In the US, life expectancy at birth was around 53 in 1921. Today it's almost 79. That's a nearly 50% increase.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-...

It's a particularly interesting time to discount the life extension benefits of modern technology. We just saw multiple vaccines get developed and deployed in record time to significantly reduce the death toll from a worldwide pandemic. It's unlikely we would have seen this remarkable success even a decade ago.

Much of the rest of what you say is also inconsistent with actual data.

Why did we make more progress before and less later? We have better tools, computers, and software. We have more people, both in the US and coming in from worldwide along with a greater portion of the population being college educated and free to work on scientific and engineering problems. We have better developed theories of biological, chemical, and physical systems. And yet, when we knew very little, had little resources, and few people working on the problem - we made huge strides. Now, not so much.

Maybe this issue is that we've already plucked the low hanging fruit. That doesn't seem quite right to me though. Even if we have, we should be equipped, via the advantages I referenced earlier, to pick higher fruits.

That having been said, for this particular example (life expectancy) it's typically a bit better to look at life expectancy at age x, often 5, 10 or 15 are chosen.

It's because infant mortality used to be sky-high, as 25% (one in four) in 1900 and 16% (one in 6) in 1950 worldwide, to < 2.9% today, with the best countries now around 0.2%.

If say one in four humans becomes virtually zero years old, that skews the average down a lot, e.g. from 65 to 40. But it doesn't mean that the average person who makes it through the first few years would've died at age 40.

If we look at improvements of life expectancy for those who already raeached age 10, it looks like this and is a pretty straight line with fewer indications of slowing down. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-10...

Not to sound harsh, but the main economic benefit is that now people need to have fewer children to maintain a stable population.

A lot more of my relatives died of heart attack or cancer in the 80s than those from the next generation did in the last ten years. In fact in the last few years I witnessed many people getting surgery for those same heart issues or cancer that would have killed you a couple decades back.

Which appear to be uniquely dangerous and ineffective, so it's odd to use them as an example of progress. Besides that, mRNA is not a new thing. What's new is the EUA.

This has nothing to do with productivity rise and where do we see its results (what is discussed here), but about the merits of technology.

Even so, the raise in life expectancy at birth is about those low hanging hygiene practices (nothing to do with post 1950 techology) and a few vaccines (most of which available before 1950s).

Not any big technological breakthroughs, like artificial hearts and so on (which hardly make a dent), and with extremely little to do with any post 1950s tech.

So the question of the article in the domain still remains, where's all this benefit from the productivity rise.

You continue to make claims that are inconsistent with the data.

But can you show me the exact breakthrough that came by this pouring of resources into the research, and that enabled such vaccines, by removing blockers that blocked such vaccines for decades?

So, the “breakthrough” was a brief suspension of questionable bureaucratic barriers. (Temporary suspension of “Dissipation” from the article.)

So as I doubted.

Naturally, the next question would be "What was the questionable bureaucratic barriers" that was temporary suspended. It really blows my mind that the answers to this is not widely known. It is kind of disturbing..

What about the quality of life? We know that people are getting sicker at a younger age, and if we consider that in addition to the ever increasing cost of the treatments, it does not appear to be a net positive.

Let's say hypertension is now diagnosed at 50 instead of 70. How many people used to die of a stroke between 50 and 70 due to undiagnosed hypertension?

So it technology take away some and then give back some (not without a huge cost, mind you), how can you evaluate its impact on human existence?

It's possible that the amount of single mother suffering has increased even though the suffering per single mother may have decreased. (No change, I expect, in the children's suffering)

1 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/276025/us-percentage-of-...

Of the people I know with kids like 50% of them were not married when they started having kids. They either got married latter or never married because there was no advantage to do so and they didn’t care.

Yet none of them are what you would call “single mothers”. They are all still together with the fathers of their children.

So basically it says more about marriage than it does about parenting.

Table CH-1 from this census website shows that children living with a single parent goes from 10% in 1960 to 36% in 2020. (=E13/C13) I'm not certain but I think they are accounting for cohabiting parents here because they don't use any language related to marriage and the census could tell if the parents were cohabiting or not.

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families...

Drug use, gang activity, and other criminality are all positively correlated with single-parent households, and some data shows even MORE positively correlated with single-mother, as opposed to single-father, households.

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/single-p...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316649639_The_effec...

https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/report/the-real-r....

https://ifstudies.org/blog/children-in-single-parent-familie...

I don’t remember where I saw the numbers, but in 1980 a microwave cost more than a months (average) salary. Today I can buy a good one for less than half a day’s earnings.

The answer might suprise you...

I have never heard anyone say, "Bosh made my life easier"

And it reminds me I'm on my second pump for a E12 error.

(After tossing too many Bosh appliances, I finally got lucky repairing one. The guys on the internet helped.)

How nicely should a consumer device be made? I feel like technological improvements make the device obsolete and disposable, so making the build quality higher just artificially slows down iteration time. (Why will 5G be widely adopted? Because eventually everyone will drop their 4G phone down the stairs or the battery will be uneconomical to replace.)

If you go back and look at old appliances, they basically have no value despite being well built. They don't solve the problem they were designed to solve anymore. A shitty laptop from Amazon is a whole different piece of technology compared to a hand-crafted Apple 1 from 1976, enabling you to do things that people wouldn't have even dreamed of when the Apple 1 came out. So making it "survive the test of time" is futile -- that computer isn't garbage because it was put together sloppily, it's garbage because technology advanced past it. (Probably a bad example, I think the Apple 1 was just a circuit board cobbled together in a garage.)

I feel like even consumer appliances have changed. Clothes washers use significantly less water. Stoves use precise electronic control instead of burning flammable gas that gets piped into your home. TVs display content on-demand, with 8.3 million individually-colored pixels and 6 channels of sound. Computers connect to a library where you can read pretty much any book ever written, right in your home. Technology changes so people discard their old devices and replace them with new ones. It's not just some scam to make companies that can't innovate some cheap money. Everything has a lifetime, and sometimes it's shorter than the lifetime of the physical materials that the device is built from.

Maybe you don't need any of that, and just want to read novels from the 1950s with your dog in a log cabin. That's totally legit, but where you think people excited about 4k TVs are weird, they probably think you're weird.

Honestly, I think phones are something people hate the most for being a little too breakable, but thinking about it more deeply, I think the right tradeoffs were made. They last as long as they need to on average. 10 years ago, the technology (hardware, software, connectivity, design, everything) was immature. So they broke more and cost less, because you were going to need to upgrade. Now we have $1200 phones, and they are a little nicer, and the technology isn't changing enough to make them obsolete every 6 months. This all sounds about right to me. I have a $1000 phone and thoughts about upgrading it haven't crossed my mind in the ~3 years I've had it. That is very different from the phones I had before that, where I felt like they were compromises on the day they came out. (And hey, I only paid $300 for them.)

TL;DR: maybe everything isn't awful all the time.

Hell, I was happy kid watching free cartoons on the Zenith?

While tech got bettter talent seems to have nosed dived? (exception being a lot of free talent on youtube)

The pure talent of the 60's-70's was magic, and that era was before my time?

I think we should reject 5G as a community.

Not because any danger of radiation. But I think people should be able to say "This is enough", and stop ourselves to be forced to think "We need moar!", thus put some block to this progress for the sake of progress..

May be it was.

You make a poor argument, because resources are limited, and "progress" will have to wait at some point. Human race can either opt into slower progress to match the available resources, or be selected out.

Indiscriminate growth is a hallmark of cancerous things. You can detect it, cut it out and attempt to survive, or surely die with it.

Finally, with regard to poor arguments, you should probably read this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

Obviously that is not the kind of progress we were talking about here in the context of transitioning to 5G here.

https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2019/9/energy-consumption-5...

It is the first time I hear this: the usual narrative is that it would require more towers. (And the idea of the emitters being more pervasive in the territory is one of the main concerns of some).

True.

> Up to 15 percent energy savings with software features

'Upto 15 percent' sounds alike it is a very optimistic estimate, (you know when they advertise 'upto 50% discount' most of the products are discounted at much lower rate). And it does not seem that this power saving is also dependent on network traffic. So I am not really convinced.