Pace of technology & progress

[DodgyGeezer]

Are we ever going to see as large a leap forward in technology as we did between 1900-1999? I mean we went from:

Not being able to fly to landing on the moon and having reusable spacecraft.
From machine guns to atom bombs.
A literacy rate of 20% to one approaching 90% and having the world’s information at your finger tips.
Steering wheels were first introduced inc.1899/1900 with a car top speed of 35mph or racers up to 73mph

That's not even mentioning the vast leaps and bounds in medicine and science.

Although the pace of change seems to be accelerating are the leaps forward quite as drastic as in the previous century, and why is going to be the next mind-blowing advance (providingwe dont blow ourselvesto kingdom come in the meantime)

[croyde]

It's all little things now, isn't it. The rise of the do it all smart phone.

I've got a usb drive bigger than my whole thumb that I bought for £60 maybe 20 years ago. 32mb

I was so proud of it as it held all my accounts and invoices in a Word format.

I bought a portable mini-disc player just before the iPod was launched. About £300 in 2002.

Yesterday I bought a pen drive with a normal USB one side and a USB C on the other. The bit with the memory is the size of my little finger nail. 64gigs for £10.

I transferred all of my old iTunes songs on to it to just stick it in the USB C slot of my new car. The cars infotainment system had no trouble playing the music files and even displays the album art on the central screen.

This is all amazing but certainly not as amazing as two guys flying a flimsy glider with a motor a few hundred yards being only 60 odd years from men landing on the moon.

Maybe all the big stuff has been done.

[captain_cynic]

croyde said:

It's all little things now, isn't it. The rise of the do it all smart phone.

I've got a usb drive bigger than my whole thumb that I bought for £60 maybe 20 years ago. 32mb

I was so proud of it as it held all my accounts and invoices in a Word format.

I bought a portable mini-disc player just before the iPod was launched. About £300 in 2002.

Yesterday I bought a pen drive with a normal USB one side and a USB C on the other. The bit with the memory is the size of my little finger nail. 64gigs for £10.

I transferred all of my old iTunes songs on to it to just stick it in the USB C slot of my new car. The cars infotainment system had no trouble playing the music files and even displays the album art on the central screen.

This is all amazing but certainly not as amazing as two guys flying a flimsy glider with a motor a few hundred yards being only 60 odd years from men landing on the moon.

Maybe all the big stuff has been done.

Where did you buy this for just £10. Tell me, tell me damnit.

The price of memory and flash storage is insane at the moment, I spent £300 on 32 GB of RAM and that was because it's the first time it's been below £300 for ages.

[croyde]

Actually may have been £13. On Amazon.

[ARH]

But how far have we come since 2000, which is 25% of the time you are talking about. I am sure there have been some big leaps in the last 26 years.

[Pistom]

There's lots of things which have also gone backwards in progress such as comfort in air travel, craftmanship in daily articles as a couple of examples.

Then there's those areas we seem to have made little progress with at all - such as wiping our arses with pulped trees. Where else on our body would we feel it's OK to wipe wet excrement off our skin just with a piece of dry paper?

[Landlubber]

Being able to cut you open and swap your heart and lungs with someone elses and you live. fk me that's astonishing.

Being able to whip a thin rectangle of plastic and glass out and find you can not only contact anyone, anywhere in the world but also see all of the human knowledge still in existence.

[Colonel Cupcake]

Battery technology isn't much better than when it was invented.

I cannot remember the exact comparison but I read somewhere that if battery technology had kept pace with computers, a battery the size and weight of a smartphone could power London for 10 years and cost about £5.

[768]

Space is the final frontier.

[vikingaero]

I used to buy a lot of computers for the extended family in the late 80's & 90's. Dells, Gateways, eMachines etc depending on budget/use. Every 3-6 months there was a doubling or exponential growth in processing chip power. Now it's gnats chuff progress.

[hotchy]

Still plenty to go in medicine. Bad heart? They'll grow you a new one that cant be rejected. Etc. Think that could already be near..

I wouldnt be suprised if they eventually "cure" ageing. Probably only ever be available for the billionaires though while the rest get old and die.

Space travel. Colonising planets. It seems as though it may actually happen aswel. Its a right shame I wont get to live forever and see it all unfold, but im glad iv had my time now when cars sounded brilliant.

[sjabrown]

There are still huge leaps.
In the current century the rise of the smartphone has had the largest impact in my day to day life - arguably I no longer need a laptop or PC. Banking is no longer cheques/cash/card machine but now mostly phone or contactless and a visit to a bank is a very rare occurrence. Navigating around the country? No longer paper maps or a satnav in the car as the phone can do it all. Photos? Phone camera for most (though a proper camera is still better). Contacting friends? Phonecalls and texts (at 5p per text!) have become still some phonecalls but more often whatsapp or other instant messages.

There are some huge and evolving leaps in medicine, particularly inflammatory diseases and malignancies with the rise of immunotherapies. Some malignancies that were a 6 month death sentence now have potentially several disease-controlled years. Some conditions like rheumatoid arthritis are now diseases to life with rather than suffer from. Whilst our lifestyles are progressively less healthy there are now GLP1s to deal with it, +/- ADHD meds arguably. We haven't solved general decrepitude or dementia and there is a question over how affordable all this is to society if folk are going to die less quickly from cancer.

[dave123456]

Pistom said:

Then there's those areas we seem to have made little progress with at all - such as wiping our arses with pulped trees. Where else on our body would we feel it's OK to wipe wet excrement off our skin just with a piece of dry paper?

I’m guessing that those of you bothered by this are sufficiently light in number that throwing any effort at solving your dilemma is not particularly worthwhile.

[Tracklover]

I think the rest of this century will see some inventions we cannot currently comprehend, brought about by AI and quantum computing.

A lot of impetus will also be around "fixing" things like the climate, the world economy, disease etc.

[Haltamer]

vikingaero said:

I used to buy a lot of computers for the extended family in the late 80's & 90's. Dells, Gateways, eMachines etc depending on budget/use. Every 3-6 months there was a doubling or exponential growth in processing chip power. Now it's gnats chuff progress.

To be fair, compute (Even on consumer level devices) has still continued to advance rather quickly all things considered, It just tends to go unnoticed as software bloat increases and software quality declines - That, and the normal interactions with computers tends to be things that leave the performance to go unnoticed; I think we’re at a point where like mass market cars, the devices people have are capable of far more than they would imagine, but they’re only interested in can it get them logged into Facebook.

When comparing to devices from even a couple of years ago, there has still been noticeable progress in raw / measured performance..

My home PC has 2x Xeon E5s (Now very dated, admittedly - From 2016) - My MacBook an M4 Pro;
The Xeons’ draw 170W, the M4 50W - Yet the M4 returns double the compute of them combined.

[Pitre]

Have to mention AI. It's growth is already prodigious and it is being exploited just about everywhere, but it will have an enormous impact over the next 10-20 years, and quite possibly not in a good way. I'm glad I'm old....

[Last Visit]

vikingaero said:

I used to buy a lot of computers for the extended family in the late 80's & 90's. Dells, Gateways, eMachines etc depending on budget/use. Every 3-6 months there was a doubling or exponential growth in processing chip power. Now it's gnats chuff progress.

Exactly. I've just bought a new laptop top and I was more bothered about the screen tech and the RAM than the processor, the differences between the current generation chip and the last one (or many other versions prior) having no bearing on what I use a laptop for.

[ninepoint2]

[quote=Pistom]There's lots of things which have also gone backwards in progress such as comfort in air travel, /quote]

Actually the whole airport/airline experience is dreadful these days

[21TonyK]

Tracklover said:

I think the rest of this century will see some inventions we cannot currently comprehend, brought about by AI and quantum computing.

A lot of impetus will also be around "fixing" things like the climate, the world economy, disease etc.

If "we" are not distracted by war, politics and greed.

[Alex_225]

ARH said:

But how far have we come since 2000, which is 25% of the time you are talking about. I am sure there have been some big leaps in the last 26 years.

I suppose the rise of the smartphone is one of the most significant to the average person. When I look back to when I was 18 in 2000, a lot of the tech we use day to day is simply better versions of the same thing. Laptops got smaller and more powerful as did PCs. The internet has got fast enough now that you simply stream everything you want rather than own it (which I think is a shame).

In the medical arena it certainly seems to have leaped more. My mum was diagnosed with ovarian cancer 3 years ago and in her mind it couldn't be cured, because it was often too late but she's now cancer free.

I would imagine when you take my nan at 92, she's seen so many completely new things in her daily life. Television, computers, the internet, commercial flight, even something as simple as the electric shower!