that's never been done?
This can only be done if the VN machines are able to form a useful cloud away from the moon immediately after they've disassembled the surface layer. If they aren't allowed to do that, it would take 415 millennia: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.244e29+J+%2F+%281kW%2...
But you can make it twice as fast by getting the first layer to lift the second layer to cislunar orbit, then combine the power of both layers; then four times as fast etc. etc.
I don't know the upper limit before the main constraint is cooling.
Not by itself. I basically agree with your broader point, of course, but on this particular detail, if someone's goal is to turn the moon into something like a Culture Orbital with the Earth at the centre*, the overall momentum of the system doesn't need to change.
* Or the old barycentre at the centre. This is also a terrible idea, please don't do this. Apart from anything else, mistakes are inevitable and large chunks of moon/O will rain down on us.
Modern takes on gender roles feel as deeply unserious to me as this take. Whenever I hear about the tradwife trend or hear some pundit blaming the "fertility crisis" on women liberation it sounds just like these 20th century takes.
I care about the fact that technology is used to undermine democracy and destroy social cohesion.
Were they wrong?
So... how would we know?
Spend 3 days in deep nature, or meditate etc, and you can uncover your humanity....
Go look at the clouds, or better the stars, for some time. But don't do it tool long because you might start wondering why the fuck you're wasting so much time and energy fulfilling other people's TODO lists
You can certainly commit mass slaughter with less technology. But then you need either a) more people to do the slaughtering, or b) more time. Technology makes it possible for a few people to slaughter many people in very little time.
Wright brothers:[0] 1903
"They made the first controlled, sustained flight of an engine-powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903"
737-100 :[1] 1967
"the initial 737-100 made its first flight in April 1967"
1967 - 1903 = 64
2025 - 1967 = 58
So in three years your statement will be true. As of now, it is false - unless you count the start of 737 development time I guess?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737
PS: This is also "backed up by Gemini" with the google search phrase "is first 737 flight closer to first wright brother flight than now?" .... but I'd rather do the math.
So to revise my statement, in six years your statement will be true....
My apologies.
Notably, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, and Tito were all there at the same time.
David Farber - Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed [Audiobook]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxm0hYnGezA
Google says that horses can go up to 70 km/h (45mi/h). Did cars (and bicicles) go so fast then?
That is the fastest speed for a Thoroughbred racehorse over a mile. It's not sustainable for long. The horse record for 100 miles is 17MPH, on a really good Arabian.[1] 6MPH is a good working pace for a horse. 8-12 MPH at the trot, which can be kept up for a hour or two by many horses in good condition.
[1] https://www.chronofhorse.com/article/world-endurance-record-...
> in 1904 in NYC the limit was set to 12 mph inside of the city and 15 mph outside of it.
With that 12 mph figure being a little under the average running speed of the record holder marathon runner (26.2 miles in 2 hours flat, so 13.1 mph).
Now of course, most people are not record holding athletes, so sustaining these speeds on foot is not really happening for most. But you can definitely at least keep up for the duration of a sprint. So no real need for a horse even, your own legs can make do, despite these speeds being supposedly unnatural.
You can also sustain these speeds with a bicycle today, not sure about the bicycles of then.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Writeresearch/comments/hmy0h4/what_...
Today, even the Internet's positive impact is wildly debated, the LLM copyright issues are wildly debated and no data exists for the long term impact of LLM usage on the reasoning faculties (if you tell me that the article was not posted to discredit LLM skeptics, I have a bridge to sell you).
It would seem to me that the public sentiment of stuff is not very trustworthy in general, especially at its typical intensity. Both when it's negative or positive. The word "multimedia" still makes me gag a little, for example.
Anyone with even a vague awareness of history is aware of the historical parallels.
Let's hope saner heads will prevail in these times of rapid change.