On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 08:57:57AM -0700, Tim Maroney wrote:
>
> 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?
Purely speculative and anecdotal on my part. However, the _range_ of stuff
on offer is increasing, and that's a market that is highly price-sensitive
and very competitive. I doubt supermarkets would be so full of Indian-
restaurant-in-a-bag-ready-to-microwave packaged meals if there wasn't a
growing market for them.
> > 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.
I missed out microsurgery. Thirty years ago, if you lost a finger or
a hand -- tough. These days, pack it in ice and take it along and there's
a good chance that not only can they re-attach it, but they can even save
some neural connections.
Organ transplants: in 1971, heart transplants were -- publicity aside --
grand-standing experimentation. Today, thanks to much better immunosupressant
agents, many people can run for years or decades on replacement organs. We
wouldn't have the Chinese government harvesting organs from executed felons
(a la Larry Niven) if it wasn't a technology that had arrived.
Again: the laser. In 1960 it was a miracle of quantum mechanics
that required expensive synthetic rubies and demonstrated a physical
principle. By 1970, some expensive military applications had shown up --
rangefingers, for example -- and holography was becoming a curiosity. By
1980, there was suddenly a market, with the advent of the CD player. By
1990, holography was becoming commercialised as something you can make
prints of, and CD players were everywhere. Today, I have a £5 laser
pointer for playing with my cat, and dentists use 'em for de-scaling
teeth and drilling out dental caries.
Yes, it was there before 1970. But the mass production and commercialisation
wasn't.
-- Charlie
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