The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

“That’s them!  They knocked us out and stole our space suits!” – Dude, Where’s My Car?

How does a crab cross the street?  It uses a sidewalk.

The future isn’t what it used to be.

Going back in time, the future as envisioned by the 50s, 60s, and even the 70s was pretty cool.  There were flying cars, jetpacks, and a world that was cleaner and more convenient filled with abundant energy that would be too cheap to meter – and humanity would soon be headed outward to the planets, at the very least.  I believe that’s because that’s where the hot alien women in bikini space suits are kept.

That didn’t happen, or at least hasn’t happened yet.  Pa Wilder was born after World War I, but still within spitting distance of the first time people flew in the rickety plane that Orville and Wilber tossed together.  By the time he finished his government-funded all-expenses-paid European vacation in 1945, jet engines had already screamed over Europe, ballistic missiles had crossed into space on their way toward delivering urgent packages to London.

Jet airliners and satellites followed, and before Pa Wilder hit fifty, man was walking on the Moon.

And his favorite eel?  That’s a moray.

Amazing progress, by any stretch of the imagination.  But what (at the individual level) has changed since, say, 1981?

Let’s put computers aside (for a moment).  I know that’s like wanting to talk about the life of O.J. Simpson but just skip that one little detail.  Life in 2024 would be utterly comprehensible to Pa Wilder of 1981, especially if he never looked at a cellphone or a tablet or a computer.

The big advances in basic applied engineering seemed to stop around 1970.  Heck, in some ways, they’ve regressed – it’s not really possible to get on an SST and jet to London in a few hours going faster than the speed of sound unless you’re in the .mil club.  We’re also tinkering with going back to the Moon, but seemed to have lost the directions since Buzz Aldrin left them in his other spacesuit.

“I am Buzz Aldrin, I’ve been on the Moon.  Neil before me!”

One of the reasons that progress in a lot of conventional technology has slowed down or stopped is that progress is always easiest at the front end.  The Wright Flyer?  It sucked.  But after flight was proven, people lined up to improve it.  Radio?  It sucked, too, just dots and dashes until AM and then FM were plucked (by very smart people) from the aether, leading also to television in very short order.

Unfortunately, television also led to The View and Keeping Up With the Kardashians, so there’s at least some argument that Philo T. Farnsworth could be held liable for war crimes.

The biggest and most important refinements to a new technology often come soonest.

But that’s not the only reason technological development slows.  Nowadays, experimenting has become too hard because failure is no longer an acceptable outcome.  A prime example of this is Elon Musk’s SpaceX® versus NASA.  Elon makes more progress in an “old” field in a month than NASA does in a year because he watches things blow up and smiles because he knows that his team will have learned something new about why stuff broke.

Space is hard, but it’s a thousand times harder if you have to continually guess what will go wrong rather than test, and that slows progress.  Nuclear power may be an exception here, since we only need so many Godzillas® and Gameras™ to fight off dangerous kaiju, like Michelle Obama or Amy Schumer.

What do you find between Godzilla’s toes?  Slow Japanese people.

As I mentioned, Pa Wilder of 1981 would be quite comfy and unsurprised by the world of 2024 with the exception of information technology and telecommunications, which, aside from financial shenanigans, has received the greatest amount of investment of any single industry since 1981.

What would the biggest changes be for him?

Well, duh, computers, telecommunications, and their influence on the world.

It has transformed businesses in fundamental ways.  Walmart®’s secret sauce wasn’t just cheap Chinese merchandise – nope.  It was also the information tech that allowed them to manage the purchasing and logistics of a business with a supply chain that spanned multiple continents.  The time was ready for that particular innovation:  if it hadn’t been Walmart©, it would have been some other company.

You can get Batman® shampoo at our Walmart©, but not conditioner Gordon.

Pa Wilder would not be very comfortable with the pace of social media.  Also, I think that he would be very, very concerned with the advances in Artificial Intelligence, but enough about the chairman of the Federal Reserve®.

Pa was the president of a very small farm bank as computer terminals began to replace the paper ledgers that they used to track accounts, so he was familiar the changes that he was seeing in banking that in, but taking it from that level to the idea of “all the information anywhere, immediately available” was never something he quite got.  Of course, it probably didn’t help that he used a 28.8kb modem and there were only something like 24 lines(!) from his county to the AT&T© office the next county over.

Yes.  28 lines.  It wasn’t like everybody would be calling all at once, right?  That was, however, the time that we ran for the phone in my house, since calls were rare, and you really wanted to see who it was.  Now?  I have the data equivalent of 10,000 old phone lines coming to my house.

We certainly don’t have jetpacks or flying cars, but we do have an information explosion that is unparalleled in history.  That being said, we’re probably pretty near the limits for conventional computing power based on the limits of physics and energy density, and I’m not sure that quantum computing isn’t just a meme.

Is the next big field genetics?

What do you get when you cross a duck and a pig?  A media exposé about the lack of ethics in genetic engineering.

Advances in things like CRISPR and genomic sequencing have come about because of the advances in information processing, and we are, perhaps, at the cusp of the A.I. world where things could get very, very interesting indeed in just a few years.  Maybe the scientists and A.I. working together with CRISPR can even find a way to turn plant matter into protein.  You know, like a chicken.

Or maybe they’ll finally locate the hot alien women in bikini space suits?

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

25 thoughts on “The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same”

  1. I am betting our next step will be a great leader creating a statue that speaks and demands we the people to worship him

  2. I remember Neil and Buzz on the TV as a teen and thinking it was the most important event in history, right there in 1969. Walter Cronkite, the legendary CBS newsman, said “500 years from now they will be celebrating the first landing on the moon and the first walk on the moon.” We were both wrong. Only 50 years later Apollo 11 has been virtually forgotten, its symbology eventually replaced from our 1971 national dollar coin by a politically correct Sacagawea. And while the most important event in history wasn’t the moon landing, it WAS indeed right there in 1969: flipping the switch to turn on ARPANET, the very first computers that founded the internet. They haven’t been turned off since.

    Genetic and AI technology are certainly two big areas of future progress. But the biggest breakthru of all (literally) would be not “to boldly go” into space but instead “to routinely drill” into the Earth and tap the geothermal heat beneath our feet. That would change everything.

    https://news.mit.edu/2022/quaise-energy-geothermal-0628

  5. I’d have to disagree with information being widely available. Very little of it is information, instead it is:
    – Ads
    – Attention W****s doing the digital equivalent of raising their dresses over their heads, and yelling “Come and git it, People!”
    – Gossip – some spread by ‘professionals’, some by the same type of amateurs that always did so – this is probably 50% or more of the bandwidth
    – Useful instruction – videos on practical topics. But, that isn’t NEW info, it’s just generally re-hashed knowledge, packaged attractively, and about things people really do want to know.
    – Scientific papers and conferences – this was intended to be the backbone of the internet, but it actually forms a miniscule segment, and is generally paywalled (at prices that only institutions can afford). What you see is reported by NON-scientist journalists, and heavily watered down.
    – Pseudo-science – what we used to call uninformed opinion.
    – Partisan rantings – on every side of the political spectrum. The very few who provide intelligent reporting and commentary are out-shouted by the dumba$$es.

    I’ll be honest – I generally rely on aggregators who lean non-Left. If there is a story I’m interested in knowing about, I google it, and carefully look for opposing viewpoints. Not that they are necessarily better or more authoritative, but if I take a look at both sides, I may be able to figure out what happened – and what didn’t.
    Not a very efficient way to be on top of the news, but it’s all that I have time for.

    1. Oh, it’s available, it’s just that you have to find a way to find it. Search engines censor me, so what else are they censoring? Yandex, anyone?

  6. Wait – we’ve got something that will already turn plants, insects, and table scraps into protein – in two different forms, no less! It’s called a chicken!

    So, what exactly *is* the holdup on the flying cars and hot alien women in bikinis? It wouldn’t have anything to do with non-males being involved in R&D now, would it? Because not wanting competition, and believing that we’d kill ourselves (or pick up hot alien women) in our flying cars – might be a plausible reason *why* we don’t have them (yet). 😉

  7. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced as much information now available. Unfortunately, finding accurate information is like picking for kernels of corn in a pile of horse apples, and the pile grows daily.

  8. Further to your comment about AI and CRISPR — I believe that John Ringo has discussed his books in the Black Tide Rising series as being prediction, not fiction: having cheap and simple hardware for fooling around with genetics will eventually end up with somebody, somewhere, creating something that makes the black death look like a small case of the sniffles
    Steve O

  9. That Walmart meme is funny stuff right thar. I graduated high school in ‘81, had no clue about the world.

    Shortly there after due to a really smart older brother who got a front page business section color photo write up in a large city paper I was able to ask him, “what’s a webpage?”. I still didn’t understand but knew I better learn if he knows. Years later Before he past I asked him what he was trying to due back then. The answer shocked me. It didn’t work because he was light years ahead of B2B activity on the www.

    1. ps thank goodness for how to videos on the www, saved me lots of mula fiat bucks

  10. Point Of Order:

    “When you swim in the sea
    And get bit in the knee
    That’s a moray.    ” – Snorkelling 101

    You may now return to your regularly scheduled blogcast.

    The wonder of the internet is that anyone can have access to information in mere seconds it took people like Shakespeare, Newton, Franklin, or Einstein a lifetime to amass; but most people use it for cat pics, dates with slags and slugs, or watching porn.

    If Gutenberg had just printed porn, he’d probably have become the world’s first billionaire.
    Right before they burned him at the stake.

    People don’t appreciate anything they haven’t had to work for.
    This is why Orville and Wilbur were a million times more enthusiastic about what they did – at the speed of a fast run – than anyone is who’s travelling cattle class on Frontier Airlines, even at 500MPH.

    So tech is nice, but it has to be useful in service of achieving fundamental human desires.
    Pocket calculators, solar panels, freeze-dried food, Velcro, and Tang are and would have been pretty decent achievements on their own, but they only became spectacular when they enabled landing on the Moon.

    And the hidden flaw in most technological “progress”?
    The Axemaker’s Gift
    https://www.amazon.com/Axemakers-Gift-Technologys-Capture-Control/dp/0874778565

    Cases in point:
    Flying cars and jetpacks.
    Now imagine what DUIs would be like with the addition of the hazard of flaming death meteors slamming into buildings piloted by hordes of inebriated morons. Like there would be.

    1. It’s the profusion of trash that makes wading in the Internet something I control – I go to specific places, at specific times for news. Otherwise? It’s just a tool. I shudder to think what it has done to the kids.

      Aesop, imagine the humor when a drunken guy in a jet car plows into a cornfield. Evolution takes another step forward. Now? We just have to let doctors kill themselves in double engine planes.

      1. Drunks wouldn’t plow into cornfields.
        Plowing corn fields is too close to being work.

        This is why they hit buildings, trees, and other drivers instead.
        The saddest part is they usually survive, because they’re nice and relaxed at impact.
        We should change the name of capital punishment to “Evolution”. Then the idiot Left would be knee-jerk in favor of it. That’s just a theory, mind you. (You probably saw what I did there.)

        BTW, Profusion Of Trash is a great band name.
        It’s probably also what the internet and most media should be called, formally.

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