- cross-posted to:
- technology
- cross-posted to:
- technology
Today, progress is defined almost entirely by consumer-driven, often banal improvements in information technology. The US economist Tyler Cowen, in his essay The Great Stagnation (2011), argues that, in the US at least, a technological plateau has been reached. Sure, our phones are great, but that’s not the same as being able to fly across the Atlantic in eight hours or eliminating smallpox. As the US technologist Peter Thiel once put it: ‘We wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters.’
past technological progress will always seem more abrupt than one you live through yourself. reading a paragraph in a textbook makes it seem as if there there is a line in the sand where before it doesnt exist and after it is mastered. with contemporary technology there are numerous uneventful days at your bullshit job between breakthroughs to make the speed of history and progress seem glacial