For the purposes of this thread you have been given a one-off opportunity to change history by stopping technological advancement at a point in time of your choice.
If you choose the year 1452* for example all technological development worldwide will be frozen at its current level, in effect the capacity and desire to invent or innovate technologyiwise has been removed from the human mind, everyone thinks the current technology is just fine the way it is. Technology can still spread but once everyone is at the ‘highest’ level there will be no further advancement.
Social and other changes can still take place so a more egalitarian society can be moved towards, but that raises the question of course of how much technological improvement has driven social change and if it would even be possible with out it.
Whoever or whatever is giving you this choice is also feeling generous, if you like they will send you back to the point you stopped technological change (with knowledge of the language and everything else you need to fit in, you can’t change technology levels either though) or to remain in your current time period and take your chances regarding how history has changed up to that point. The choice is backwards only, you don’t get a look into the future to see how things turn out.
So when do you choose to freeze things, or do you let everything continue to progress as is?
*a completely random choice on my part, I have no particular knowledge of what the world was like at that point in history
If I was allowed a freeze-unfreeze cycle, I would at least consider doing a freeze just before the Manhattan Project and an unfreeze after … well, after what? After we become intelligent enough to handle it? When would that be? How would this even work? You know what, forget it, it’s too unpredictable and I’d do better not to mess with it.
I agree. Worse, I probably wouldn’t be here, since my father would have been taken off occupation duty in Germany and would have been part of the invasion of Japan.
To answer the OP, maybe right after we achieve immortality.
1956, the year I graduated from high school with an A in Physics, a field I had a pretty good understanding of. People were generally contented that he world worked pretty well then.
Your choice of 1452 provides one interesting example, since it comes shortly after the first printing press. If we freeze tech there, books will be substantially cheaper than when they were created by hand, but will remain much more expensive than they later became. So their distribution would be limited, forming a serious barrier to widespread education, especially for those not born to the wealthy.
History provides examples without number of the ties between technological advancement and social change.
Better and better automation is making it harder and harder to find a decent job. This will either culminate in a situation with a 90% underclass or a society with a lot of general leisure time and those who do work are those that generally like to feel busy. I’m not confident in the future. Take it back to 1996 technology, at least then there should be a better balance of decent jobs compared to people who want a decent job.
Also, freezing technology anywhere near the industrial era means that civilization *will *eventually permanently collapse when the non-renewable resources run out.
Solar Power Revolution will allow Humankind to increase Energy Consumption at least 100 times. That will increase Industrial output 100 times and Gross World Product 100 times. Everyone will have more material wealth then an average American in 2018. That will coincide with Robotic Revolution.
This one, if you are going to do it. Probably a bad idea, but if you’re going to do it, the sooner the better. If you do it prior to stone tools, Humans probably never would have lasted.
This.
I feel sorry for people who lack imagination to the degree they think we’re at, or ever have been, at some technological sweet spot.
Life sucks in so many ways. We don’t say that every day because it’s important to ac-cen-tu-ate the positive, or whatever.
But really there are a huge number of problems we’ve yet to tackle. I hope my descendents can live a life that makes ours look pathetically short, unpleasant and just plain boring by comparison.
Non-revewable resources would only run out if the birth rate continued at its rate supported by technological capacity to keep a population increase of nearly an order of magnitude. Without the industrial revolution, the population would have never increased from a billion or so to a projected ten billion, to gobble up all those resources.
When I was in high school in 1992, my German textbook included an article titled Die Freizeitgesellschaft (the free time society). The gist of it was exactly the point you’re making here : technology will allow us to work much shorter hours or even not at all, allowing us to spend most of our time on hobbies.
That book was published in the early 1970. Almost 50 years later, I’m pretty sure that Die Freizeitgesellschaft isn’t going to happen in my lifetime, perhaps never. If anything, I feel that we are much more stressed-out than our parents used to be. They occasionally had problems at work, but not that often, and the general pace of life seemed much less hectic. So, technology has definitely made lots of job obsolete, and we’re probably just seeing the start of this trend, but it hasn’t really offered us more free time.