Re:When Will This Low-Innovation Era End?
by majormajor on Saturday September 22, 2012 @10:24PM
(#4559764)
Wireless global communications for the masses is an enormous leap forward.
Cars and planes let me easily move 1500 miles away from where I grew up. And then modern communication technology and video/audio compression lets me communicate, with video, in real time with people back there, from anywhere I go with phone coverage. That's pretty damn significant.
The author of the original article is basically also assuming that none of the interesting things that are currently being researched are going to amount to anything. It's a bizarre mix of sampling problems, observational biases, and cynicism.
Edit: I thought of another pretty huge one: imaging, especially medically (look at how much less invasive many surgical procedures are now than they were 30 years ago), but also for stuff like mapping. We now have collections of images taken from airplanes and satellites of most (all?) of the world. When has that kind of information ever been available in the past? What kind of cool stuff will we be able to do in the next twenty years with all this information that has only seen widespread availability in the last ten years or so?
And then there are the medical procedures that weren't even possible thirty years ago...
Cars and planes let me easily move 1500 miles away from where I grew up. And then modern communication technology and video/audio compression lets me communicate, with video, in real time with people back there, from anywhere I go with phone coverage. That's pretty damn significant.
The author of the original article is basically also assuming that none of the interesting things that are currently being researched are going to amount to anything. It's a bizarre mix of sampling problems, observational biases, and cynicism.
Edit: I thought of another pretty huge one: imaging, especially medically (look at how much less invasive many surgical procedures are now than they were 30 years ago), but also for stuff like mapping. We now have collections of images taken from airplanes and satellites of most (all?) of the world. When has that kind of information ever been available in the past? What kind of cool stuff will we be able to do in the next twenty years with all this information that has only seen widespread availability in the last ten years or so?
And then there are the medical procedures that weren't even possible thirty years ago...