I don’t think society will ever change as much as it did from 1963 - 2013. Not only technology, but letting someone that is not a Christian white man be on any importance (I’d add “straight” to that description, but in the early 1960’s there were no “visible” queers.).
No…because the changes will be more. The difference is you won’t notice them as much since you are in in the maelstrom and don’t have the historical perspective to judge the relative change.
Yet the rate of change is accelerating for all those things except, right now, the average life span. Even there, however, the quality of life seems to be going up at all phase of life, especially towards the end, for more people than ever before. The number of people living in absolute poverty world wide is dropping steadily, and even those living in regular poverty is dropping across the globe.
As for life span, I’m guessing we are on the cusp of several technologies that will make radical life extension a reality by your 2099 figure. I probably won’t live to see them, but I think it’s possible that a human has been born today who will live hundreds if not thousands of years.
All these predictions are funny. It’s like watching people try and predict the future in 1900 for what the next 99 years would be like…or, hell, what folks in the 60’s predicted the future would be like by the year 2000. 
Essentially, you are trying to extrapolate from the technologies you (think) you know today and just making them a bit better but really more of the same. It doesn’t really work that way, especially now where you have so many different lines of research converging in unpredictable ways. I can’t even imagine what the GAMING will be like in 10 years, let alone more complex things. I get a taste of what I THINK the future will be when I see the various research lines for things like augmented reality and machine to brain interface, but we aren’t even scratching the surface on those things. Yet, I almost certainly WILL live long enough to see several paradigm changes in our technology and how we use it. And that’s just one, small, vertical sliver of the tech that’s coming. Bioscience, geoengineering on a massive scale, manned exploitation of space…there are so many irons in the fire and from so many different sources today that no one could possibly keep track of what all is going on or what breakthroughs might change the world again and again. That’s the thing…in the past you had a few people then a few countries who were driving innovation…today, that pool of people who are doing that has grown and grown and grown, as have the tools available to them. The computational power available today to people is astonishing and continues to grow.
I think it will be so different that you and I won’t even recognize it. It will be the difference between some guy taken from your 1599 and taken to 1999 but compressed into less than a century.
Brandeis and Cardozo and Frankfurter and Goldberg all got on the Supreme Court before then, didn’t they?
Science advanced rapidly in the 19th century. The 20th century applied the scientific knowledge gained in 19th. Relative to those changes the 21st century may not seem so different in terms of the development of technology based on scientific discoveries, but that’s just the hardware. How the technology is now applied can lead to changes we don’t even predict yet. Even the ones we do predict will make a substantial difference, we can expect the human-machine interface to keep advancing, by the end of this century our smartphones may seem as basic as a telegraph.
Another aspect of this is the pace of change. By this point in the 20th century man had gone from earthbound to flying through the air in machines. We may not see that kind of rapid change but we could see improvements to flying machines continue through the century. We could easily see SSTs return to commercial flights and STOL/VTOL technology that ends the central airport system. The flying experience could be tremendously different at the end of the century without any abrupt leaps in flight technology.
Try widening your horizons a little? There’s a whole lot of other countries out there, you may have heard of some of them. Your definitions (such as of “of any importance”) could use some reviewing too.
Well let’s see how we are doing in the first 17%:
In 2000 automobiles were just making the transition to IVHS technologies. In 2017 most cars are equipped with GPS, object detection, Wi-Fi, display screens and multiple video cameras. Some have automatic parallel parking.
In 2000 fully automated driving was a high tech novelty. In 2017 it is being tested as a commercially viable product.
In 2000 a self stabilized multi rotor drone with first person view video was an expensive military secret. I saw one at Walmart yesterday for $147.
In 2000 most TVs used cathode ray tube displays. In 2017 all displays are flat screen LCD at very affordable prices.
In 2000 light bulbs were mostly incandescent or fluorescent. Regardless of what it said on the box none of them lasted very long. In 2017 LED bulbs are common at competitive prices. They are low power and very long life.
Between 2000 and 2017 Cell Phones replaced land line phones.
Drone warfare is now a reality.
Then there’s Terabit memories at Walmart for $60, TV ads for personal DNA analysis, Watson and Apple watches. And you have the convergence of these technologies. When I am exploring the east mesa in my Land Rover, my wife can see exactly where I am using a cell phone app.
Not bad progress for %17 of the century.
However, socially we have not progressed much, if any, since the days of Aristophanes.
Crane
When I was a small child in the 1960’s, my father used to tell me stories about the first time he used an escalator, and how there was no television when he was my age, only radio. I remember wondering what similar innovations I would tell my own children about, since it seemed to me that all of the good stuff had already been invented, and there wasn’t really anything left for my lifetime.
Now the world has changed faster than I could possibly have imagined, and in ways I never dreamed of (50 years from now you’ll be typing on a computer over something called the Internet to tell people all over the world this story simultaneously and instantly).
I have no doubt that the pace of change will only continue to accelerate, and that the changes will be nothing that we could think of today. Somewhere I have list of 10 predictions that I made for the 21st century. I’m sure that they will sound quaint and silly in 2100.
Yes, it’s only been 17%, but the differences from 1900 to 1999 are much more obvious, even if we limit it to just the categories you mention.
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In 1900 automobiles were a novelty, a lot of people still used horse and buggy. In 1999 they were everywhere, and a car from 2000 transported to 2017 wouldn’t seem out of place.
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In 1900 planes didn’t exist. In 1999, by your own statement, we already had drones, not to mention all the stuff in between such as helicopters, 747s, B2 bombers, the Concorde, etc.
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In 1900 the machines Babbage had built would barely even qualify as computers, by 1999 PCs, admittedly a lot less powerful than what we currently use, were commonplace.
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In 1900 most people had never seen a lightbulb, by 1999 my guess is that the only people without lightbulbs were people purposely avoiding technology.
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In 1900 there weren’t TVs. A 60 inch TV from 1999, which a little bulky and heavy, wouldn’t look terribly out of place as far as the picture on the screen goes next to what is on the shelves at Best Buy today.
I think the smartphone is the only new game changing widespread technology that has been invented since 2000. All the other stuff, GPS, the internet, drones, etc. had already been invented. Looking back at my own life in 2000 compared to today that is the only real major difference that I can identify.
On the micro level, the latter part of your statement is how invention generally works. It addresses some need or issue that already exists in an innovative way. There are very few ‘thunderbolt’ inventions, if any.
A famous example is one of the most influential and consequential inventions of our time, the theory of general relativity. It may appear to have come from out of the blue, but in reality it built on at least decades of mathematical and physical theory. It took Einstein’s unique point of view to synthesize it.
Successful inventions lead to progress in a particular field (or fields), but projecting the directions in which those fields will grow is almost impossible on the macro level. We don’t know which will succeed and which won’t, or where the successful inventors will apply their talents.
I agree with the OP. The 1900s were like the takeoff and ascent phase; the 2000s will be more like a cruise phase of invention.
Someone from the year 2000 will probably be able to recognize technology in 2100 or at least understand it. Someone from the year 1900 would have probably been dumbfounded and mystified by 2000’s technology.
I’m much more pessimistic. The 21st century will see a global thermonuclear war and the few (if any) that survive will be reduced to living in Stone Age conditions. The weapons of war are everywhere and there are too many depots and/or insane leaders out there.
Except you’re comparing 1900 to 1999, and he’s comparing 2000 to 2017. To be fair you’d have to compare 1900 to 1917.
And in that span of time the only really major game-changing invention was powered flight, which went from early unsuccessful experiments in 1900 to a gigantic military industry in 1917.
Thing is, WWI radically foreshortened the development of flight. Usually these things start as very early speculation, early experiments, a long period of uneconomical and unpractical hobbyist efforts, a breakthrough commercial success, rapid diversification and breakthroughs, then a long period of incremental improvements. WWI collapsed the hobbyist and breakthrough periods into almost nothing by throwing millions of dollars and thousands of lives into producing aircraft for the war. Then along came WWII and the same thing happened. By the 1950s the modern jet aircraft was in existence, and all development since then has been incremental improvements in reliability and efficiency.
So the modern jet age was established already in the first half of the 20th century, and we’ve been pretty much coasting ever since then.
But that trajectory of invention makes it hard to pick out transformative inventions. When we look back we can see the first people who speculate about the technology. We see the first couple of guys who experiment with the technology, the hobbyists, the failed products, the early successes, then the saturation point. And all that is collapsed in our minds as “well, at one point there were no automobiles, and then along came the Model T and then everyone had a car, and it’s all been coasting since then.”
But in the early days of automobile development you could be forgiven for not understanding how the car could transform society. How does a horseless carriage work better than a technology that’s been in use since ancient Egypt? And by the time the automobile has already transformed society you can contrariwise look back and say that the automobile is nothing new, it’s been around for decades so how is it revolutionary?
So we have the simultaneous problem of not seeing the revolutionary potential of inventions that exist today but are impractical and cumbersome and don’t really work, and discounting fully developed technology that is just a long evolutionary improvement over stuff that’s been around for decades.
Because we just went through a 20 year revolution in communication technology analogous to the revolution in powered flight. 20 years ago the internet just started happening. 20 years ago mobile phones were curiosities for the rich and pretentious. Today in 2017 everyone has a smart phone in their pocket. If you had outlined the capabilities of a typical 2017 phone to a person in 1997 nothing you talked about would seem that impossible or outlandish, just like in 1900 everyone was expecting powered flight to be just around the corner. It’s just that it didn’t actually exist yet. Putting it all together into not just a product that works, but works well enough to ubiquitous rather than a toy is a revolution.
I wouldn’t call it gigantic at that point. Few military decision makers took air power seriously until at least the '30’s.
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Yes, it’s only been 17%, but the differences from 1900 to 1999 are much more obvious, even if we limit it to just the categories you mention.
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No, they are more obvious to you in hindsight. The differences to most of humanity between 1900 and 1917 weren’t that great.
In 2000 China, for instance, had around 2 million cars on the streets (this is commercial and private…mainly commercial). Today it’s well over 200 million and I think it’s going up something like 20 million a year. Other Asian countries and several in Africa are similar. And while the cars today LOOK just like those in 2000 there are some fairly large though subtle changes that have happened. However, cars have been around for well over a hundred years, so you are right…someone in 1900 going to 1917 would notice a big change from no cars (or few cars) to more cars, as well as the change in the number of gas/service stations.
No, they didn’t (until 1903). Again, though, it’s not the air frame that’s changed, so the differences are more subtle. Today’s air craft are much more tightly integrated with data networks, making them much more capable. In addition, we are just starting to have technologies converge to allow parts to be printed instead of milled and new materials to be introduced to make the planes lighter and stronger and more capable. While it LOOKS like the differences are smaller, under the skin it’s very different.
Again, looks are deceiving. While PCs are fundamentally the same if as you say more powerful, the software is more capable and stable and the underlying network architectures are light years different and expanding all the time. The amount of bandwidth available to basically the average Joe today is astonishing (to me at least), and the amount of connectivity to people all over the world is breath taking. And HOW they are using it is equally interesting. The changes to society alone from 2000 to 2007 wrt technology and how it’s being integrated into people’s lives is just a taste of things to come.
Your focus seems to only be on the US or perhaps Europe…even today, not everyone has access to electricity, even non-stable electricity. And on this score there hasn’t been that much progress, to be sure, though the hooks are there for huge changes. Fusion is still on the table, solar is becoming closer to a wide scale reality, but the grid hasn’t really changed from a physical perspective. What HAS started to change is, again, the more subtle underlying stuff that folks don’t see, with grids more highly automated and smarter.
I know…broken record here. Again, it’s not so much to device that’s changed (though, of course, it has changed a lot with more capabilities), it’s the underlying stuff that’s really made a difference between a TV in 2000 verse one today that can be hooked up to the world wide web and get content on demand from a bewildering number of providers. And, again, this is just starting to scratch the surface on where this is all going.
I think part of your problem is you look around and see things that look, to you, to be exactly the same as they were when you were a kid. Cars still have rubber wheels and drive on the streets, computers still access porn on the interwebs, TVs still show TV, etc etc. But lift the hood and it’s a whole 'nother ball game. And this is just the stuff you see and use…there are folks working on some really astonishing (and scary) things, and there are a LOT of those folks doing so. There are technologies in the wings or with the potential to change the entire world in ways as to make it unrecognizable to you and I today…and to do so in 10 or 20 years, let alone in the next 93. You only think it’s not changing a lot because you are inside the change and don’t have the perspective to look outside or look at it from the perspective of hindsight.
Maybe if you’re talking about bombing. But air power at first was simply for reconnaissance. Fly your plane over the other guy’s territory and take notes about what you see. The side that knows the disposition of the other forces has a huge advantage. So maybe you wanna stop the other side from doing that? So you mount a gun on your reconnaissance plane and try to shoot down the other guy’s unarmed reconnaissance plane. So he sticks a gun on his plane to shoot you down before you shoot him down. In WWI that’s the primary mission of air power, bombers existed by they weren’t very effective. The whole panoply of fighters is there to allow your reconnaissance to succeed and deny it to the enemy. Bombing missions or attack missions were rare and not very successful.
And then along comes 1945 and a single bomber can carry a nuclear bomb that can flatten a city.
I thought you meant AlphaGo by the “he” in red above :smack: That would be mighty impressive AI – for AlphaGo to give interviews after the match.
We can all simply pray that the answer is not “collect as many stamps as it can”.
I think the advent of practical robotics and true AI are pretty substantial changes that are already here and getting cheaper, and currently peeking over the horizon, respectively.
The former will essentially make humans virtually unemployable in a great many fields (if there’s not a single job that an 80-IQ human can do that a robot can’t, and the robot is cheaper, the 80-IQ human is just SOL; and as robotics improves that number creeps up), requiring a significant realignment of how we think about work and economics in an economy where a great many people can’t be useful as consumers or producers.
The latter… Who even knows. AI risk is its own field, and much-maligned, but let’s be clear here - advanced AI poses an existential risk to life on this planet, just as much as thermonuclear war does, and to pretend otherwise is to drastically undersell the difficulties in ensuring that these systems are both intelligent and do what we want them to, and if we can’t figure out how to get them to do what we want them to by the time true AI exists… Well, I’d say “flip a coin, heads everything is fine, tails humans cease to exist in any meaningful way”, but that might give the impression that there are good odds that this problem solves itself. Humanity going up in smoke for the sake of making more stamps to collect would be a pretty dramatic change, and I’d argue it’d blow just about anything in the 20th century out of the water.
Beyond that, even just in the last 17 years, the proliferation of smartphones, the internet, mass communication, the drastic improvement of IT technology on just about every front, and more are pretty damn significant. It seems like a bizarre prediction to make - along the lines of “I will change less next decade than I did last decade”. But then again, it’s also a pretty basic fallacy our brains make:
The scientists published their findings in the journal Science¹. Many of the choices that people make rest on assumptions. The psychologists devised a series of online experiments, in which more than 19,000 people participated. Adults between 18 and 68 filled out a questionnaire, scoring themselves on basic personality traits. The researchers asked them to do it again, answering as if they would have done 10 years ago or as they would do 10 years from now. The surveys of the participants of all ages indicated that they felt that they had changed more in the past decade than they would change in the upcoming one.
There’s generally two responses to topics like this, and both cite cute graphs of inventions, population, energy consumed, or something where it shoots up during the industrial revolution. One stance is that change will accelerate as it builds upon what came before. The other is that humans picked the low hanging fruit, whether it’s the invention search space or resource extraction, and further advancements will be more difficult, especially as people must dedicate more of their lives to research and studying multiple disciplines.
A less common stance is that human society hasn’t changed much since agriculture and cities. There’s still classes and various roles, like farmer, merchant, soldier, priest, and rulers. Proportions and influence of certain classes shift, as do their tools, but the relations are still easy to understand, which is why you can read a story from 3,000 years ago and still relate to their position in society. You once went to the market and bought things with coins, now you use your computer to visit a digital market and buy things with digital money – same difference.
So then there wouldn’t be a real change until we get, how does the meme go, fully automated gay space communism.
Why do you compare changes in 17 years with changes during a whole century?
And what were the massive changes people experienced between 1900 and 1917?
One thing doesn’t change however : people keep thinking that mostly everything significant has already been invented. Now as they did in 1900.
My predictions for 2099:
Humans will be able to transfer their minds to machines if they want.
Biological lifespan is 200+ years with medical advances in anti-aging tech.
80-90% of jobs humans used to do are automated. There is maybe 1 job a human does for every 10 people alive.
Superintelligent artificial intelligence is everywhere. Most tasks that require any cognitive ability are done better and faster by machines.
Some method of interstellar travel will have been devised (technically we’ve had these since the 1950s if you count nuclear pulse engines).
I feel like the 20th century is the century where humans more or less reached their potential as homo sapiens. The 21st century is when humans transcend being homo sapiens. I agree that in the beginning of the 20th century, most people were living lives barely more advanced than people were leading in prehistoric times (even in the US) and by the end of the century people were living lives full of tech.
But I think this century is when we transcend our biological limitations regarding our health and cognition. That’ll open up entirely new avenues of life and existence.
The real issue is when AI develops. Science and technology has biological human creativity and innovation as a bottleneck. If the promise of AI turns out to be true, then that bottleneck will be smashed this century and the pace of innovation, problem solving, information gathering, creativity, etc will become rapidly faster and higher in quality. Its like a horse, even if you have a horse that is 4 standard deviations better than the average horse at running and travel, it is still vastly vastly inferior to a jet, train, ship or car (all machines we invented to help us travel).