Comment by frognumber

Comment by frognumber 2 days ago

9 replies

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There are a series of challenges like:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/09/technology/ai...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/19/technology/ar...

These are a little bit unfair, in that we're comparing handpicked examples, but I don't think many experts will pass a test like this. Technology only moves forward (and seemingly, at an accelerating pace).

What's a little shocking to me is the speed of progress. Humanity is almost 3 million years old. Homosapiens are around 300,000 years old. Cities, agriculture, and civilization is around 10,000. Metal is around 4000. Industrial revolution is 500. Democracy? 200. Computation? 50-100.

The revolutions shorten in time, seemingly exponentially.

Comparing the world of today to that of my childhood....

One revolution I'm still coming to grips with is automated manufacturing. Going on aliexpress, so much stuff is basically free. I bought a 5-port 120W (total) charger for less than 2 minutes of my time. It literally took less time to find it than to earn the money to buy it.

I'm not quite sure where this is all headed.

homebrewer 2 days ago

> so much stuff is basically free

It really isn't. Have a look at daily median income statistics for the rest of the planet:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...

  $2.48 Eastern and Southern Africa (PIP)
  $2.78 Sub-Saharan Africa (PIP)
  $3.22 Western and Central Africa (PIP)
  $3.72 India (rural)
  $4.22 South Asia (PIP)
  $4.60 India (urban)
  $5.40 Indonesia (rural)
  $6.54 Indonesia (urban)
  $7.50 Middle East and North Africa (PIP)
  $8.05 China (rural)
  $10.00 East Asia and Pacific (PIP)
  $11.60 Latin America and the Caribbean (PIP)
  $12.52 China (urban)
And more generally:

  $7.75 World
I looked around on Ali, and the cheapest charger that doesn't look too dangerous costs around five bucks. So it's roughly equal to one day's income of at least half the population of our planet.
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knodi123 2 days ago

+100w chargers are one of the products I prefer to spend a little more on, so I get something from a company that knows it can be sued if they make a product that burns down your house or fries your phone.

Flashlights? Sure, bring on aliexpress. USB cables with pop-off magnetically attached heads, no problem. But power supplies? Welp, to each their own!

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  • fph 2 days ago

    And then you plug your cheap pop-off USB cable into the expensive 100w charger?

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    • knodi123 2 days ago

      Yeah, sure, what could possibly go wrong? :-P

      But seriously, it's harder to accidentally make a USB cable that fries your equipment. The more common failure mode is it fails to work, or wears out too fast. Chargers on the other hand, handle a lot of voltage, generate a lot of heat, and output to sensitive equipment. More room to mess up, and more room for mistakes to cause damage.

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csomar a day ago

Democracy (and Republics) are thousands of year old. Computation is also quite old though it only sky-rocketed with electricity and semiconductors. This is not the first time the global world created a potential for exponential growth (I'll consider the Pharaohs and Roman empires to be ones).

There is the very real possibility that everything just stalls and plateau where we are at. You know, like our population growth, it should have gone exponentially but it did not. Actually, quite the reverse.

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bee_rider 2 days ago

> One revolution I'm still coming to grips with is automated manufacturing. Going on aliexpress, so much stuff is basically free. I bought a 5-port 120W (total) charger for less than 2 minutes of my time. It literally took less time to find it than to earn the money to buy it.

Is there a big recent qualitative change here? Or is this a continuation of manufacturing trends (also shocking, not trying to minimize it all, just curious if there’s some new manufacturing tech I wasn’t aware of).

For some reason, your comment got me thinking of a fully automated system, like: you go to a website, pick and choose charger capabilities (ports, does it have a battery, that sort of stuff). Then an automated factor makes you a bespoke device (software picks an appropriate shell, regulators, etc). I bet we’ll see it in our lifetimes at least.

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MengerSponge 2 days ago

Democracy is 200? You're off by a full order of magnitude.

Progress isn't inevitable. It's possible for knowledge to be lost and for civilization to regress.

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  • frognumber 14 hours ago

    Okay. You're right about what I wrote. Let me rephrase what I meant. I was missing the words "the widespread adoption of"

    Athens had a democracy over 2500 years ago. A few Native American tribes had long-lasting democracies. Ukrainian cities were democratically self-governing 500 years ago, and Poland had elected kings.

    Those were isolated examples. This was not a revolution. We also haven't regressed; isolated examples continued throughout history. If you point to a year, you can probably find some democracy somewhere. The only major regression I know in history was around 1000BC. Regressions are rare.

    What changed was a revolution. From just before 1800 to just a little after 1900, virtually every country had a revolution which led to either being some form of democracy, or pretending to be one. Democracy was no longer isolated. We had the creation of a free world covering much of the world's population, and the creation of what was pretending to be a democracy (today, even the Democratic People's Republic of Korea pretends to be a democracy).

    The number of countries which claim to not be a democracy, you can count on your fingers. Iran. Vatican City. Saudi Arabia. UAE. Oman. Eswanti. Did I miss any?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_system_of...

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