Also in what way are "refinements" not technological innovation? e.g. modern cars are massively safer, more reliable and comfortable.
The problem with that is there will be proto-inventions all around us that will later be improved and made economical, but we can't see them yet. So this approach is inherently biased, treating past and current innovation differently.
Not wrong, and I wouldn't want to 'regress', but compared that to going from using gas lighting and candles to the incandescent light, the introduction of LED lighting isn't as much of a step change.
Also remember that there was a noticeable improvement in efficiency with fluorescent lamps pre-1970s:
Except that the book isn't taking about "proto-inventions" but items that could be purchased and used by the general public, from transportation (planes, trains, automobiles), food-related (refrigeration, microwaves, even induction cooking), radios, television, medicine (penicillin/anti-biotics).
All the major inventions (except the Internet) that we would association with 'modern civilization' were invented pre-1980.
True to a certain extent:
> Research on rechargeable Li-ion batteries dates to the 1960s; one of the earliest examples is a CuF2/Li battery developed by NASA in 1965. The breakthrough that produced the earliest form of the modern Li-ion battery was made by British chemist M. Stanley Whittingham in 1974, who first used titanium disulfide (TiS2) as a cathode material, which has a layered structure that can take in lithium ions without significant changes to its crystal structure.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#History
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_lithium-ion_bat...
But even if we grant that Li-ion batteries were a post-1970s innovation/invention—as opposed to a refinement of something that came before—it would still be one of the few that occurred, as the referenced book argues.
Today, any average person can do video calls across the world.
The "invention > refinement" idea would call these the same thing.
Yes, the book makes the point that computers and the Internet was one of the inventions that were and an improvement post-1970s.
But the productivity bump of those seem to have peaked around 2004 (the book has numbers up to 2014, as it was published in 2016). Apple's iSight was released in 2003:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISight
The first webcam was in 1993:
You know those pregnancy tests one can buy in the drug store? Based on MABs. Ditto those COVID tests. The Nobel-prize winning work that first created MABs occurred in the 1970s, but no product was available to consumers then.
MABs are ubiquitous in medicine now.
Fax was invented in the 1800s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax
The 1968 Steve McQueen movie Bullitt used a fax machine to send a photograph of suspect. It's a pre-1970s invention, as is the modem: the Bell 101 was released in 1958.
Edit: the authors of the book do say that the mainstreaming of computers and the Internet is one of the post-1970s innovations.
> Also in what way are "refinements" not technological innovation? e.g. modern cars are massively safer, more reliable and comfortable.
But not a new invention. The Model T started production in 1908:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T
By the late 1920s, more that 80% of US households had at least one car; by the 1960s it was something like 160 cars per 100 households (i.e., most had at least two cars). It was by the 1930s that society had already been transformed by the automobile, regardless of how "safer, more reliable and comfortable" (or not) they were:
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2924825
For safety, the four biggest factors were seat belts, airbags, ABS and crumple zones, all of which were invented in the 1970s or before:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-lock_braking_system#Histo...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbag#History
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt#History
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crumple_zone
Comfort: AC was invented by Willis Carrier in the early 1900s, and put into air cars by the 1950s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_air_conditioning
For reliability/efficiency, fuel injection was in cars by the 1950s:
Offices didn't have them until the late 60s or 70s which is what matters.
It's like saying that people could make video calls back in the 30s...
> the four biggest factors
Yet there were almost 2x more fatalities per same distance driven back in 1980 and almost 4x in 1970
Yes, which goes to the point of the book: the major innovation and mainstreaming of technology occurred "until the late 60s or 70s". You're making the same point as the book is.
Also: photocopiers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerography
Edit: the authors of the book do say that the mainstreaming of computers and the Internet is one of the post-1970s innovations.
The only reason I mentioned fax is because that’s a thing that only became widespread after all innovation had supposedly stopped. BUT it already has been obsolete for decades and replaced by more advanced technologies.
> the authors of the book do say
That’s like saying that there wasn’t much innovation in the late 1800s besides electricity.. Yes if you exclude the area there has been the most progress in your point might have some very superficial merit
Computers and internet transformed plenty of those devices that were apparently already perfected by the 70s.
Except devices like TVs have almost nothing in common with their equivalent from back then besides the name and the fact that they show pictures. So television and CRTs weren’t real inventions either? They are basically the same thing as film projectors and those were a thing back in the 1890s. Really if we think about it almost nothing worth mentioning was invented after 1899..
We can say we just invented quantum computers and AGI if the fax was supposedly invented in 1800.
In hundred years people are gonna argue with their AI that yeah, all that singularity is nice but it was actually invented 100 years ago, so stagnation all around.
A good portion of the things mentioned in the book (photography, radio (vacuum tube), telephone, television, cars, refrigerators (and AC generally), vaccines, washing machines, trains, trams, subways, automobiles, airplanes (piston and jet/turbine), rocketry and satellites, etc) were invented and available in the fifty years between 1870 and 1920, and completed mainstreaming/saturation in the fifty years between 1920 and 1970.
There were some things that were invented in the 1920-70 time period: penicillin, CT scan, MRI scans, notable car refinements (fuel injection, crumple zones, seat belts, ABS, airbags), computers, transistors, modems, microwaves, fax/photocopiers.
Besides the Internet and maybe smartphones, what new classes of device were created post-1970s that had a major technological, sociological, or medical effect on society? @cperciva mentioned Li-ion batteries in a comment as well.
Technological advancement in semi-conductors has enabled human-like AI models.
We'll see if AI helps in productivity (e.g., per capita GDP): the book shows data that says that computers and the Internet had effects, but they were done by 2004 (book was published in 2016, and had numbers until 2014).
Neodymium magnets and incredible power density motors they enable. Lithium ion batteries with carbonaceous anode.
As a result drones and other things.
Blue led, OLED. Insane pixel density screen manufacturing Technics.
GPUs
I'm not sure how you can get such blind spot that you don't see immense scientific progress that was made since the 1980s
Literally a better part of a day of average Westerner is spent by looking at things that weren't invented before 1980.
It’s like saying that modern healthcare was invented in the 1800s and therefore there was absolutely no meaningful progress since then. How does that sound?
> created post-1970s
Digital cameras?
Personal computers? Note that by your bizarre standards fridges were invented in the 1830s and microwave ovens in the 1930s so innovation stopped long before the 70s or 60s..
BTW would you also agree that computers were invented in the 1830s as well?
MRI was invented in the 70s but practical devices weren’t created till years later (due to advances in other fields)
And where can the general public get or make use of them?
The book is not arguing that invention / improvement has stopped, but that what we've mostly seen is refinements in what was invented pre-1980.
What the actual fuck?