Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Forget the millennium, just in my lifetime I have seen:

1. Computers go from room-sized devices that only major institutions could afford to being disposable commodities. Today I can buy a machine that can run Linux for less than the cost of one hour of labor at the minimum wage. That in and of itself is staggering.

2. The internet. When I was a kid, to get information you had to go to the library, or have an encyclopedia in your house, or wait for the daily newspaper (which was actually made of paper) to be delivered. Today I have direct real-time access to most significant world events (with video!) and Wikipedia wherever I have a cell connection. And it's all free!

3. ATM machines. When I was a kid, my parents had to go to the bank and wait in line to withdraw cash to get through the weekend. When I was in college, if you wanted to travel abroad, you carried cash or traveller's checks. If you ran out, you were hosed.

4. Genome sequencing, self-driving cars, and chess-playing computers that can beat human grand masters go from a pipe dream to a consumer product.

5. GPS. Well into my adulthood, if you wanted to figure out where you were, you had to cross-reference your surroundings to a paper map. It was actually possible to get lost. Today my cell phone tells me my location accurately enough that I can tell which room of my house I am in.

I could probably go on.

(Not all the changes have been good. When I was a kid, my friends and I regularly walked to school and otherwise roamed the neighborhood without adult supervision. Nowadays, parents get arrested for letting their kids do that. :-(

The truly sad part about your last thing is that the change isn't based on reality. If anything, it's probably much safer to roam the streets alone, partially due to all those technologies you mentioned (and others).

Very little of people's assessment of the state of the world is based on reality. Almost everything is better today than it has ever been (at least for humans, not so much for other species), but many (most?) people are still convinced that we're on the wrong track. To be sure, we have significant challenges ahead of us, and things could easily take a turn for the worse. But right now things are pretty awesome. We're in the middle of the longest stretch of world peace in history. There is less poverty (in terms of percentage of the population) than ever. People are healthier and living longer than ever. And we have Pokemon! It's a golden era.

> We're in the middle of the longest stretch of world peace in history...

But what is the status of military expenses?

>There is less poverty (in terms of percentage of the population) than ever.

How much of that is loaned? I mean, aren't more people in perpetual, often unnecessary, debt now?

>People are healthier and living longer than ever.

And totally dependent on drugs, often from very young, even when they are not necessary. Not to mention obesity, depression...but hey, more drugs, cola and fast food.

>And we have Pokemon! It's a golden era.

Sure. I see you now.

The "awesomeness" you see is very superficial, and is quite possibly short lived. Things are far rotten if you look deep down.

> what is the status of military expenses?

World wide? As a percentage of the size of the world economy? Compared to historical norms? I have no idea. But I'd be surprised if they weren't low.

> How much of that is loaned?

I'm talking about actual wealth, not bean-counting. There are fewer (again, as a percentage, not in absolute numbers) people without the basic necessities of life than ever before.

> totally dependent on drugs

Longevity improvements are not due to drugs on which people become dependent. They are due mainly to better nutrition and hygiene, vaccines, and antibiotics.

> Sure. I see you now.

To be clear, I was joking about the Pokemon.

> quite possibly short lived

That is certainly true. We can easily squander our good fortune. But one of the ways we can do that is not to recognize our good fortune for what it is: good fortune.

> people without the basic necessities of life than ever before...

I think this is a bubble. Because where I live, the IT sector has a big influence. Kids straight out of college were making 10 times more money than their parents were making. But they also spend like there is no tomorrow. This spending causes this wealth to be distributed so everyone grow a bit more richer.

But this is not sustainable. People are paying huge sum of money for mortgage and credit card bills every month/year. In other words, these people cannot live three months straight without a heafty pay check. The worse part is that, they are not skilled at all, even after years of employment..

>They are due mainly to better nutrition and hygiene, vaccines, and antibiotics.

Better nutrition? What provides better nutrition now than the past years? In my country we still get vegetables with dangerous amounts of pesticides. People are starting to have diabetics and choelesrtrol/blood pressure issue in the early thrities. But they won't rollover and die, thanks to perpetual healthcare and medication, I mean, for those who can afford.

People everywhere are hooked to antibiotics. "Sneeze? Oh my god, I am having an infection. Let me just gobble down this antibiotics that my doctor prescribed me last time". "Headache? let me just take this new wonder pill for headaches". Yes. People are overstuffed with medicines. You are deluded if you think otherwise.

>To be clear, I was joking about the Pokemon.

Thank god.

> In my country we still get vegetables with dangerous amounts of pesticides.

What country is that? I get the impression you have not traveled much in poor places because "dangerous levels of pesticides" is definitely a first-world problem.

My country is definitely not a first world country...

>"dangerous levels of pesticides" is definitely a first-world problem

Wow. You seem to have no idea of what you are talking about.

> You seem to have no idea of what you are talking about.

Quite possible. So are you going to tell me what country you're talking about, or are you going to continue to be cagey about it?

> > We're in the middle of the longest stretch of world peace in history...

> But what is the status of military expenses?

Looks like they've been at historically-low levels for the last 15 years: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS (I seriosuly doubt they were lower in the 40s to 80s, the period before this graph, or in the 10s - maybe the 19th century had really low expenses?)

> >There is less poverty (in terms of percentage of the population) than ever.

> How much of that is loaned? I mean, aren't more people in perpetual, often unnecessary, debt now?

This is clearly a comment about world-wide poverty, not in your neck-of-the-woods, so: http://data.worldbank.org/topic/poverty

and just in the US, it's somewhat lower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/...

> >People are healthier and living longer than ever.

> And totally dependent on drugs, often from very young, even when they are not necessary. Not to mention obesity, depression...but hey, more drugs, cola and fast food.

As someone dependent on drugs since a young age, I'm really all for those drugs. My mother had to put up with "oh, it's just psychological", I'll take the drugs instead (this was asthma, FWIW).

> >And we have Pokemon! It's a golden era.

> Sure. I see you now.

> The "awesomeness" you see is very superficial, and is quite possibly short lived. Things are far rotten if you look deep down.

My perception: the people who think things are horrible now, and getting worse, have little to no understanding of how life was 50, 100, 1000 years ago.

> We're in the middle of the longest stretch of world peace in history.

If you don't count the Middle East or Africa, I suppose.

Those are very minor conflicts (in terms of the percentage of the world population involved in them) compared to historical norms. Even if you killed the entire population of Syria you still would not still reach the number of people who died in WWII, not even in terms of absolute numbers, and certainly not in terms of percentage of world population (which has tripled since 1945).

Sure, but WWII was a historical anamoly, not a "historical norm". "World peace", to my mind, implies _no_ wars, not just 'less conflict than the biggest war in history'.

> WWII was a historical anamoly

Not as much as you might think. WWII was unusual, but not unprecedented. See:

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

WWII was not even the deadliest war ever, even in terms of absolute numbers, and certainly not in terms of percentages. (Note that that Wikipedia page inexplicably does not list WWI, which killed 38M.)

The last war to have a death toll over 1 million was Viet Nam.

> "World peace", to my mind, implies _no_ wars

On that definition there has never been world peace.

Africa too is more peaceful than it has been pretty much since the start of the colonial era. There are a few individual wars going on, but Africa is huge, and much of the massive economic boom of large parts of Africa over the last couple of decades has been down to wars ending or slowing down.

You and I must be living on different planets.

Did you just say Africa is more or less peaceful and has experienced an economic boom?

No, I said that Africa is more peaceful than it has been at most points since before the colonial era. But yes, that means that the vast majority of the African continent is currently at peace. Africa is big.

A substantial majority of the wars on the continent have ended over the last 10-15 years, including civil wars that have been going for decades. Most of the remaining conflicts are relatively subdued or restricted to smaller regions.

And yes, Africa has experienced an economic boom. The GDP growth rates in most African countries over the last decade has vastly outperformed most of the rest of the world, including largely remaining unaffected by the financial crisis that hit developed countries. Africa as a whole is seeing a GDP growth on average around the 5% mark year over year. That includes the worst war torn regions.

E.g. Nigeria: ~510 USD GDP per capita in 2003 vs ca. 3000 in 2013. Ghana 375 to 1858. Kenya: 439 to 1245. Sudan 471 to 1753 - you'll note this is a country still dealing with the aftermath of civil war. Ethiopia: 119 to 505. Rwanda: 202 to 638. Democratic Republic of Congo: 175 to 484 (worth nothing that DRC/Zaire was above 600 prior to the civil wars, that destroyed the economy, before it started rebuilding in the early part of this century. Angola: 920 to 5783. Zambia: 449 to 1844. Egypt: 1194 to 3314. Algerie: 2056 to 5360. Niger: 222 to 385 (Niger was slightly higher in 1980 but kept going the wrong way through the '80's and 90's). Chad: 293 to 1095 (despite being at war with Sudan until 2010).

And so on.

The exceptions are few: Somalia doesn't have reliable numbers, but it was heading for a total crash in the late 90's and it's unlikely that it's back where it was.Libya peaked in 2008 at 15853. It was at 4437 in 2003, and 11964 in 2013, heading into another crash. I'm sure there are a few others. But they are too few to drag down the continent as a whole.

For most African countries, there was a drastic rise in growth rates around the turn of the century, following the end of a large number of civil wars and other conflicts, rise in trade - especially exports to Asia, as a follow on effect from the growth of China and other Asian countries.

Currently, the World Bank expects most African countries to fall in the "middle income" category by 2025 if current growth continues.

Current projections is for Sub-Saharan Africa alone to reach a combined GDP of $29 trillion by 2050, up from $2.39 trillion for Africa as a whole in 2013.

In recent years there's been exceptional growth rates in some countries, with Mauretania approaching 20% year over year GDP growth, Angola 17.6%, Sudan 9.6%.

lisper, nearly everything you just mentioned is contained within the sphere of computation or information science.

And this:

> Genome sequencing

is not a product. It doesn't do anything useful by itself. There are only 16 new biotech drugs approved each year. I am unaware of any cures for Alzheimers or other popular affliction. It is also a side effect of computation and not an advance in biological science on its own merit. No fast computer, no sequencing.

This is why the Technology Stagnation Hypothesis is a serious one.

It says there have been almost no advances outside of computation since '73. Which matches the plateau in real wages in the West. Eroom's Law is also a symptom of it.

As I see: the world massively improved from the late 1600s to the 1970s. Then improvements continued in computation and halted in almost every other area of development.

> many (most?) people are still convinced that we're on the wrong track

What I am saying is far from anecdotal.

> We're in the middle of the longest stretch of world peace in history.

We have already passed what I believe to be an inflection point.

You are correct about violence until the year 2007.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/03/20/breaking-a-...

Now we're heading consistently in the wrong direction.

Same with health:

"Taken by itself, it could just be a random fluctuation from one year to the next," said Elizabeth Arias, a demographer with the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. But the data, which was released Wednesday, also showed that Americans collectively have lost momentum when it comes to greater longevity. Life expectancy at birth has remained virtually stagnant for the nation since 2010."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/0...

tldr; Not all is roses. Past trends were real and important and are not continuing. I make a similar rant here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12121172

I fully accept that we've had it good for a long time lisper, I've read my history, it's not that I'm unappreciative.

Observing that most high profile modern innovations rely on computation is about as good a point of evidence in favour of technological stagnation today as somebody in the 1850s positing stagnation on the basis that nearly all high profile innovations in recent years had relied on steam power or somebody in the 1930s noting that nearly all high profile innovations in recent years had relied on electricity.

A good rebuttal.

However it rests on an assumption because broad based stagnation did occur during the Industrial Revolution.

www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/pessimism-6.pdf

There was a period of about 50 years when wages didn't change and when countless cottage industries with skilled labour disappeared. The standard of living did not increase for most people at this time. Today this has been conveniently forgotten.

The standard narrative that life improved for most people is only true if you examine economic history on a timescale of centuries.

One question that comes to mind is: are you going to be alive when a technology such as biotech brings home the bacon? Eroom's Law suggests life longevity escape velocity (as hypothesized by Audrey with SENS) is very unlikely.

In my former post there is a link to a youtube video made in 1969 by the Ford Corporation. Our grandparents expected a lot of substantive changes that have not yet occurred. I consider those reasonable projections still. I would like most of us put them conservatively at 50 years hence. Yet that would imply it took a century from our grandparent's original projections.

I make the claim that it is perfectly possible we won't have any significant results from biotechnology for hundreds of years.

Furthermore it is not crazy to speculate that if we enter a long term stagnation there is the possibility we enter a new dark age. This is not taken seriously by most men of intelligence today, and I consider that highly unfortunate because it too, is a genuine possibility, an outlier that becomes more likely with each year of broad stagnation that passes. I would like to remind the reader that by some metrics our production levels only exceeded that of the Roman Empire in the 18th century. That is 1000 years later.

tldr; More of us should be more worried. There should be far more urgency about innovation than there is today.

Wage stagnation and technological stagnation are separate issues though. I don't think anyone who has studied the period seriously disputes that the Industrial Revolution was a period of hitherto unparalleled technological innovation or that wages collapsed in some sectors, often as a direct consequence of that innovation. And - as you correctly point out, on a scale of centuries rather than the average person's experience - life definitely got a lot better for everyone as a result. It got better for the wealthier much faster, of course.

Today's enabling technology that allows greater innovation is based on silicon rather than steam power, but if anything our situation is more optimistic than before: mobile phones found their way into the hands of the poorest far more rapidly than early twentieth century home appliances, and greater resources (if not political will) exist to support the losers from today's technological change.

I don't believe in technological singularities or longevity escape velocity, but that's really not required to believe that Eroom's law is no more an inviolable rule of human progress than Moore's

> People are healthier and living longer than ever.

Nope. There are frightening reports stating that today's children will die sooner than their parents and earn less than their grand parents. (Europe, ilygt)

> today's children will die sooner than their parents

Citations please?

> and earn less than their grand parents

What does that have to do with being healthier and living longer?

>> today's children will die sooner than their parents

> Citations please?

I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

> > and earn less than their grand parents

> What does that have to do with being healthier and living longer?

Really ?

> I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

Lisper didn't claim his observations came from a report. You did.

Sorry but...

> People are healthier and living longer than ever.

... such a bold statement call for a `citation please` even if it's not from a report or a study (that's even more the point).

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/...

And yes, really.

You don't see the link between what's in your wallet and access to healthcare [0] ? http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/how-poverty-related-access-ca...

[0] Wether you live in the US or in of the EU so-called welfare states.

Of course I see the link. But the marginal losses in the developed world from drinking too much soda and income reductions are more than made up for by the reduction in extreme poverty and concomitant health improvements world-wide.

> > today's children will die sooner than their parents

> Citations please?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/2449040/Children-will...

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr043743#t=article

(Yup, as mass produced food becomes the main and only source of calories people can afford then their health will decrease. Yup, it's linked to money you can or can't make. Yup, if I had not landed a job this year I would have stopped using some medicine I need (severe allergy) for an over the counter solution because our health minister decided to drop it from the reimbursed medicine. It's happening. http://www.ibtimes.com/healthcare-2015-why-millennials-avoid... . And the over the counter solution would have ruined the inside of my nose after two weeks than I would then need more expensive care.)

These are not data, these are predictions. For first-world countries. The fact is that world-wide, at the moment, people are living longer, healthier lives than at any previous time in human history.

Of course these are predictions. Those children haven't lived their lives yet. But it's nonetheless data-based predictions.

OK, well, we may just have to agree to disagree about this. Personally, I don't think that the fact that kids are drinking too much soda really refutes the thesis that we are currently in a golden age when you look at the situation globally and relative to the full sweep of human history. Yes, there are many things that could be improved (and having people drink less soda is certainly one of them). But things could be -- and have in the past almost universally been -- one hell of a lot worse than they are right now.

Your father's lifetime wasn't all that different. From no planes, to jets, to mun landings. That was rather epic. Same too in medicine. In the 1940's cancer was a death sentence, today many live for decades. Things like insulin, especially antibiotics, arguably have had a larger impact than computing technology. People don't drop dead nearly as often today.

Go back another generation or two and anesthetics and germ theory allowed surgery to progress. Appendicitis was no long a death sentence. My grandmother was, as a child, "in traction" for weeks. But nobody really fears breaking a bone or cutting a knee these days. Every of the last few generations described themselves as living through a tech revolution. Ours is just the latest. There will be more.

> Your father's lifetime wasn't all that different. From no planes, to jets

I'm not quite that old. My father was born in 1936. Commercial air travel was already common. (But you're right about no jets yet). :-) Now my grandparents were born in a world with no airplanes. My grandmother grew up in a house with no electricity (but they had a telephone!)

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