I constantly get the vibe from people that they think our technology is skyrocketing, that we're living in a new tech age, "where was all this ten years ago?!" etc.

But I disagree with this assessment of our technology. It has made steady improvements in one specific space: software and electronic hardware. That is all. On top of that, the improvements on the hardware have not even been ground breaking. GPS is a ground-breaking invention. Smaller screens are not: they are just an incremental improvement.

Smartphones are merely the result of incremental improvements in the size and quality of electronic components. The only breakthroughs involved are ages old. The invention of the transistor, the laser, etc. The existence of google, facebook, uber, and so on, are merely inevitable "new applications" stemming from these improvements. They are not breakthroughs, they are merely improvements and combinations upon the telephone, the directory, and the taxi.

In my opinion, technology as a whole is borderline stagnant.

A list of why technology is still shit:
Electronics & Machines
- Our phones and laptops last less than a day. It is comical that our lives are beholden to charging batteries.
- It all breaks easily. Let any piece of tech drop out of your hand, and there is greater than 50% odds it breaks.
- Cars. Nothing has yet to economically, by its own merit, push the gasoline combustion engine car out of general popularity. Something that was invented in 1870. Goods are still man-driven around in trucks.
- Commercial airplanes are actually slower than they used to be.
- No one has been back to the moon since the 60s, we just continue flinging camera drones into space
- Our current idea of "new electronics tech" is quadrotor drones (a mere combination/improvement on existing gyroscope, computing, radio and battery technology)

Energy
- We still burn liquid or solid tree & dinosaur remains to power things.
- Our response to nuclear power, the best source of energy we currently have was, "OMG too dangerous staap!", not "OK how can we make it safe and better?".
- No new forms of feasible energy have been created (that fusion shit is still fantasy)
- Instead governments fuck around with windmills and steam power (which sounds so much fancier when you say "renewable energy" and "geothermal energy")

Medicine
- Kids still get acne
- Men still go bald
- Everyone still gets the cold and flu, and there are no cures
- The worst disease is still treated (unreliably) with knives and poison
- Pasteur invented modern vaccination back in 1885. Anti-biotics in 1928. X-rays (and medical imaging) in 1895. Even the MRI, an improved/additional form of medical imager, was invented back in 1977.
- There is still no way to make the crippled walk, the blind see, the deaf hear (you can only "aid" hearing), the amputees grow back what they've lost, and so on.

Clothes
- We still bind our clothes with buttons. Fucking buttons, the most inefficient binding there is. We even still use laces
- Everything still wears out at the same rate it used to.
- You still have to iron them, or take them to a dry cleaning shop and wait more than a day.
- The only meaningful recent "breakthrough" was just an improved belt buckle (a form of ratchet buckle). Vecro was invented in 1941, and the zipper in 1851.

Food
- The current pinnacle of food efficiency is still the sandwich. For hot meals it's still the microwave meal (microwave oven invented in 1933).
- 99% of even citizens of rich countries, get their groceries in the same way as ever: walk into a shop, select them, carry them home. No automation in this beyond gimmicks is yet to exist.

Finance
- The current pinnacle of payment technology, the credit card, was invented in 1951.
- Internet banking is nothing more than cheques (ancient) over telecom technology.
- I'll concede that "contactless payment", which was invented recently in 1997, is one breakthrough since it has made a material improvement in an ancient and tedious process, but even that is just technically radio + cheques.


Feel free to add your own below!

Everything related to improvements in communication branch from the Guttenberg Bible. Movable text.
Everything related to travel branches from the invention of the combustion engine. Late 18th century.
Every bullshit finance decision was because we went to paper money. Easier to track.
Food has advanced light years. We grow more food in less space. The worst part of our food consumption is the idea of "Just in time delivery". It makes us more dependent on our transportation system.

99% of any other improvements have to do with taking something that required 10 steps and shortening them to 3. Ask any 90 year old woman what the best invention is in human history and chances are they will say the Washing Machine (which on its own took from 100 steps to 2).

What will happen when those 10 steps require zero (something like a 3d printer or a robot making your hamburger at McDonalds)?

No one cares about "new discoveries" just taking the ones we know and reducing cost. Chances are the Chinese and the Indians are going to the moon in 50 years. The rest of us will have drones and watch them do it.

The answer to some of your questions is materials science

Mass computing became practical with huge advancement in material technology related to silicon wafers and
processes related to that field

Same with batteries, and a whole bunch of other stuff

The other, is , lack of will.

Apps are the new mass media, which is why they get funded. Serious technology, with huge risks is very
difficult to fund. Convincing the public to spend more money on space is significantly harder then pulling out your own teeth.

I might just add that it's the medicine that pisses me off the most. I don't see how we can say with a straight face "our tech is so good" or make any murmurs about "advanced medicine" with that list there. They throw billions of dollars at medical research every year, and nothing moves at all, it's a complete joke.

If I ever meet a medical researcher I'm going to laugh in his face and call him and his whole profession a lazy, retarded farce.

Great thread, although I see it proceeding as a forum for debating what technology has been discovered but suppressed by the elites.

It's a little unbelievable for trillions of dollars to be spent funding the greatest minds on the planet only for us to be left with the utter technological stagnation that Phoenix correctly points out.

I'm betting Zelcorpion has some interesting stuff to share with us.

Well I'd appreciate it if this thread didn't just become another (((they))), conspiracies, establishments, etc fest.

I'm sure there are other reasons behind it other than (((them))) "doing it to us".

(05-26-2017 09:59 PM)Phoenix Wrote:  Well I'd appreciate it if this thread didn't just become another (((they))), conspiracies, establishments, etc fest.

I'm sure there are other reasons behind it other than (((them))) "doing it to us".

Having worked in fairly advanced R&D I can tell you that most of the difficulties are not because of (((THEM))) but because actually creating something very new, getting it perfected and pushing it out into the market place is very difficult.

Some of the difficulties do come from middle managers and other assorted parasites but its not a conspiracy. Mostly because no one wants to take any risks. Xerox's pc program is a great example of this.

The truth of the matter is that technology is improving in some respects.

-FF 5 years and I think we will see affordable long-range EVs from several manufacturers be mainstream, not to mention full autonomy features.

-AI in general is moving in leaps and bounds. We're getting closer and closer to strong AI that could in turn lead us to things like sexbots (corporeal or just a disembodied voice ala ScarJo in Her).

-Quantum computers are also coming along rapidly. While it's unlikely we'll see them on our desktops, even just one supercomputer could be asked to solve heretofore unsolvable problems. DNA sequencing, curing cancer, whatever.

What we do have problems with is build-quality. Why?

As the human population explodes, you can't expect commodity stuff to be at the same quality it was in the "olden days". Look back to the build quality 100+ years ago. Look at how much solid hardwood was used in furniture. Now it's particleboard with stickers for woodgrain. "Hardwood" is now little wafers of bamboo stuck together. Even in the 1950s you could buy a TV that was like a piece of furniture with wood backing. Or take VCRs, they went from being mostly metal to almost all plastic by the end of their lifespan. Cars used to be full of chrome and now they are covered with plastic cladding. All of this is the need to sell the same class of product to more and more people. So you see a lot less exhaustible natural resources (like quality woods) and more and more plastic.

Lots of gatekeepers who pad thier wallets with circle jerking with R and D.

Next, for consume products craftsmanship is frowned upon. You want stuff to break quickly or to fade out so you can by another one. I remember as a kid having the same toaster for nearly half my childhood. My parents can opener is older than ma, they have had it for 30+ years and it still works fine. There used to be pride in making the best and most robust products but this does not carry over into the modern age of rapid profit seeking.

Medicine is messed up as Govt is the mestro that funnels cash and incentives around to research the same things all while.protrfting massive corps who purposefully hold back tech if it isn't good for thier business model at that current time.

The above goes for cars as well as we had great EVs in the 80s that ran well with good mileage but shady industries colluded to put a stop to it.

I have no idea if my life has improved with technology. I think the best part of tech is the ease to information and resources to learn new things.

(05-26-2017 10:19 PM)kosko Wrote:  I have no idea if my life has improved with technology. I think the best part of tech is the ease to information and resources to learn new things.

Yeah that's why I don't have "education" on the list. Education is one thing that has improved leaps and bounds, simply because everyone can get on their computer and self-educate equal or better than a traditional school or library could provide.

I'd know a fraction about how the world works compared to now if I was relying on paper encyclopedias and professors, rather than being able to type into google whatever question popped into my head whenever I wanted.

I don't know guys.

Someone just invented a juicer that squeezes pre-juiced juice out of a bag.

We didn't have that 5 years ago.

(05-26-2017 10:32 PM)Suits Wrote:  I don't know guys.

Someone just invented a juicer that squeezes pre-juiced juice out of a bag.

We didn't have that 5 years ago.

For as much as people made fun of that idea, I can see how it got funded.

We are X for Y.

We are like netflix for juicing
Or Kuerig
or a number of other subscription based services.

Execution on the other hand wasn't so good. I can see this idea appearing down the line in another form.

For $2000 a year I can buy like 200 freshly made juices at the local whole foods. Or one what every other day basically.

(05-26-2017 09:13 PM)Phoenix Wrote:  I constantly get the vibe from people that they think our technology is skyrocketing, that we're living in a new tech age, "where was all this ten years ago?!" etc.

But I disagree with this assessment of our technology. It has made steady improvements in one specific space: software and electronic hardware. That is all. On top of that, the improvements on the hardware have not even been ground breaking. GPS is a ground-breaking invention. Smaller screens are not: they are just an incremental improvement.

Smartphones are merely the result of incremental improvements in the size and quality of electronic components. The only breakthroughs involved are ages old. The invention of the transistor, the laser, etc.

Those were all incremental improvements. They all follow a similar pattern of evolution from older, larger, less practice, more expensive versions. Then there is lag time while the core technology is developed into useful consumer products. And then yet MORE lag time until creative types discover new uses for those products. And then some new incremental technology comes out that combines with the older technology and produces something completely revolutionary.

Quote:A list of why technology is still shit:
Electronics & Machines
- Our phones and laptops last less than a day. It is comical that our lives are beholden to charging batteries.

Turn the brightness down. LEDs are incredible. 15 years ago, which is less than a fifth of an average lifespan, the huge cathode ray tube screens were still common. Now you can watch a full-length widescreen movie on a cell phone that can be carried in your pocket. Wikipedia has a list of applications of LED tech, most of which was not remotely possible when LEDs were originally invented in 1960s. It took 50 years of incremental advances to get where we are now.

Quote:- Cars. Nothing has yet to economically, by its own merit, push the gasoline combustion engine car out of general popularity. Something that was invented in 1870. Goods are still man-driven around in trucks.

Self-driving cars are coming. Tesla's electric cars are common, now. The Tesla Model 3 is set to be priced at $35,000. That's competitive with similar common, upmarket cars.

Quote:- Commercial airplanes are actually slower than they used to be.

No argument here. Air travel seems to be one luxury that has not gotten cheaper and easier over time.

Quote:- No one has been back to the moon since the 60s, we just continue flinging camera drones into space

Quote:Energy
- We still burn liquid or solid tree & dinosaur remains to power things.

Yeah, it turns out that the efficiency of energy stored as a result of millions of years of geological processes is not easy to replicate.

Quote:Medicine
- Kids still get acne
- Men still go bald
- Everyone still gets the cold and flu, and there are no cures
- The worst disease is still treated (unreliably) with knives and poison
- Pasteur invented modern vaccination back in 1885. Anti-biotics in 1928. X-rays (and medical imaging) in 1895. Even the MRI, an improved/additional form of medical imager, was invented back in 1977.
- There is still no way to make the crippled walk, the blind see, the deaf hear (you can only "aid" hearing), the amputees grow back what they've lost, and so on.

We're close to being able to reverse macular degeneration with stem cell technology.

Artificial limbs have actually generated controversy as being a potentially unfair advantage in sprint events.

Here's a woman with bionic hands

You can Sequence your Genome

Quote:Clothes
- We still bind our clothes with buttons. Fucking buttons, the most inefficient binding there is. We even still use laces
- Everything still wears out at the same rate it used to.
- You still have to iron them, or take them to a dry cleaning shop and wait more than a day.
- The only meaningful recent "breakthrough" was just an improved belt buckle (a form of ratchet buckle). Vecro was invented in 1941, and the zipper in 1851.

There have been many advances in clothes. It's just that we're limited by fashion. In industries where fashion takes a back seat to performance, like ultralight hiking, advances are easier to see.

Quote:Finance
- The current pinnacle of payment technology, the credit card, was invented in 1951.
- Internet banking is nothing more than cheques (ancient) over telecom technology.
- I'll concede that "contactless payment", which was invented recently in 1997, is one breakthrough since it has made a material improvement in an ancient and tedious process, but even that is just technically radio + cheques.

Bitcoin.

The current crop of LEDs, the super bright white ones. Are possible because of something called Blue Ammonia.

Ammonia is used to make nitride layers in semi conductors.
To make a white LED you need three leds, red, green and blue which shine on a phosphor.

To make the blue leds, you need very pure ammonia. A few years ago this level of purity became available, 99.99994%, and with it
resultant super bright leds.

A few quick points on the subject:

-We've reached peak health sometime in the late 20th century. Since then, there has been a great deterioration in environmental pollutants of all sorts. Autism rates have gone up from 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 50. Sperm counts are collapsing. Cancer rates are still rising.

-Planned obsolescence explains why the quality of products like phones or clothes have leveled off. Similarly, there is a huge disincentive in many industries against progress for commercial reasons.

-Oil is not a fossil fuel, most likely a naturally occurring mineral, the second most common liquid on earth after water.

-Broadly speaking, there were some large technological leaps which have resulted in big gains in productivity, yet those resulting economic gains haven't been passed on to the middle classes.

The problem across the board is in the political/economic system. Contrary to popular belief, technology is often downstream from this system, not upstream.

3D Printing

Voice pattern recognition technology. I worked on a VR project in the 90s. We have come a LONG way since then. You may not use it much (I don't) but some people love to be able to issue voice commands to their cell phone. And then there's applications on IVRs for customer service. Annoying as those are, they save companies a lot of money on customer support.

Live Streaming video over the internet was not feasible 10 years ago. Now, livestreaming is an important industry.

(05-26-2017 10:42 PM)Blaster Wrote:  Turn the brightness down. LEDs are incredible.

No, I won't turn it down. The technology is there to satisfy my needs. I'm not there to satisfy its. And even if I could happily make do with a dim phone, that might let it reach 1.5 days instead of 1 day of battery life. It's shit. And no LED's are not incredible, they are a small lamp. Sure, they're a better lamp, but they're still a small lamp. And we don't need TVs. Having pretty TVs is no compensation for still having cripples and malaria.

(05-26-2017 10:42 PM)Blaster Wrote:  Self-driving cars are coming. Tesla's electric cars are common, now. The Tesla Model 3 is set to be priced at $35,000. That's competitive with similar common, upmarket cars.

"It's coming". Yep, just like flying cars "are coming".

Here is how much subsidy Tesla gets:
https://www.quora.com/How-much-governmen...ve-by-2015

(05-26-2017 10:42 PM)Blaster Wrote:  

Quote:Energy
- We still burn liquid or solid tree & dinosaur remains to power things.

Yeah, it turns out that the efficiency of energy stored as a result of millions of years of geological processes is not easy to replicate.

Why would you say something so stupid in such a snarky tone? It's already been well surpassed in energy efficiency by nuclear power.
https://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclo...arison.htm
And the millions of years of geological processes has nothing to do with anything, we're not trying to replicate that we just want easily transportable energy.

(05-26-2017 10:42 PM)Blaster Wrote:  We're close to being able to reverse macular degeneration with stem cell technology.

"It's coming".

(05-26-2017 10:42 PM)Blaster Wrote:  You can Sequence your Genome

I don't need to sequence my genome. I need a pill that kills a cold.

(05-26-2017 10:42 PM)Blaster Wrote:  Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is not a technological advance, it's a reaction to government involvement in money, and I don't know anyone who uses it. I don't consider band-aids against government intrusion a technological advance.

(05-26-2017 11:04 PM)Blaster Wrote:  3D Printing

Voice pattern recognition technology. I worked on a VR project in the 90s. We have come a LONG way since then.

Live Streaming video over the internet was not feasible 10 years ago. Now, livestreaming is an important industry.

I'll concede that additive manufacturing is a breakthrough. On voice recognition, I've conceded software is one place where advances are still being made. Livestreaming is just a different form of broadcasting.

(05-26-2017 10:47 PM)ms224 Wrote:  The current crop of LEDs, the super bright white ones. Are possible because of something called Blue Ammonia.

Ammonia is used to make nitride layers in semi conductors.
To make a white LED you need three leds, red, green and blue which shine on a phosphor.

To make the blue leds, you need very pure ammonia. A few years ago this level of purity became available, 99.99994%, and with it
resultant super bright leds.

1)


2) How LED Lighting May Compromise Your Health
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articl...hting.aspx

I have stock in upcoming robotics & automation companies, I also donate to SENS.org on a monthly basis.

A family member of mine is high up in big tech company. I said I was so bored everything is a smaller screen or a more mobile way to transmit information. I want the Jetsons not some gay smug Apple commercial with a ukeleili playing. They didn't get it. When people
make a living making a certain thing it is hard for them to change.

The biggest reason is when people's basic needs and even luxuries are easily met they are not sitting around thinking of ways to innovate.

The same guy in 1920 that may have sat around tinkering now may have gotten $80k engineering job outta college and is reading RVF and trying to go to clubs and Russia to get laid. He isn't thinking deep.

You can tune the whiteness of the led by adjusting the three primary colors.

On a note of how well old things work

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison[/quote]

Quote:One of the controversial claims of his last years was that of being able to build a land clock more accurate than any competing design. Specifically, he claimed to have designed a clock capable of keeping accurate to within one second over a span of 100 days.[24]:25–41 At the time, such publications as The London Review of English and Foreign Literature ridiculed Harrison for what was considered an outlandish claim. Harrison drew a design but never built such a clock himself, but in 1970 Martin Burgess, a Harrison expert and himself a clockmaker, studied the plans and endeavored to build the timepiece as drawn. He built two versions, dubbed Clock A and Clock B. Clock A became the Gurney Clock which was given to the city of Norwich in 1975, while Clock B lay unfinished in his workshop for decades until it was acquired in 2009 by Donald Saff. The completed Clock B was submitted to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich for further study. It was found that Clock B could potentially meet Harrison's original claim, so the clock's design was carefully checked and adjusted. Finally, over a 100-day period from 6 January to 17 April 2015, Clock B was secured in a transparent case in the Royal Observatory and left to run untouched, apart from regular winding.. Upon completion of the run, the clock was measured to have lost only 5/8 of a second, meaning Harrison's design was fundamentally sound. In fact, if this clock had been built in 1762, the date of Harrison's testing of his H4, and run continuously since then without correction, it would now (May 2017) be slow by just 9 minutes and 42 seconds. Guinness World Records has declared the Martin Burgess' Clock B the "most accurate mechanical clock with a pendulum swinging in free air."[26]

(05-26-2017 11:22 PM)911 Wrote:  

(05-26-2017 10:47 PM)ms224 Wrote:  The current crop of LEDs, the super bright white ones. Are possible because of something called Blue Ammonia.

Ammonia is used to make nitride layers in semi conductors.
To make a white LED you need three leds, red, green and blue which shine on a phosphor.

To make the blue leds, you need very pure ammonia. A few years ago this level of purity became available, 99.99994%, and with it
resultant super bright leds.

1)


2) How LED Lighting May Compromise Your Health
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articl...hting.aspx

I did not intend to sound snarky with that sentence. Just lightly humorous.

Quote:No, I won't turn it down. The technology is there to satisfy my needs. I'm not there to satisfy its. And even if I could happily make do with a dim phone, that might let it reach 1.5 days instead of 1 day of battery life. It's shit.

30 years ago, the lithium-ion batteries that power most smartphones were not yet in commercial production.

20 years ago, cell phones were fairly rare and expensive.

10 years ago, the first iphone was released.

Today, we can get live news from random people on the scene of an event from cell phone cameras connected to the internet.

Maybe someday we'll have microthermonuclear reactors that can be installed in a cell phone. Until then we'll have to suffer with only a day or so of battery life for a smartphone.

(05-26-2017 11:06 PM)Phoenix Wrote:  I'll concede that additive manufacturing is a breakthrough. On voice recognition, I've conceded software is one place where advances are still being made. Livestreaming is just a different form of broadcasting.

Livestreaming, which is of course just one example of how far video technology has come, is groundbreaking. The video you can get from the scene of an event can be unfiltered and unedited by the legacy media gatekeepers.

10 years ago, if you wanted to broadcast a live interview with two people in two different locations, you had to have a lot of expensive equipment and rights to broadcast on a TV station.

In 2017, you can skype and livestream interviews with laptops and cell phones. Or you can record them. What do you think Dave Rubin's budget looks like, compared to 60 minutes? Who actually has better interviews?

Then there's facetime. 30 years ago, not even Star Trek had handheld video chat.

Relentless incremental advances. That's how we got where we are today.

I have noticed that some old technology is better than the new versions. Some of this is due to government regulations. For example, people who buy new washing machines find that their clothes still have detergent on them because the rinse cycle isn't sufficient. This is due to pressure from government agencies to save water, so they reduce the rinse cycle. Thus, you are actually better off with an old washing machine which rinsed the clothes sufficiently to remove all the detergent.

Another example. In Mexico, there isn't heat in the houses in the winter, so I ordered electric blankets. I had four of them work for a month and then not work anymore. I went on Amazon.com to see reviews and hundreds of people say the same thing. The blanket breaks or doesn't give enough heat. My theory of this is that the manufacturer puts in so many safety devices in the blanket to keep from being sued or to get the UL stamp of approval, that the controller is likely to just shut down or not provide heat. Better for the blanket not to work then to be sued. I opened up the controllers and found evidence for this. Like one controller had a large varistor which would only be useful if there was a direct lightening strike.

To solve my electric blanket problem, I took a pair of wire cutters and cut out the controller and replaced it with a light dimmer switch. It now works and gives me all the heat I want. It actually makes sense to learn some skills so you can take the new junk and make it work.

What Phoenix was getting at (I'm reasonably sure) was that there are not many new technologies. It's apparent that the word "technology" itself has been subverted to be translated as "something that has a microprocessor and a screen", so that "new technology" is therefore translated as "a new way to use a microprocessor and a screen".

Quote:technology
tɛkˈnɒlədʒi/
noun
noun: technology; plural noun: technologies

-The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry.
-Machinery and devices developed from scientific knowledge.
-The branch of knowledge dealing with engineering or applied sciences.

Origin
early 17th century: from Greek tekhnologia ‘systematic treatment’, from tekhnē ‘art, craft’ + -logia (see -logy).

A catapult is technology. A wheel is technology. And Phoenix is correct. A more clever or useful way to arrange 1's and 0's in a hard drive is not "new technology". That's not to say that voice recognition is not useful, but it's not a new technology. A device or substance that naturally resisted gravity would be a new technology. Safe and affordable wireless energy transfer would be a new technology. 3D printing is nice, but again it is technically not a new technology. It's merely an application of old technologies.

I think I can answer for the tech anyway.

- Our phones and laptops last less than a day. It is comical that our lives are beholden to charging batteries.
Yes, but that is because 95% of all users charge them every day anyway. Is is not really commercially wanted/needed for the majority of users. And the good trade off charging every day is that you can have better/faster possessors and graphic cards. With you can play the newest stupid game with...

- It all breaks easily. Let any piece of tech drop out of your hand, and there is greater than 50% odds it breaks.
Well, the problem with making things more durable to impacts is that you make it bulkier. And I doubt anyone would want that from mobile tech.
Though if you are referring to the more planned to obsolescence things are nowadays, then I completely agree.
On a sidnote I have had the Cat s60 phone half a year, and it is good but way to bulky, so I will most likely replace it (water resistant to 5m and drop prof to 2m)

- Cars. Nothing has yet to economically, by its own merit, push the gasoline combustion engine car out of general popularity. Something that was invented in 1870. Goods are still man-driven around in trucks.
As other people have written is it not very far off in to the future with Tesla as an example. Mr. Koenigsegg himself does not drive his cars normally. He drives a Tesla.

- Commercial airplanes are actually slower than they used to be.
Yes, but they are cheaper, safer/more dependable, a lot more efficient and can take large payloads. It is all trade-offs.

- No one has been back to the moon since the 60s, we just continue flinging camera drones into space.
Of cause not. It is a frozen rock. What are we going to do on the moon? put another flag?