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join:2001-11-22
Chicago, IL | Denying Futures Cant Prevent Them You sound funny, all of you. Do these sound familiar:
Everything that can be invented, has. (1899)
Who would ever want a computer in their house?
Why would you ever need more than 2 MB of memory?
How could you ever fit 43 hours of video on a CD?
We've compressed time so much that the future approaches faster than the present can happen. In 1890, most people thought that people could only fly by climbing something tall and jumping off. They thought that the horse and locomotive were the best transportation mankind could ever come up with. Twenty-five years later, cars were pushing horses back to the fields, and the fields were being paved over for places to land planes.
In 1975, you did not see a computer unless you went to school for a looong time, were very rich, or worked for the government. If you wanted to send a message, you wrote or typed it out and expected that it would be received in a few days. Every gas station attendant pumped the fuel, did your oil, AND washed the windshield.... EVERY time you went there. Twenty-five years later, the guy inside the plexiglass cube who turns on the pump for you knows more about computers than you ever will, and he can talk to his friends in Mongolia as fast as he can type for 50 cents a day.
These seem to be similar examples of how fast the world changes, but in fact, they are different. In 1915, the plane and car were still pretty much iffy things at best. The world had not fundamentally changed as far as most folks were concerned. In 2000, the world was radically different for most people than it was in 1975. This points toward the idea that the pace of change is increasing for a larger number of people every decade.
The way that the two examples are similar is that they both show an exponentially greater rate of change than that of the whole of human history. Most people alive in 885 hoped that their village wasn't raided, plagued, burnt, invaded or otherwise depopulated more than a dozen times in the next twenty-five years. The average person in 1510 hoped that their master or landlord didn't rough up their two surviving children as much in 1535. A person alive ten thousand years ago hoped for good rain and hunting when his grandchildren were born twenty-five years hence. Not much changed year-to-year for the majority of people.
What's the lesson? Consider this:
In 1985, i used a floppy disk that WAS floppy to save a few pictures and letters. In 1990, i used a smaller floppy to save a book and a photo album. In 1995, i could get a CD with either an hour of music or an encyclopedia. In 2000, i burnt 70 hours of old radio broadcasts to a CD, and if i had enough cash i could record 3 hours of damn fine video to an optical disc. Don't fool yourself, that is NOT a linear progression!
At this rate, i would be SHOCKED if no one was able to store 20 movies on a CD-R by 2005. After all, TV was invented decades before it was widely available, VCRs took about 9 years from invention to ubiquity. CDs took less than that. Perhaps the guy in the article is the leading edge of the "killer app" that solidifies the CD-R format and sells billions of personal video players by 2005. You gotta figure that someone, somewhere, has that sort of compression scheme in their head. Judging by recent trends, now is about the right time for that someone to invent it. Perhaps we are learning about it so soon because everything else is faster nowadays too.
That's just my three cents. | |
| Thanks for posting your term paper.  But seriously, I, as well as almost everyone here on DSLr, would agree with you. The amount of progress in the last quarter century has been amazing. I am just waiting for the Star Trek holodecks and nanobots. | |
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