Thanks for your thoughtful and interesting response!
> Ultimately I expect the mobile phone to have a comparable degree of social
> impact to the automobile.
Sure, I'll grant you cellphones as a new technology with significant social
impact qualifying for "revolutionary" status. So, that's cellphones, the PC,
and the Internet. It still doesn't seem to compare with the incredible
number of high-social-impact inventions from about 1875-1950. And it's still
anecdotal. Is there any systematic attempt to provide a Y-axis for these
asymptotic growth charts we keep seeing? I could try to do it myself, but I
would have thought the movement would have done its own homework.
> This is a one-off item, and not one I can put a quantitative figure on
> (especially because it's a change-in-progress). But I think there are other
> socially revolutionary technologies that are slipping in under the radar
> and that you may have missed. For example, advances in food preparation
> technology in factories have turned the TV dinner from a soggy cardboard-
> tasting novelty into something that many people eat every day, to the point
> where many no longer _need_ to know how to prepare food from raw ingredients
> like vegetables, spices and a cut of meat. That activity used to soak up
> maybe ten to twenty hours of work time per household per week -- what is
> replacing it?
I considered the microwave for possible inclusion. I don't think it's as
important as the refrigerator, but it probably squeaks in under the wire,
unlike, say, the home cappuccino maker.
Going to the grocery store, I don't really see a revolution in frozen food
compared with what I saw thirty years ago, at least not yet. It seems to
take up a comparable amount of shelf space, anyway. Do you have sources for
your assertion about falling cooking times?
> Again: the RAF noted recently that the reflex speed of new applicants for
> pilot training is vastly higher than their equivalents during the Battle of
> Britain -- by 1940 standards, every applicant today has the reflexes to be
> an ace. They blame the widespread adoption of computer games that foster
> lightning hand-eye coordination skills. Who'd have expected son-of-Pong to
> have serious defense implications in 1976?
I'd like to see the sources on that one. There seems to be a very
contradictory literature on the effects of computer games. But it's possible
they could qualify as a socially revolutionary technology, yes. Software is
problematic that way. If we start counting individual program categories,
then the number of revolutions would go up. But is it really fair to count
each of games, word processing, spreadsheets, graphics, e-mail, chat, the
Web, e-commerce, presentation, and animation as its own revolution, as
opposed to part of a general revolution in computer technology? I'm not
sure. I do have a pretty strong feeling that software is starting to mature
and flatten out as far as the number of new product categories is concerned.
> And what are the implications for
> teleoperator-controlled surgery in, say, a decade's time, when that same
> video generation begins graduating from medical school?
Potentially important. Medical improvements are also problematic in much the
same way that software improvements are. Antibiotics are clearly a
revolutionary technology. Techniques like telesurgery or focused radiation
treatments are harder to call out as their own revolutions, though they may
have the potential to become as important as antibiotics.
The issue of ongoing incremental change casts light on a greater fuzziness
in the whole question of revolutionary technologies. We can probably agree
that from phonograph and audiocassette to CD is really just an incremental
format change and not a revolution; ditto VHS to DVD. But what about the VCR
itself? Is that just an improvement on the television that gives people more
control over what they see, or just an improvement on the motion picture
that lets people watch them at home in a way not tied to release schedules,
or should it be called a revolution based on its creation of the video
rental industry and/or its fusion of two important technologies that were
previously largely separate? What kind of metric of social change can be
used here?
> All this without mentioning the Flynn effect.
http://www.sciam.com/1999/0199issue/0199profile.html
"Intelligence scores are rising, James R. Flynn discovered--but he remains
very sure we're not getting any smarter."
-- Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org
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