The car existed for a long time, you just couldn't actually mass produce one, or transport people in it or some other shortcoming. What you're crediting for invention seems to be more mass proliferation.The internet could really be considered more of a 21st century "invention" using this metric.
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What has been invented in the 21st century? (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Evilgrin 72
- Start date
NewlyRetired
Footballguy
The idea of the Internet (as a data collection/storage and sharing medium) has been around since the 70's. It had its major break through for the public in this century because the technology to carry the data improved significantly over what the data was traveling on in the 90's. Without broadband (or some like technology), I am not sure the Internet would have exploded like it did.
There were plans for cars and flying machines centuries before they were actually "invented" as signified by someone coming up with a model that could be mass produced affordably. All the "invention" of the car is, if we're going to put that in the 1900's, is an improvement on that idea that allowed this affordable mass production. A network in the 1970's that no one uses (in the context of the general public) and has no means of them actually connecting to doesn't seem to mark the point of it being "invented" using this definition.
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NewlyRetired
Footballguy
Yup, we are saying the same thing. There is a strong parallel between cars and the Internet in terms of their popularity growth when you equate cars to "data", and roads to "data carrying medium". As the roads and data carrying mediums improved so did the popularity of the items they serviced (cars and data for the Internet).
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spreagle
Footballguy
The biggest change I noticed from from 20 years ago to now is that 20 years ago I used USA Today to manually calculate fantasy football scores, and now it is done automatically. Quite honestly I prefered doing it Monday morning to extend the uncertainty and excitement. Other than that, most things haven't changed much.
Thinking about this in terms of a number of other inventions - how do you categorize something as a new invention, and when is it simply utilizing other invention to improve something? The work done on radio waves created an entirely new medium to transmit data, but then stuff like the radios themselves, television, wifi networking could be considered not a new invention but instead just ways to use that technology to make other things we've already done better. The TV for example wasn't really an invention per se - it was just figuring out how to transmit and receive a new type of data over that medium.
Ursa M
Footballguy
Oddly enough, this was in my local paper today. The Economist article covers exactly what has been discussed here.
With the pace of technological change making heads spin, we tend to think of our age as the most innovative ever. We have smartphones and supercomputers, big data and nanotechnologies, gene therapy and stem-cell transplants. Governments, universities and firms together spend about $1.4 trillion a year on R&D, more than ever before.
Yet nobody recently has come up with an invention half as useful as the humble toilet. With its clean lines and intuitive user interface, the loo transformed the lives of billions of people.
And it wasn't just modern sanitation that sprang from late-19th and early-20th-century brains: They produced cars, planes, the telephone, radio and antibiotics.
Modern science has failed to make anything like the same impact, and this is why a growing band of thinkers claim that the pace of innovation has slowed. Interestingly, the gloomsters include not just academics such as Robert Gordon, the American economist who offered the toilet test of uninventiveness, but also entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook.
If the pessimists are right, the implications are huge. Economies can generate growth by adding more stuff: more workers, investment and education. But sustained increases in output per person, which are necessary to raise incomes and welfare, entail using the stuff we already have in better ways -- innovating, in other words. If the rate at which we innovate, and spread that innovation, slows down, so too, other things being equal, will our growth rate.
Ever since Thomas Malthus forecast that we would all starve, human ingenuity has proved the prophets of doom wrong. But these days the impact of innovation does indeed seem to be tailing off.
Life expectancy in America, for instance, has risen more slowly since 1980 than in the early 20th century. The speed of travel, in the rich world at least, is often slower now than it was a generation earlier, after rocketing a century or so ago. According to Gordon, productivity also supports the pessimists' case: It took off in the mid-19th century, accelerated in the early 20th century and held up pretty well until the early 1970s. It then dipped sharply, ticked up in the late 1990s with computerization and dipped again in the mid-2000s.
Yet that pattern is not as conclusively gloomy as the doomsayers claim. Life expectancy is still improving, even in the rich world. The productivity gains after electrification came not smoothly, but in spurts; and the drop-off since 2004 probably has more to do with the economic crisis than with underlying lack of invention. Moreover, it is too early to write off the innovative impact of the present age.
This generation's contribution to technological progress lies mostly in information technology. Rather as electrification changed everything by allowing energy to be used far from where it was generated, computing and communications technologies transform lives and businesses by allowing people to make calculations and connections far beyond their unaided capacity. But as with electricity, companies will take time to learn how to use them, so it will probably be many decades before their full impact is felt.
Computing power is already contributing to dramatic advances far beyond the field of IT. Three-dimensional printing may cause a new industrial revolution. Autonomous vehicles, like the driverless cars produced by Google, could be common on streets within a decade. The performance of human prosthetics is rapidly catching up with that of natural limbs.
And although it is too soon to judge how big a deal these inventions will turn out to be, globalization should make this a fruitful period for innovation. Many more brains are at work now than were 100 years ago: American and European inventors have been joined in the race to produce cool new stuff by Japanese, Brazilian, Indian and Chinese ones.
So there are good reasons for thinking that the 21st century's innovative juices will flow fast. But there are also reasons to watch out for impediments. The biggest danger is government.
When government was smaller, innovation was easier. Industrialists could introduce new processes or change a product's design without a man from the ministry claiming some regulation had been broken.
It is a good thing that these days pharmaceuticals are stringently tested and factory emissions controlled. But officialdom tends to write far more rules than are necessary for the public good; and thickets of red tape strangle innovation. Even many regulations designed to help innovation are not working well. The West's intellectual-property system, for instance, is a mess, granting too many patents of dubious merit.
The state has also notably failed to open itself up to innovation. Productivity is mostly stagnant in the public sector. Unions have often managed to prevent governments from even publishing the performance indicators which, elsewhere, have encouraged managers to innovate. There is vast scope for IT to boost productivity in health care and education, if only those sectors were more open to change.
The rapid growth in the rich world before the 1970s was encouraged by public spending on infrastructure (including in sewage systems) and basic research: the computer, the Internet and the green revolution in food technology all sprang out of science, where there was no immediate commercial aim. Wars provide the sharpest example of the innovative power of government spending: astounding new developments in drone and prosthetic technology -- let alone the jet engine -- are a bittersweet testament to that. Even in these straitened times, money should still be found for basic research into areas such as carbon capture and storage.
For governments that do these things well -- get out of the way of entrepreneurs, reform their public sectors and invest wisely -- the rewards could be huge. The risk that innovation may slow is a real one, but can be avoided. Whether it happens or not is, like most aspects of mankind's fate, up to him.
With the pace of technological change making heads spin, we tend to think of our age as the most innovative ever. We have smartphones and supercomputers, big data and nanotechnologies, gene therapy and stem-cell transplants. Governments, universities and firms together spend about $1.4 trillion a year on R&D, more than ever before.
Yet nobody recently has come up with an invention half as useful as the humble toilet. With its clean lines and intuitive user interface, the loo transformed the lives of billions of people.
And it wasn't just modern sanitation that sprang from late-19th and early-20th-century brains: They produced cars, planes, the telephone, radio and antibiotics.
Modern science has failed to make anything like the same impact, and this is why a growing band of thinkers claim that the pace of innovation has slowed. Interestingly, the gloomsters include not just academics such as Robert Gordon, the American economist who offered the toilet test of uninventiveness, but also entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook.
If the pessimists are right, the implications are huge. Economies can generate growth by adding more stuff: more workers, investment and education. But sustained increases in output per person, which are necessary to raise incomes and welfare, entail using the stuff we already have in better ways -- innovating, in other words. If the rate at which we innovate, and spread that innovation, slows down, so too, other things being equal, will our growth rate.
Ever since Thomas Malthus forecast that we would all starve, human ingenuity has proved the prophets of doom wrong. But these days the impact of innovation does indeed seem to be tailing off.
Life expectancy in America, for instance, has risen more slowly since 1980 than in the early 20th century. The speed of travel, in the rich world at least, is often slower now than it was a generation earlier, after rocketing a century or so ago. According to Gordon, productivity also supports the pessimists' case: It took off in the mid-19th century, accelerated in the early 20th century and held up pretty well until the early 1970s. It then dipped sharply, ticked up in the late 1990s with computerization and dipped again in the mid-2000s.
Yet that pattern is not as conclusively gloomy as the doomsayers claim. Life expectancy is still improving, even in the rich world. The productivity gains after electrification came not smoothly, but in spurts; and the drop-off since 2004 probably has more to do with the economic crisis than with underlying lack of invention. Moreover, it is too early to write off the innovative impact of the present age.
This generation's contribution to technological progress lies mostly in information technology. Rather as electrification changed everything by allowing energy to be used far from where it was generated, computing and communications technologies transform lives and businesses by allowing people to make calculations and connections far beyond their unaided capacity. But as with electricity, companies will take time to learn how to use them, so it will probably be many decades before their full impact is felt.
Computing power is already contributing to dramatic advances far beyond the field of IT. Three-dimensional printing may cause a new industrial revolution. Autonomous vehicles, like the driverless cars produced by Google, could be common on streets within a decade. The performance of human prosthetics is rapidly catching up with that of natural limbs.
And although it is too soon to judge how big a deal these inventions will turn out to be, globalization should make this a fruitful period for innovation. Many more brains are at work now than were 100 years ago: American and European inventors have been joined in the race to produce cool new stuff by Japanese, Brazilian, Indian and Chinese ones.
So there are good reasons for thinking that the 21st century's innovative juices will flow fast. But there are also reasons to watch out for impediments. The biggest danger is government.
When government was smaller, innovation was easier. Industrialists could introduce new processes or change a product's design without a man from the ministry claiming some regulation had been broken.
It is a good thing that these days pharmaceuticals are stringently tested and factory emissions controlled. But officialdom tends to write far more rules than are necessary for the public good; and thickets of red tape strangle innovation. Even many regulations designed to help innovation are not working well. The West's intellectual-property system, for instance, is a mess, granting too many patents of dubious merit.
The state has also notably failed to open itself up to innovation. Productivity is mostly stagnant in the public sector. Unions have often managed to prevent governments from even publishing the performance indicators which, elsewhere, have encouraged managers to innovate. There is vast scope for IT to boost productivity in health care and education, if only those sectors were more open to change.
The rapid growth in the rich world before the 1970s was encouraged by public spending on infrastructure (including in sewage systems) and basic research: the computer, the Internet and the green revolution in food technology all sprang out of science, where there was no immediate commercial aim. Wars provide the sharpest example of the innovative power of government spending: astounding new developments in drone and prosthetic technology -- let alone the jet engine -- are a bittersweet testament to that. Even in these straitened times, money should still be found for basic research into areas such as carbon capture and storage.
For governments that do these things well -- get out of the way of entrepreneurs, reform their public sectors and invest wisely -- the rewards could be huge. The risk that innovation may slow is a real one, but can be avoided. Whether it happens or not is, like most aspects of mankind's fate, up to him.
NCCommish
Footballguy
Well the thing is we can already theoretically exceed light speed. To keep it simple you build an extremely dense gravity well around a ship and away you go. Now you need a buttload of energy to make that happen which is one of the drawbacks but we can assume that will be solvable. What doesn't get discussed when we talk FTL is the problem of violation of causality. This would come about from various frames of reference interacting when the ship was going faster than light. And then we have to consider the possibility of unsolvable paradoxes. In other words we could pile up so many causality issues we get to a point where we end up in an unsolvable paradox which is a situation that contradicts it's own existence. Never a good thing to be in contradiction of your existence.'NewlyRetired said:
(HULK)
(Smash)
The future of work
EG, I'm sure you'll find that article interesting as heck. The "what are we going to do about it" is something I puzzle on quite a bit. No good answers yet though.
EG, I'm sure you'll find that article interesting as heck. The "what are we going to do about it" is something I puzzle on quite a bit. No good answers yet though.
(HULK)
(Smash)
Debunking the toilet arguement
I read this the other day. Sure, toilets are great, but I'd rather drop dueces in the woods and keep my smart phone.
I read this the other day. Sure, toilets are great, but I'd rather drop dueces in the woods and keep my smart phone.
roadkill1292
Footballguy
That linked piece will make Maurile's head explode. He thinks there will always be plenty of work to do, the nature of it will simply change over the years.I haven't made up my mind on this issue yet. It's not easy disagreeing with MT even though I don't think he can be right all the time.
Evilgrin 72
Distributor of Pain
To be fair, from my OP :The 19th century saw the invention of the automobile, the telephone, radio, etc.I did put the car in the 1800s, not the 1900s.
(HULK)
(Smash)
There will definitely be new jobs we haven't thought about. I'm not sure if it will be enough to sustain everyone. I'm kinda doubtful that the US will ever see 4% unemployment again (which was what used to be considered "full employment").My thought is, this wave of automation, its going to happen very rapidly over the next 2 decades. When it happens, new jobs won't be created fast enough.
And frankly, even though I was born with the "American" work ethic, I think the end state goal of automation should be to require less work out of everyone, to provide more free time to pursue happiness and whatnot.
NCCommish
Footballguy
MT is not right all the time. And he is certainly wrong here. The nature of work and the job market is changing before our eyes, we ignore it at our own peril.
Evilgrin 72
Distributor of Pain
Wow, that's odd. I guess I'm exactly one day ahead of my time.
Evilgrin 72
Distributor of Pain
VERY interesting. What they propose is damn near communist, that's going to get people's panties in a bunch.What I take from this is that middle America is headed over the falls in a barrel. Aside from farming and ranching, what jobs are going to be available to many of the people who rely on manufacturing to support their infrastructure? It feels like everything between the Rockies and the Mississippi could turn into Detroit, except maybe for Kansas City, since they have Google Fiber.
(HULK)
(Smash)
Just some notes for flushing this out:1769- First powered wheeled passenger vehicle (steam powered tricyle)1881- Fully electronic zero emmisions vehicle (electric tricyle, lol)1885- First internal combustion car (Benz)1908- Model TThe Model T kinda took off in the mid-1910s, although it was instantly popular due to its price. As production ramped up and costs went down, its price fell and it became even more popular, selling over half a million units a year towards the end of that decade.I would say that the explosion of the Model T was the point where the full impact of the automobile began to be felt. As you can see there is a bit of time lag. Home PCs went online in the 90s, lets say about 20 years ago. From Benz's car to the Model T was 23 years. Maybe we're just going to begin to feel the full impact of a connected world now?
Evilgrin 72
Distributor of Pain
I'd rather have a toilet and throw my Evo out the window. F Facebook and Twitter.
(HULK)
(Smash)
Thats the rub, isn't it. Communism/Socialism, the great evil for most of us growing up. I don't think thats an answer this country can swallow. Which is why I keep trying to think of ways to redistribute wealth generated by robots while maintaining a capitalistic setup. I don't want people starving in the streets, but if there is no way for them to earn income, what can be done?VERY interesting. What they propose is damn near communist, that's going to get people's panties in a bunch.What I take from this is that middle America is headed over the falls in a barrel. Aside from farming and ranching, what jobs are going to be available to many of the people who rely on manufacturing to support their infrastructure? It feels like everything between the Rockies and the Mississippi could turn into Detroit, except maybe for Kansas City, since they have Google Fiber.
(HULK)
(Smash)
You need to install Androminion.I use my smartphone EVERYtime I poop.I do not poop everytime I use my phone.
Evilgrin 72
Distributor of Pain
I think so. I think that social interaction, home entertainment, and business travel (or the lack of need for it) are the areas in which we're just now beginning to see the full impact. As someone said earlier, people sit in bars and Facebook all night. How long before the bar becomes unnecessary? Most of the interaction between friends takes place online. Gotomeeting and gotomypc and things like that are just barely beginning to make the ideas of commuting to an office or traveling cross-country for a meeting obsolete.
NCCommish
Footballguy
The Basic Income Guarantee thing is not really all the communist. We already have welfare, unemployment, food stamps, etc. If you do the BIG you could drop a lot of those safety net programs. You'd probably still do food stamps for kids but otherwise you wouldn't need them. And of course it works much better with a single payer system. Of course it comes down to size of the BIG but really doesn't it make sense to come up with some way to keep people fed and housed when the reality is there just won't be jobs for them?Thats the rub, isn't it. Communism/Socialism, the great evil for most of us growing up. I don't think thats an answer this country can swallow. Which is why I keep trying to think of ways to redistribute wealth generated by robots while maintaining a capitalistic setup. I don't want people starving in the streets, but if there is no way for them to earn income, what can be done?VERY interesting. What they propose is damn near communist, that's going to get people's panties in a bunch.What I take from this is that middle America is headed over the falls in a barrel. Aside from farming and ranching, what jobs are going to be available to many of the people who rely on manufacturing to support their infrastructure? It feels like everything between the Rockies and the Mississippi could turn into Detroit, except maybe for Kansas City, since they have Google Fiber.
Evilgrin 72
Distributor of Pain
If every American can be provided a "living wage" by the government with the possibility of adding wealth through our current capitalist system, I think that's a fine idea. Those who don't have anything to contribute can still live without resorting to crime or welfare, yet those with the intelligence and work ethic to figure out how to augment their incomes can do so. The question is, can it be done? Communism failed largely (in my opinion) because the basic nature and most powerful instinct most humans possess is greed. Would this system keep that at bay? It would almost be like communist cake with capitalist icing.Thats the rub, isn't it. Communism/Socialism, the great evil for most of us growing up. I don't think thats an answer this country can swallow. Which is why I keep trying to think of ways to redistribute wealth generated by robots while maintaining a capitalistic setup. I don't want people starving in the streets, but if there is no way for them to earn income, what can be done?VERY interesting. What they propose is damn near communist, that's going to get people's panties in a bunch.What I take from this is that middle America is headed over the falls in a barrel. Aside from farming and ranching, what jobs are going to be available to many of the people who rely on manufacturing to support their infrastructure? It feels like everything between the Rockies and the Mississippi could turn into Detroit, except maybe for Kansas City, since they have Google Fiber.
shader
Footballguy
From the wikipedia page "The Nobel announcement illustrated this by saying that a 1 square meter graphene hammock would support a 4 kg cat but would weigh only as much as one of the cat's whiskers".Sweet
Evilgrin 72
Distributor of Pain
Might this make solar power a more viable alternative to fossil fuels? Hasn't the main knock on solar been that the panels are too big and too inefficient, or am I way off on this?
Mose
Footballguy
Did you watch the youtube video? It talks about clothing, cars, and buildings being coated in solar screens made of this stuff.
Evilgrin 72
Distributor of Pain
No can do, I read the Wiki page. I'm just wondering if the knock on solar power remains the size and inefficiency of the panels and whether this stuff might be the missing piece in solving that problem (if it still exists)
Evilgrin 72
Distributor of Pain
Who said that? A smart phone in my opinion, is an amalgam of other ideas, all of which were 20th century developments. Of course, all inventions are extensions of existing technology, but desktop PC -> tablet is not the same as horse drawn carriage -> gas powered automobile.
Ignoratio Elenchi
Footballguy
I don't think the speed of light is considered the universal speed limit simply because it's the fastest thing we've ever observed. It's more fundamental than that, it's considered the limit because that's a natural consequence of the equations of relativity (e.g. accelerating something to a speed faster than c would require an infinite amount of energy, etc). I'm not up to date on all the latest quantum stuff, and there are probably ways to mimic the effects of exceeding the speed of light (through space-bending or quantum effects or somesuch) but in my limited layman's understanding, c is still the speed limit, and it's not at all arbitrary.
Brony
Footballguy
NCCommish
Footballguy
Best advice on that site
on't try to understand women. Women understand women and they hate each other.That mallard knows things.
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(HULK)
(Smash)
I personally do not think that we're aware of how everything works, and that the speed of light as an upper limit is simply our best guess and it also works well as an approximation for various calculations. Still, things like quantum entanglement/teleportation seem to defy the speed of light. Just last year it looked like some neutrinos were breaking it (although that turned out to be an error). All in all, I'm not going to subscribe to it as a factual speed limit because I figure when we know more we'll find out that it isn't.
NCCommish
Footballguy
Well there are many issues with exceeding light speed. No one is saying you can't go faster theoretically. But there are all kinds of consequences for reaching C. Until we can get around those it is effectively the speed limit.
NewlyRetired
Footballguy
Exactly. Calling it an arbitrary number or even worse trying to compare it to the speed of sound is wrong in so many ways.
roadkill1292
Footballguy
I always thought the people opposed to the BIG because it would reward people with a minimal lifestyle without working had it all wrong. If there indeed isn't enough work, the competition will be to become the most productive. If that's the only way to separate yourself from the same minimal existence as some unemployed stoner and get some good schwag, then there will be lots of people chasing fewer opportunities. There could be a boom in innovation and productivity as a result.Full employment shouldn't be our goal. Having our wants and needs met without the drudgery of uninteresting work should be our goal.The Basic Income Guarantee thing is not really all the communist. We already have welfare, unemployment, food stamps, etc. If you do the BIG you could drop a lot of those safety net programs. You'd probably still do food stamps for kids but otherwise you wouldn't need them. And of course it works much better with a single payer system. Of course it comes down to size of the BIG but really doesn't it make sense to come up with some way to keep people fed and housed when the reality is there just won't be jobs for them?Thats the rub, isn't it. Communism/Socialism, the great evil for most of us growing up. I don't think thats an answer this country can swallow. Which is why I keep trying to think of ways to redistribute wealth generated by robots while maintaining a capitalistic setup. I don't want people starving in the streets, but if there is no way for them to earn income, what can be done?VERY interesting. What they propose is damn near communist, that's going to get people's panties in a bunch.What I take from this is that middle America is headed over the falls in a barrel. Aside from farming and ranching, what jobs are going to be available to many of the people who rely on manufacturing to support their infrastructure? It feels like everything between the Rockies and the Mississippi could turn into Detroit, except maybe for Kansas City, since they have Google Fiber.
Ignoratio Elenchi
Footballguy
I would characterize it as more than simply "our best guess" and "an approximation," although I obviously agree with you that we don't know how everything works and I am repeatedly amazed whenever I read about new developments in quantum theory. Of course there would have been someone like me arguing that Newton's laws were all right before Einstein came along and showed that they technically weren't. So I understand that what we think is true now may turn out later to be not so true. But there are a lot of fundamental reasons to believe in a limiting speed. As you point out (and I already acknowledged), while there are things that seem to defy the speed limit, we haven't (to my knowledge) found something that actually does. And as NCCommish points out, it's not simply a matter of waiting until we develop the understanding and technology to find something faster - traveling faster than light carries with it some very strange and troublesome implications. The whole idea of causality, which is pretty fundamental to everything we know about everything, would change, leading to paradoxes that are practically impossible to resolve or even imagine existing. Anyway, my point isn't that we'll never break the speed of light - that's something I can't possibly know, although right now I'd have to guess we won't - but simply that it's not "arbitrary" that the speed of light is the universal speed limit. It's not like science just said, "Wow, light is the fastest thing we've ever seen, that must be the fastest anything can go." It's much more fundamental than that. Exceeding c is not just a matter of building a bigger engine or measuring things to greater precision or whatever.
(HULK)
(Smash)
I'm not a physicist and probably not the best person to discuss the theoretical speed limit of light. I personally wouldn't be suprised if things can exceed that speed. I also wouldn't be suprised if I'm wrong in my assumptions. Lets get back on track with awesome inventions of the 2000s. Hoping for sexbots.
Run It Up
Footballguy
Not joking at all when I say they are being projected to be commercially available ~2030.Technology forecasting firm: Envisioning Tech
(HULK)
(Smash)
Well put
