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Comment by dhimes | Hacker News Reader

I believe you are correct; the beauty of exponential growth is that at any point you can make the same observation about the previous 100 years.

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Exponential growth in some areas.

I don't think peoples lifestyles have changed all that much in the last 30 years. In 1982 you could point to computers, networks, and cellphones and say these are going to get far more popular. But, medicine, car millage, and battery power while improved are not that much better.

PS: What's so striking to me is how little science fiction has changed over that time span.

Agree on sci-fi, but medical imaging has really been born in the last 30 years and may prove to be a game-changer in diagnosis and localized treatments over the next 70. Also, the invention of PCR techniques allow much better testing and drug development. So I think we'll look back 70 years from now and make the same claim about medicine.

MRI's is another 'old' tech, and PCR is barely inside that 30 year window as it was developed in 1983. In 1952, Herman Carr produced a one-dimensional MRI image as reported in his Harvard PhD thesis. Meanwhile, Paul Lauterbur expanded on Carr's technique and developed a way to generate the first MRI images, in 2D and 3D, using gradients. In 1973, Lauterbur published the first nuclear magnetic resonance image.[25][26] and the first cross-sectional image of a living mouse was published in January 1974. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging

Granted, improve things enough and you end up with qualitative differences. AKA wind power is near parity with coal which is a game changer.

I don't disagree that the foundations of this technology were laid earlier than 30 years ago (NMR->MRI); there was, of course, even other medical imaging long before that (x-rays, PET, etc). I still think that in 70 years we're going to be able to look at this 30 year span and say it was 'game-changing.' And 100 years from today "we'll" (you maybe- I'd be 150 years old!) look at the years 2010-2040 at "game changing."

Look at 1800-1830 from the point of view of 1900: steam engines.

Anyway, it's fun to think about.

There were long periods of world history where growth and development were anything but exponential, and for significant periods were reversed.

The period since the Italian Renaissance has been pretty spiffy though.

The period since the Italian Renaissance is actually more interesting than "pretty spiffy". While science improved by leaps and bounds, living conditions for ordinary people (in Europe) deteriorated quite significantly. Crop yields plummeted, leading to starvation, disease and decreasing populations all over Europe. Only in the 19th century did things improve again.

The moral of the story being, I guess, that improvements in science and technology, do not necessarily go hand in hand with improvements in living standards.

The foundations for the 19th Century improvements were established in the 14th century, and followed nearly ten centuries of stagnation and decline. The payoff wasn't instantaneous, but it was certainly cumulative.

Exponential, one might almost say.

For the technical improvements, maybe, but for the improvements in living standards, not so much.

Living standards for commoners improved (vastly) during the 15th century, as a result of depopulation due to the Black Death in the 14th and the increased negotiating power of commoners that caused. Improved farming methods helped as well.

Unfortunately these improved living standards led to overpopulation and a subsequent decrease in living standards that only bottomed out during the late 17th century and that was exacerbated further by constant religious war and by climate change (the "little ice age"). Recovery was slow (partly because the "little ice age" lasted until the early 19th century) and only towards the end of that century do we find peasants better off than their 15th century forebears.

The evidence for this is in archives all over Europe and has been extensively written about by people like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladury. While the rich and educated were busy improving science and conquering the world, the poor suffered.

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