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Comment by xoserr | Hacker News Reader

We aren't innovating like we use to and it isn't even close. We are just such a histrionically ignorant society that has lowered the bar on innovation so we can pretend that we are a society innovating at lighting speed.

The smartphone was 15 years ago but we act like it was yesterday.

1900-1910ish we got air conditioning, plastics, airplanes, motion pictures, the Theory of Relativity..

We are just so clueless now. Even the smart people are clueless.

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The ability for mitumba in a village outside of Nairobi to whip out a little device in his pocket and learn anything his mind can conjure up a desire to learn and speak with any human being on the earth they'd like is not a small development compared to air conditioning, airplanes and plastics. And it's not an abstract academic example, a few weeks ago I video chatted with a real Masai warrior who I've never met, because my friend was casually catching up with family overseas.

And 15 years ago is not that big of a timeframe, it was ~50 years between first powered flight and men stepping on the moon. The kids born with cheap access to all the worlds information are going to do things with their minds that you and I cannot imagine yet. They're going to organize in novel ways and nobody can stop them.

The smart phone doesn't even belong in the same category as the others you listed. The digital computer certainly does but it's been 80 years since that occurred. The smartphone is simply a refinement of that basic technological leap. Practically everything people are listing here falls in the category of refinement of existing technology rather than a completely novel form of technology. That is the scary and correct assertion of the article, we've almost completely stopped discovering or inventing novel technology or at least the rate of discovery has slowed to the point where 100 years of our present progress is equal to 10 years of the previous.

> The smartphone is simply a refinement of that basic technological leap.

There's very little that isn't.

Moon rockets are a refinement of thousand year old technology, fireworks. Steam engines are a refinement of little toys from ancient Greece. Guns are a refinement of throwing things.

Any definition of innovation that doesn't include smartphones is a silly one, in my book. It's quite clear they were novel and massively impactful on society.

This argument is being framed incorrectly. It's the fundamental discovery that counts, not the implementations. The discovery of steam power is more important than Hero's Engine because discovering that you can do useful work with steam allows you to build all kinds of things that didn't exist before. Having a whirligig that runs on steam gives you nothing more than a few minutes enjoyment. Guns are definitely not a refinement of throwing things, someone who only knows how to throw something cannot build a gun. Guns are a refinement of the invention of gunpowder and good enough metallurgy to produce the gun itself. Similarly, rocketry is a refinement of gunpowder and the discovery that pressurized gasses escaping from a hole or nozzle can propel something. A smartphone itself is not a truly novel discovery, it's essentially a handheld portable computer. All the same technology exists or could exist in other form factors. If we compare it to something simple like a hammer, it is just a small hammer good for doing certain tasks and not others. It doesn't compare to the discovery that if you attach a weight to a handle you can hammer things. There are other specialized forms of hammer that are better for other tasks. i.e. a smartphone is just a specialized form of computer.

That's ridiculous, the smartphone has changed society far more than desktop's or really any form of computer that exists. Vast numbers of people only access the internet via a smart phone. Doctor's visits across the globe, remote working from wherever you are, hand held GPS and maps, access to countless hours of entertainment, etc....

None of that is possible without digital computers and those generalize to a much larger domain of devices and technologies that have revolutionized the world in thousands of ways. So no, the smartphone has not had a larger impact on the world than the invention of the digital computer. As for the other examples, GPS is not possible without the Theory of Relativity, video calls are not possible without motion pictures, the integrated circuits that make up the smartphone are not possible without plastics, and I doubt we would have many close connections with the rest of the world without air travel. Besides that, remote working and doctor's visits are possible without a smartphone, same thing with GPS which predates smartphones by quite a bit, same with access to entertainment. None of those things are really very revolutionary. GPS is the closest since it does provide a novel and superior way of navigating but you'd be hard pressed to make a case for entertainment or remote working being on par with manned flight or plastics.

Is it possible that you don't appreciate the great innovations of the last decade, but looking back there will be just as many as the 1900-1910s?

In the last 15 years we got reusable rockets, mRNA vaccines, Crispr, workable quantum computers, AI capable of beating us at Go, and many other numerous breakthroughs. Sure 1900-1910 meaningfully changed the world but the bar form the 1800's was dramatically lower than the 2000-2010 bar from the 1900's. Ironic that such a ignorant comment laments societies ignorance.

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