Honestly, it seems like you're just picking some incremental or marginal technological changes that happened, then promoting them to something more fundamental than they really are. Electric cars? Come on. They're barely even a change from a consumer perspective. Someone from 1950 wouldn't even notice the difference, unless you told them exactly what they were looking at.
And some of those other things are debatable. For instance: I deliberately stopped using GPS for several years, because I realized it was preventing me from building up geographic/navigational knowledge, and instead was just training me to follow instructions blindly and never learn anything (e.g. by picking weird routes that were marginally faster but very difficult to systematize). [Edit: The following is about non-map online information.] The computerized "knowledge at your fingertips" is a common slogan of computer-age propaganda, but it's probably true that a greater fraction of that "knowledge" is in fact garbage and overall may just be a marginal improvement.
Sufficiently advanced marketing is indistinguishable from technological progress.
The change over even 10 years ago is also really dramatic for how I use public transit, since I not only know where I am but where the vehicles I'm planning on getting into are so I can reroute that way. It's only in the past 5 years or so that the data has gotten reliable enough that I trust it to use in that way.
I remember what it was like to get lost, and be lost for hours, late at night nothing open, no one but unsavory characters out.
I remember how hard long trips could be even with maps or trip-tiks from AAA (which were awesome)
GPS enables all sort logistics, it allows transport companies to ensure trucks are driven safely, to know when and where goods in transit are there is an entire world of productivity improvement right there.
I'm not saying it's not useful. I'm just saying it's not as big of an advance as it's being made out to be.
> And come on, maps are excellent, there's no garbage there.
I've above clarified, but my "garbage" comment was not referring to maps, but other kinds of material you'd fine online. Maps are actually one of the few types of online references that tends to have very little garbage.
For me that’s incredible and very reliable. Thousand of kilometers to arrive in a place I’ve never been before without memorizing the road in advance is innovation. My dad never could’ve done that at my age.
You went all the way to Europe and didn't even look at a map? You could have been 100 yards from some amazing place and never even known it. Your dad never would have done that.
Technology has generally eliminated the worst scenarios -- getting totally lost or stranded -- but also generally eliminated the best -- discovering something new, an unexpected detour. I can also speak from experience and say that I barely remember the trips in which every detail was planned and executed exactly according to plan. The times when I was lost, or had no place to sleep, often turned out to be the best and most memorable trips of my life. Actually being forced to interact with other human beings has its upsides.
A GPS makes it even easier to discover the world
So not only convenience and leveling the information playing field, but pricing fairness. I'm sure quite a few minorities would have some testimonials about the benefits of getting quoted the same price as everyone else.
Did they say they had only room left and 3 people were looking at it right now, despite it being obvious the hotel was only half occupied?
However, I largely consider technology advances to be rather unimpressive, especially services and apps built on the internet. Access to information has definitely been improved though, but this is one of the few major improvements and now with more information being siloed behind corporate mega-sites we may be regressing back to the libraries for free access again.
On family trips in the 90s, I'm pretty sure my dad almost never paid the asking price for our rooms. If you were coming in from about the mid-evening on, without a reservation, but they still had some rooms unlikely to be filled, and there were any other hotels with vacancies around, they'd gladly knock off a few dollars if you asked, since the alternative was likely having $0 of income for that room, that night.
What I've noticed traveling more recently is that there seem to be fewer vacancies if you try that "just show up and find a room" thing (which used to almost always work out fine, except at extremely popular places on very busy travel weeks), like the whole industry's running with way less slack (i.e. more efficiently). But also room prices have gone batshit crazy, even more so than general inflation, so the savings from that efficiency doesn't seem to be reaching customers.
After moving there I've started to appreciate a decent, frictionless, fixed price service a lot more.
That’s a fine personal choice to make if you value building up geographic knowledge for its own sake, but I don’t really get your point. You could say the same thing about giving up your dishwasher because you value hand washing dishes for its own sake.
Wut? I call major bullshit on this. Yes, obviously electric cars generally do the same thing as ICE cars, but the consumer experience is so much better for me is that after owning an electric car I will never, ever even consider owning an ICE car.
I mean, by your analogy, an ICE car is just an "incremental or marginal improvement" over a horse and buggy. Heck, I've got to feed my horse grass and clean up after its poop, and I've got to "feed" my ICE car gas and clean up after its oil leaks. What's the difference, right?
Sure, not common in 1950, but the user experience difference between an ICE car and electric is, to a 1950s or 1910s person, basically noise. The ICE car is noisy, electric not. The acceleration, ride comfort, features - all are similar enough to be interchangeable to someone far removed from this time.
This is not true at all. Ride comfort and features is massively improved in todays cars compared to 1950. Or to 1980. That goes for both the driver and passenger.
Bottom line is that cars have been available to get us from point A to point B at high speeds for over 100 years and that is why we buy them.
Active (electromagnetic) suspension systems are a huge improvement over the 1970-80 land yachts that couldn't corner to save their lives.
Better yet, you can adapt your suspension system to ride however you want.
Get a sports car for fast corners.
The fact that the per-mile cost is much lower? Isn't that pretty much the definition of productivity?
Not a big deal. And on long trips with an electric car, don't you have to plan around relatively extended stops at (currently) relatively rare charging stations?
Took a quick look at the map of the superchargers exactly once before the trip, just to doubly make sure there are any at all on the way, and that was it. The car navigation system automatically added the needed one to the path and showed exactly the calculated amount of charge i should have left by the time i get to the charger and/or destination. There were at least 6 supercharger stations on the path to my destination (didnt even look at the regular chargers).
I didnt charge my car prior to the trip, it had about 40% charge before I headed out. A bit past halfway through to the destination, i stopped at a supercharger (that the car notified me about and added as a stop on the navigation as soon as i started the trip, because it calculated i won't have enough charge to make it to the destination). Charged the car to 90% in about 40 mins tops (was one of the older v2 145kW superchargers, the v3 ones that I've seen before are much faster), went to mcdonalds and stretched my legs in the meantime.
There was a tradeoff of stops vs charge time: i waited to 90% to avoid additional supercharger stops, but if i was ok with those, my stop time would have been even shorter, because the charge speed is faster the less charge you have, it is like a logarithmic curve. I.e., about 10 mins of wait for 100 miles of range on the lower end of the charge, but 40 mins if i want to reach the 90% (with the total range being about 330 miles total).
I went into a lot of detail to explain things here, but during that trip (around 400 miles total), at no point have i even thought of or planned for charging specifically, the navigation system handled it for me just fine with pretty much no detours. And i wasn't driving through dense city areas either. Once i got out of Seattle and nearby areas (about 30 mins into the trip), it was all rural areas through and through, but somehow they still had about 7 supercharger stations conveniently placed on the way.
Nope, sorry. An electric car is still just a car, not some revolutionary different thing. It gets you from A to be exactly the same, the only difference is you plug it in at night rather than visiting a gas station.
> I mean, by your analogy, an ICE car is just an "incremental or marginal improvement" over a horse and buggy. Heck, I've got to feed my horse grass and clean up after its poop, and I've got to "feed" my ICE car gas and clean up after its oil leaks. What's the difference, right
Nope, sorry. A car is an order of magnitude faster, have far longer range, haul more than a horse and buggy.
I don't agree at all. Especially in the sciences, the collaboration across countries over the internet has been tremendous. The ability to instantly know what papers are being published in your field and use their results to further your own research can't be overstated. We rely on that to do our work at our company. But going back to tech, the ability to do open source projects _at all_ wouldn't have been possible before. The interconnected nature reduces 'local maximas' of knowledge, skill and expertise. I have learnt so many things from watching youtube DIY channels that I otherwise would never have in my own local community.
And so I ask - What makes your claim "probably true"?
No it isn't. I moved to a new city and realized after a couple years that I still barely knew my way around. I then correctly diagnosed that the cause was the overuse of turn-by-turn directions. You're trying to frame it as some hipster cooler-than-thou thing, when it isn't.
If your use case is travelling to a new place once or twice and never again, there is no point memorising the route / area.
Memorising a route doesn’t help you figure out there is an accident on the route, or unusually heavy traffic.
I don’t disagree with you about memorising common routes and learning about your local area, it’s a good thing to do imo. It’s just no longer required because technology is good enough to let you get by without having to do that.
You really should go to some museum or google how cars in 1950 looked like, functioned and sounded.
> I deliberately stopped using GPS for several years, because I realized it was preventing me from building up geographic/navigational knowledge, and instead was just training me to follow instructions blindly and never learn anything
You are in minority there from pretty much all aspects. People are not ditching GPS. They are not looking into GPS constantly either, generally people don't go to places they don't know that often. And if you are refusing "weird shortcuts" then you are lessening your geographical knowledge even more - you are opting out for routes with easy to memorize milestones instead of learning how streets are really connected.
I was surprised the first time a Tesla went by because I had no idea a car could be that quiet.
IMO the Web has done a terrible job of realizing all the wonderful knowledge-spreading and educational purposes it was supposed to.
What it has done is make it so idle, trivial thoughts that would hardly have reached the level of consciousness before, become an itch until I find out the answer—because now I can find out the answer ("who was that one actor in that one show"). And it's great at answering those kinds of questions.
It's 2022 and in tons of fields you'll still run out of material on the Web as soon as you go past the barest surface of a topic, and have to go track down some books (which may have no digitized version, so I mean actual books). I have niche reference books from decades ago that are exactly the kind of thing that an online catalog-of-knowledge ought to be good at, but what's on the web is far less complete than them. That kind of thing.
All that, plus it's so crammed full of spammy shit that using it is like trying to track down a poorly-marked Little Free Library box on the Vegas strip.
Physical libraries with inter-library loan remain much more valuable overall—and university libraries, especially—which is kind of pathetic.
The most valuable sites on the Web are probably piracy websites like Library Genesis, and they still can't deliver everything you can get on dead trees. But they come the closest.
We definitely communicate vastly different than 30 years ago and prior.
Literally every piece of the car is in a different class and the tech is insane that just didn’t exist then, I mean it basically drives itself. It’s dramatically safer, more efficient, comfier, faster, quieter.
I no longer hate long drives, they’re quite nice. The speakers are amazing and the road noise is basically gone. I can stream anything, talk to friends anywhere in the world while driving, massage and heat my back, and do it all with half the gas at a cost that’s equivalent to the 4Runner when it was new back then. It also goes 110 as comfortably as the 4Runner would do about 60, and breezes up hills that the latter would break a sweat on. I press a button for roadside assistance, I lock and start/stop it from my phone, I don’t have to bother with the key, the list just never ends.
Meanwhile a car from 1965 honestly is a lot more similar to a 95 than a 95 to today.
Run out vs. new is a straw man w/r/t/ old tech vs new.
These are all iterative changes. You still stop at red lights. You still sit in traffic. You still have the same speed limit as everyone else. While someone from the 90s airdropped into 2022 would be impressed with the stock features of a '22 car, they would not experience any fundamental shift in the movement of goods and people. We still using the same barges, shipping containers, trains, cars & highways, and jets that we were back then.
Having just done two 12+ hour road trips, each, in both cars, I can say that it's not the same. The 4Runner I arrive tired, angry, back hurting, and dizzy from focusing on the road every second, having spent way more on gas. With the new car, I basically enjoy podcasts and movies on my dash while keeping an eye on the road and it does the rest.
We literally have mostly automated driving while turning cabins into ultra-premium dens filled to the brim with every comfort from massage to heat, and people claim it's not tangibly different. It's so, so different.
Even lives saved due to all the safety features and hardware is like hundreds of thousands of human-years of productivity. Reducing it down to "technically they go the same speed" is a silly game to play, I can reduce any opposing argument down in a very narrow and specific way and "win", but that's not the game.
I stand by cars being a great example of progress, and again we're talking velocity of change - compare 1968 car to 1995 cars to today, and it's not really debatable which one is a bigger leap.
Finally, this bits vs atoms is stupid. It's another arbitrary way of slicing things to win an argument. But even if we did want to cut out computers, phones, AI, high speed internet, etc - which we totally shouldn't - you only have to look to SpaceX, or all the crazy new manufacturing tech like industrial 3D printers and AI-powered robotic arms that are actually driving all the innovation in things like cars.
There's just too much tech in it that will go wrong, or be unsupported in 10 years.
No one will know how to fix it.
We are adding complexity where we should not be, but then cars are designed to be sold, not to be used for more than 3 years.
As the sibling comment points out on average longevity is way up, another point against older cars. Safety also way, way up.
Nostalgia mixed with contrarianism are potent drugs, but cars are the perfect case against things not changing, positive change has accelerated the last 20 years.
We often buy nice, comfortable, complex things with the assumption that the comfort and niceness of now as well as the infrastructure that lets them function well are static things that will never cease. Of course, they're not, and sometimes they can recede very abruptly.
Your second point is shifting the entire conversation to something else entirely.
I find it regrettable that sooo many comments focusing on "like" rather than actual hard results. The original topic is about the latter, not about the subjective experiences. And for results, a 1960s care got you from A to B pretty much the same as a 2022 one.
That does not make the subjective aspect invalid, but I would at least like to see some self-awareness in comments that we are talking about at least two separate things, and arguments for one are not useful for the other.
.
Recently I also found myself thinking about another aspect. It was when I looked at the tram station not far form my house, which for a year or so has been upgraded to have a display with the expected arrival times of the next three trams.
It sure is very convenient! However, compared to a similar transport system of fifty years ago, which achieved the same thing, we now have a lot of additional effort to maintain such infrastructure. It got waayyyy more complex, all the electronics, and software has to be written and maintained, screens installed and maintained, computer infrastructure - all just for some slight improvement in convenience.
Is it worth it? I have no conclusion, I just have to think about that when I hear yet another "we need more 'Fachkräfte'" (skilled workers). How many people do we need for mostly just minor convenience upgrades?
Sure, the transport system also can get more efficient with things like those displays. But here again, A LOT of additional effort, planning and thinking has to go into it for such gains to not just be theoretical. If we can afford it - sure, why not.
It's just that I have to think about the challenges ahead: The more stuff we produce and have to use energy on the worse for climate change and resource use.
I think it is good when new stuff is tried, but I have doubts that all those many minor "upgrades" are worth spreading so far. The effort for minor gains is gigantic, and we don't have free power, overabundance of skilled workers and free (material) resources (yet?). How much worse would for example said city tram system really be with less sophistication and IT?
I've become a bit skeptical about my own line of work. IT is nice and all and I love it, but it also takes a lot of effort to prepare and also to maintain. Here took, too many only look at the gains, which of course do exist. But there is a bias "newer and more complex is better" IMO.
Very much related:
"Humans solve problems by adding complexity, even when it’s against our best interests"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/04/16/bias-prob...
Nature (paywall, try Sci-Hub): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00592-0
> Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving
> A series of problem-solving experiments reveal that people are more likely to consider solutions that add features than solutions that remove them, even when removing features is more efficient.
I think our economic and financial system is an additional driver. Not doing something is "being lazy" and is punished (unless you are wealthy already). If you manage to sell stuff that is useless or even detrimental, you are fine, and there still is a wide gap between this and doing something criminal.
It looks to me like our own biases and our society and systems push us towards increasing complexity just for complexity's sake. Then come the biases that let us find the justifications but not see the downsides nearly as clearly. We also have a huge bias for measurable/quantifiable outcomes, and what things with an attachment to money.
All this complexity relies on huge supply chains also for maintenance. Given the possible issues ahead, both political and climate, maybe less complexity and more locality and less international-network requirement might be a good idea.
I am way more productive and happy:
- I save more money so I have more to spend towards productive uses.
- I don't die as often, living is productive.
- I listen to podcasts, diverse videos (just listening) or music, learning more during my drive.
- I call friends and family, enhancing connections and communicating more.
- The car drives for me, leaving me more relaxed and energized when I reach my destination, and I am more likely to travel further than I would normally.
- The car is much safer, lowering anxiety, so I use it more often for productive uses and generally feel safer and happier, and therefore more productive.
- It accelerates and coasts at higher speeds easily, so I get there faster.
- My back doesn't get sore nearly as easily (I get back pain easily sitting up), a huge productivity boost.
- The AC is cooler and heat is faster, sound is nicer, every material is nicer, tint is stronger, wipers are automatic and fast, lights are automatic and fast, etc etc - all this adds up to lower stress and higher safety, meaning less death, less injury, higher likelihood to use it productively, and less stress.
To wave away these things as minor is a very Thiel-like thing to do, but I find it ridiculous. You want to go to space? To be in the most inhospitable environment possible? What does that do for us, again?
I'd rather have better Wifi and more legroom on a flight than a rocketship that went 2x faster but didn't have either. We didn't get flying cars, we got unlimited knowledge and communication at the speed of light, even when flying through air. I'd like to fly a car, but again:
Cars from then 2020s are spaceships compared to cars from the 90s, while cars from the 90s are not really much different than those from the 60s. Within a decade we likely have self-driving electric cars completely dominate, and suddenly the Theilians look silly because all these "non-important" advances like, oh, computers and AI, suddenly solved a big problem, ignoring the fact that those same computers are already solving medical problems left and right, landing rockets from space, folding proteins, re-inventing Chess and Go, saving millions of man-hours of work, connecting people all over the world and greatly enhancing their general knowledge, amongst a few hundreds of other things.
> I call friends and family, enhancing connections and communicating more.
I also question the validity of statements such as these. It does not seem to me to be supported by evidence that our connections between people - and lets concentrate on connections between already connected people to remove the question if new tech lets us make new ones more often - are qualitatively better than in the past. I would think such a statement very much deserves a [Citation needed] response. I think a lot of your statements are equally... creative and subjective, or worse ("I don't die as often, living is productive.").
I don't feel like I know my friends or family very well these days, despite being friends for almost thirty years with some.
Twenty years ago we would talk on MSN or email and arrange to do something or hang out. These days you just see photos of their lunch.
I also feel like a lot of folks are scared to hang out, even pre-COVID, because they have nothing to talk about that isn't already on Facebook. What they do discuss is pretty much solely consumption of "I ate x", "I bought y".
I largely feel like folks have lost the art of conversation. Instead they're now content creators.
They have more hobbies and more interesting hobbies (the internet has really exploded the ability to learn about and try things, and new tech like kite surfing is popular with my friends). My wife learned how to sew during the pandemic using just YouTube.
There's a massive and tangential discussion to be had about tech and it's influence on culture and connectivity, but that's not for this thread.
I'm a bit baffled, what does your reply have to do with either of my previous comments? I mean what I actually wrote, I'm aware I prominently mentioned such a convenience feature. It's just that there was no question that it was convenient.
> It was when I looked at the tram station not far form my house, which for a year or so has been upgraded to have a display with the expected arrival times of the next three trams.
> It sure is very convenient! However, compared to a similar transport system of fifty years ago, which achieved the same thing, we now have a lot of additional effort to maintain such infrastructure. It got waayyyy more complex, all the electronics, and software has to be written and maintained, screens installed and maintained, computer infrastructure - all just for some slight improvement in convenience. Is it worth it? I have no conclusion, I just have to think about that when I hear yet another "we need more 'Fachkräfte'" (skilled workers). How many people do we need for mostly just minor convenience upgrades?
You made up some arbitrary thing that you admit improves quality of life, and I pointed out that your example doesn't really even capture the difference. 40 years ago you had to ask around, or call to ask about the times of tram. Now you can find the exact times, delays, of any tram anywhere directly from your tiny pocket supercomputer. The difference is so stark, and yet you focused on signs at the station when the revolution was in your hand.
---
Realizing you brought up like 5 different things, and now every time I refute one you're motte and bailey-ing to the next thing. I don't owe you to refute every point you put out, the thread here was a specific example of tech improving productivity, and I think it's definitive.
The study is ridiculous and proves nothing, and the rest is pathos and too broad to reply to.
I still don't see how the reply fits to the comments I made. You missed the point of my example by miles, is my impression still. I think I already expressed it well enough even in the original comment, so I have no idea how to re-express it for you.
> 40 years ago you had to ask around, or call to ask about the times of tram
No you didn't. The train or bus schedule was and still is posted at each station, and pocket watches have been a thing for a very long time. I find your style of a bit tiring to be honest.
> You made up some arbitrary thing
Even more misrepresentation! I did not make up anything! That happened!
> Realizing you brought up like 5 different things, and now every time I refute one you're motte and bailey-ing to the next thing. Realizing you brought up like 5 different things, and now every time I refute one you're motte and bailey-ing to the next thing.
You keep ignoring my point and keep talking about deliberate misrepresentations of some minor examples that merely serve as illustration!
> The difference is so stark, and yet you focused on signs at the station when the revolution was in your hand.
Given what the parent comment is about, the really huge difference e.g. between tech such as gas lights and electricity, or horse carriages and modern transport, your claim of a "stark" difference seems unjustified to say the least. You still get from A to B in about the same time and with at best a minor improvement in efficiency and convenience. It is certainly not a game changer to have computerized timetables compared to paper schedules plus watches and clocks, unless a transport system is so grossly broken that it barely ever runs anywhere close to the posted schedule.
I see no basis for you claims of "stark difference" and "revolution", given the context of this entire discussion. The Internet and computerization are, but not replacing paper tram schedules with electronic boards. Again, unless your experience is from some place where the paper schedules were completely useless and trains and buses ran randomly and you had huge random wait times. In which case they would still be far better off fixing their broken transport system so that the schedule actually has meaning.
> I don't owe you to refute every point you put out
You keep "refuting" what there never was to begin with. For example, as if I had said "there is no benefit" (of changes), a point I never made.
Never once did you even acknowledge (or ever even see?) my point, which is the position in a larger context. You keep attacking positions I never took. I will not repeat them here, since I already mentioned them in my original post.
You said this is your main point, and I directly replied to that.
Another point you made was that electronic signs at trams aren’t an improvement. I agree! Wholeheartedly. I mean showerheads haven’t improved either! We could list all sorts of things that either haven’t changed or that aren’t improved by tech. But that would be silly.
You in fact have avoided the very valid point I made in reply to that. Electronic tram signs are a red herring. The revolution is in your pocket. I can check flights, trams, buses, anything in about 15 seconds anywhere in the world. That is a huge productive improvement.
Anyway it’s clear this convo isn’t going well, but glad we had it. I very much got your other points, I just didn’t feel them relevant to the article or this thread, it’s a whole other conversation on simplicity or satisfaction, not really productivity. You can see one of my sibling replies for what I think about it.
> You said this is your main point, and I directly replied to that.
You don't refute my statement. You still only get from A to B in about the same time. It's just slightly more convenient. But if the schedule is actually kept by the trams it's not even that, you can just look at the posted paper schedule at the station. The difference in convenience then only is that you have to walk a few steps to see the much smaller print.
I never disputed the utility of GPS. Although there is indeed the disadvantage of using it too much, having lived long enough in the pre-GPS time using maps and/or trying to use just my brain to find my way felt good in different ways, and I still use that method when going somewhere where the journey is the goal itself. It's like when one of my flight instructors covered up all the instruments and got me to fly by sight - including things like angle of attack, at least in level flight (yes that only works for small planes, large ones must be flown by the numbers and instruments, same with IFR conditions).
You still overlook all the larger picture things, the systemic stuff. A discussion so limited to only the thing itself instead of the system is useless in my view, and quite boring, more like trying to gain the upper hand in a discussion by selecting a limited scope and reading into the comment only as much so you can find some angle of attack, instead of using good will and really actually trying to see one's point. You began like that right from the very start, when you started your first reply: "What a horribly myopic take". Zero good will and insulting. AFAICS you keep looking for ways to "win". This is quite tiring.
Also turning a smartphone with internet, realtime transit info, route planning, which can do it anytime in the future, anywhere on earth, and let you plan travel across any number of travel modalities (it shows me transfers between bus, train walking, weather along the way, etc) into... "GPS" is just a great example of myopia. And that's just scratching the very surface! For just the narrow, narrow use of travel, the phone solves whole entire large brick-and-mortar industries that used to exist like travel agents - remember, you used to go to a dedicated store to book travel? And trusted one person who actually didn't know much about anything? And they had like a few packages, and you browsed them in a low-res pamphlet? I mean really, travel is the topic you want to say hasn't improved, and your example is electric sign-posts? The, well, myopia in that is stunning.
But I worry even bringing in one extra point, because you've shown yourself to be the type who latches onto examples and reduces, rather than expanding. Remember - smartphones replacing travel agents in a 100x better fashion is but one of thousands of improvements it's made to transportation (Google search, Wikipedia, Tripadvisor, Uber, Getaround, Yelp, HotelTonight, Airbnb, online booking), which is but one of thousands of use cases it's done similar for.
And I pointed out ~10 ways I do accomplish more because of it, refuting exactly the point.
The rest of the comment cites a ridiculous one-off, narrow social science study with a few vague pathic appeals to the quaint simplicity of the before-fore-times.
I think you both want to zoom way-way out to 10-guy "like, what does accomplish even really mean? Isn't simplicity, like, the real accomplishment?" and I'm all for a simple life well lived, but that's pretty much re-defining the entire discussion to be about something else. And no one is getting rid of cars or phones at this point, I'd love to see that argument.
You write to me on an internet-connected device, on a forum on the web, from likely a laptop or phone built within the last 5 years. That same phone you likely use all day, every day for hours a day. And you'll argue it's somehow a sinister regression? So... why are you here? A laptop, the internet (and modern healthcare that saves lives, modern cars that save lives, etc) doesn't exist without "complexity". It's such a ridiculous attempt to de-rail an interesting and specific debate.
It's also such a uniquely HN-specific type of person that pines for olden days while distinctly relying on modern technology all day every day, so weird. The same types will laud the Framework Laptop - yet talk about reducing complexity and supply chain reliance.
People had lots and lots of paper maps. Every gas station had a rack of them. You'd probably have had a good spiral-bound one of your entire region in your car. Wrong turn? Just check the map and save God's help for later.
GPS, you just wait a second for it to update and you barely miss a beat.
So maybe if we by "productivity" mean "can get away without acquiring useful skills" then sure, "productivity" has definitely gone up.
Navigational skills are likely not only improving our mind in ways we might not otherwise appreciate, but also serves a countless practical scenarios. Something as simple as getting around at a large market or mall often comes down to the exact same skills as reading a map. In fact that is what you're often literally doing as you find a floor map to locate the location you'd like to go to.
There are also examples on the other side. Read this [1] warning from the national parks service about GPS and Death Valley. Multiple people blindly following GPS there have lost their lives because of it, and countless other similar locations that are quite remote and where what your GPS tells you, and what reality tells you may often contradict.
Finally, if we ever enter into a war against another major power - on day one of the war, all GPS is going to cease to exist for the foreseeable future (with the internet not far behind). Those satellites are sitting ducks and are going to be high priority targets. This shouldn't even be an argument, but this scenario is looking increasingly likely with every passing day.
It's been over 2 decades since I got lost outdoors (and then only for about an hour), but I do sometimes get lost in a complex urban environments. Which street goes where again? Especially when I'm on a continent I haven't been on for awhile. I've been told I have an excellent sense of direction.
I also grew up before hand held GPS was a thing, let alone smart phones.
Even back then, almost no one had a decent sense of direction, people got lost and delayed getting to new places all the time, etc. If you asked someone which way was North, at least 75% of people would have no clue or thought they knew and then pointed the wrong way.
The way people dealt with it was by NOT GOING TO NEW PLACES MUCH, or by bringing someone who had been there before, or just being late a lot the first few times.
I also think it's dumb to suggest someone be trying to juggle a (usually outdated) paper map and orient themselves that way, ESPECIALLY in traffic with little notice, instead of just using GPS. And if you think people are going to be able or willing to pull over somewhere to pull out the map and look, well, go watch what people actually do in traffic now and tell me again. A lot of people don't seem to be willing to even go to the next freeway exit when they miss theirs, preferring to rampage across dividers instead.
It also used to be people would bring someone along to be the navigator because it was so difficult. Now people can explore on their own easier.
In the event of a war and GPS gets taken out, solar apocalypses, etc. it's going to suck for that and many other reasons, but it's not like it helps suggesting they use the old terrible way in the mean time. Because even on a good day, that was pretty terrible.
Well yes, it’s exactly like that argument, and they’re both valid!
And I've never seen somebody who learned to navigate on a map effectively actually locate their position in moments.
Ah yes, “just” check the map. When I was a kid if my Mom made a wrong turn on a way to a doctor’s appointment a few counties over (I got sick a lot as a kid) I’d have to reach under my seat and figure out which of the multiple paper map books corresponded to where we were. Until GPS I had no visual sense of “where we were” when we were out of my town (I don’t understand the “relying on GPS makes you worse at navigating” people), so I was basically useless at reading or interpreting the maps. Mom would need to pull over, but that meant finding some way to get off the unfamiliar highway we’d just turned onto, which could take a few minutes (or more, if the exit we took put us on another highway).
So now we’re several minutes off course, flipping through the pages in this other county’s map, trying to figure out how to get to a doctor’s office in a building whose parking lot has a one-way entrance that’s in the back, but first we’re low on gas and need to find a gas station that hasn’t closed down since the maps were printed.
And then suddenly, we got this GPS thing, and this awful fixture of my childhood was gone. “Getting lost” just stopped being a thing around the mid-2000s. Screw the 1950s, 1990s me would find the current status of driving to be an unimaginable utopia.
GPS maps are an improvement not a major innovation, which is the main point. They are more convenient and require less skill, but they are functionally a paper map with a dot on it that changes based on your location.
Finding a gas station in an unfamiliar area, however, is definitely improved by a GPS map. So, you can now run the fuel tank down a little further before filling it up. Nice, but again not revolutionary in my opinion.
For example, when I tried picking up electronics as a curious high-schooler, I managed to pick up a clearance sale copy of The Art of Electronics - it had all the information I could possibly look for (and I'm pretty sure once could make a career in Electrical Engineering using nothing but that book as a source even today). I'm pretty sure I'd be hard-pressed to find such an accurate and comprehensive reference on that topic anywhere on the internet.
You can find The Art of Electronics on the internet... And you can put it on an old tablet with dozens of other reference books.
Furthermore, plenty of stores sell you files to consume however you want.
Oh and e-ink works fine in sunlight and lasts weeks without charging. And FYI, there's plenty of notetaking systems.
My partner and I have been using these e-ink devices for almost five years. Works fine. No replacement required thus far. It is a specialized version of Android.
The World Book entry on enormous subjects of great importance was still maybe a few pages long. Today, a fair amount of primary source material in archives on different freaking continents is available online.
Printed documentation for hardware and software was frequently not exhaustive and there was no way of asking for help quickly. Maybe you had a help line. Maybe you knew hobbyists in a local meetup group. But that old DOS manual wasn't anywhere near as useful as what is available today.
It's more productive having somebody show you how to do something, than trying to learn it yourself. Perhaps in the 1980s when the economy was going better, it was easier to connect with people willing to share, teach, mentor. Perhaps people have been forced to be more competitive now. Also, cut back in education meant many programs have been cut.
We would not feel so stagnant if manufacturing was more of a thing in N. America. Lots more factories with lots more 3d printers, laser cutters, drone, robots would exist. If you needed to get your hands on some such tool, you'd only have to ask around. 3D printers didn't penetrate the home like desktop publishing did in the 1980s and 90s.
We have all the internet but damn even books are better and broader today. I can order that rare special indy book and print it on demand and have it show up in 3 days
There's also no YouTube tutorial to tell you something like "don't mix types of metals for you gas plumbing or you'll kill your family" because there's no professional watching you make stupid mistakes.
What cut backs? We spend more on education than ever. We might be getting less out of it, but not for lack of spending.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.70.a...
Now I can just fire up a browser and understand a hard math concept in minutes in a much easier way. With free as in freedom CAS tools and such, and with a netbook bought at a ridiculous price 20x cheaper than the book volume set itself, which back in the day costed A LOT.
There are arguably more opportunities now for learning things from a professional than in the past.
Public schooling has very rarely been about mentorship anyway. Arguably higher education always was to some extent, but it very often still is; you end up in debt nowadays, but it's still widely accessible.
And I don't see what loss of manufacturing has to do with anything. Some of those manufacturing jobs were in skilled trades, sure, but there are still plenty of opportunities still to learn skilled trades. And even then, I don't think that has much of anything to do with learning things from a book at the library vs. a course on the Web.
What I see is that people have no clue anymore about where they are. They rely on GPS. Is this an improvement? As long as GPS is working, yes.
That’s a pretty bold statement supported by literally nothing, just because you don’t feel like certain tech has added anything doesn’t mean it hasn’t.
Productivity is an incredibly hard thing to capture, especially with the move to away from manufacturing and physical production.
One could easily argue that the productivity numbers are failing to increase because technology has lowered the barriers to entry all over the world so now there’s more competition for every good and service creating pricing pressure on the “value of goods and services produced”
One way to tell whether you're in an 80s house would be to look around for reference books, encyclopedias, rolodexes, filing cabinets. If you wanted to know more about something, you probably had to go to a library, which might not even have a book on the topic (maybe if you were particularly determined to know the answer you'd wait a few weeks for an ILL).
Its a bit sad to me that you look at this enormous sea change in how we interact with the world and see Angry Birds.