So Madsen Pirie has written a little pamphlet talking about how the world will be in 2050. And he’s obviously right, as Chris Dillow so often says. Straight line projections are probably the best we can do. So, what’s economic growth like, 2% a year you say for the past 150? Great, so we’ll forecast that and so on. And the accumulation of technological change is such that:
Even if they did work out that
people could make telephone calls from a smartphone, the person
from 1984 would be awestruck to learn that the tiny instrument was
also a record player, tape recorder, CD player, DVD player, computer,
radio, television, camera, video camera, calculator, flashlight, and a
whole lot more besides.
And what I think is really fun there is that the bloke from 1984 wouldn’t have a clue what a DVD was. Weren’t invented for another 11 years, in 1995. Madsen’s point is of course that the accumulated changes, each perhaps small in themselves, produce and entirely different world in not that much time. This being underlined by our looking back, trying to emphasise these changes, and managing to underestimate them even as we do so.
Most fun.
In 2050 Britain will be in a new Dark Age if not a Stone Age. It will be like Yemen but without the external world providing things like medicine and food.
Straight line progression only makes sense if all else remains the same. The people actually capable of doing things are not having children and are being replaced by people who struggle with modern technology.
It is not going to end well.
To be fair the smartphone does all of those things badly, if in a conveniently small package.
“are being replaced by people who struggle with modern technology. ”
I hadn’t noticed the RoPers do struggle with modern technology. Any more than the Brits do. Do you actually have a clue what goes on inside your phone, or do you just push the appropriate button & hope?
If anything, mobile phone use for instance, probably spread quicker in Pakistan – when available – than tit did in the UK. Because Pakistan didn’t have the UK’s fix infrastructure. Same’s happened with the internet, all across the 3rd world. Because it’s actually, relatively more use to them. They didn’t have a postal service in the first place, so went straight to e-mail & video calls.
Bloke in Germany – “To be fair the smartphone does all of those things badly, if in a conveniently small package.”
The Hubble Telescope was launched way back in the 1990s. Originally it had two separate cameras each with 4 800×800 pixel CCDs. It has been upgraded several times until now it has three cameras – “two UV/visible detecting CCDs, each 2048×4096 pixels, and a separate IR CCD of 1024 x 1024”.
The iPhone came out with a 2.0 Megapixel camera. The newer ones are now up to 8.0 Megapixels.
Incidentally, I think Gibson & the other Cyberpunk authors were quite good on predicting how people near the bottom of the heap might be early adopters of tech. It’s those near the top are more reticent. less need.
It is a race between the good things that freedom can bring–markets, technology etc –and the bad shite brought by the endless evil of coercion–politics, the self-serving of so-called “leaders” etc.
And the greatest danger is that the violent and coercive can –ultimately–only be stopped by violence and coercion.
bloke in spain – “I hadn’t noticed the RoPers do struggle with modern technology. Any more than the Brits do. Do you actually have a clue what goes on inside your phone, or do you just push the appropriate button & hope?”
You do know that British people design most of the chips that go into mobile phones don’t you? Iranians aren’t doing too badly on the modern technology front. But the rest of the Muslim world? Not so good. The Soviets had to teach them how to blow up airplanes and terrorism has really been their only area of technological innovation.
“If anything, mobile phone use for instance, probably spread quicker in Pakistan – when available – than tit did in the UK. Because Pakistan didn’t have the UK’s fix infrastructure.”
Sure. Because they are so backward, it is easier for them to buy a lot of stuff off the shelf. What has that got to do with anything? They can’t make any of it. They don’t design any of it. The Chinese can at least do that. The Muslim world struggles.
The Kuwaiti Air force bought some Electric Lightnings. Unlike virtually all the rest of the Gulf, they did not pay a British mercenary company to maintain them. So they were more or less permanently grounded. Libya bought 38 Mirage jets from France. They could not maintain them. Just before Gaddafi fell, they paid the French to restore four of them. They could not do it themselves. This is not a surprise – “Before 2011, the LPAF MiG-21s did not fly at all due to reported serviceability issues and of 170 MiG-23s delivered, only 30-50 were believed to be flyable aircraft.”
These are not high-tech pieces of equipment. The MiG-21 first flew in 1959 and the MiG-23 in 1968.
The info above plus the fact that sans oil the entire Arab world produces less goods and services than Finland demonstrate that by itself islam is no threat to the West. It is the scum of the left and the treason of our “leaders” that puts us in increasing peril.
That and the fact that although there is n limit to human ingenuity there is equally no limit to human stupidity and lack of attention.
I normally tend to agree with you, SMFS, but comparing Hubble’s cameras to an iPhone’s is Apples to oranges. One is a rugged, precision calibrated radiation proof sensor, the other is for taking pictures of your mates falling down drunk.
And BiG, “the smartphone does all of those things badly, and for not very long if in a conveniently small package”. Fixed it for ya.
The real skill of the sniper is getting in to the place where the shot(s) will be taken unseen and then surviving undetected until they get the shot(s) away.
Bugger, wrong thread!
What Mr Ecks said.
Islam per se and even Islamist nutters are no systemic threat to the West and never have been despite a lot a major shit spouted by successive presidents and PMs to justify their tightening their grip on the levers of power.
The threat comes from within, from a lack of will power to hold on to the huge advantages that our forebears have given us in terms of freedom (mostly), free(-ish) markets, rule of law (almost) compared to the headchopping cave dwelling cunts whom Merkel and half the political class of Europe want to invite in, for what possible purpose one can only imagine – certainly it is not to improve Europeans’ way of life.
The poltical and and media classes are in cahoots over this brazen treason, and are only now beginning to call them out over it. However, momentum is gaining and come the EU referendum it is likely, unfortunately, to be a major issue.
Still if it helps lever us out then that’s all good. Personally I still doubt it will be enough.
Brunner predicted the Internet and smartphones in Shockwave Rider in 1973. It was so prescient he even got the year – 2005.
Only three Muslims have ever been awarded Nobel Prizes in the sciences: one physicist (an Ahmadi) and two chemists, all worked abroad. There have been two Literature winners and seven Peace Prize laureates.
Vs Jewish winners according to Wikipedia:
Nobel Prizes have been awarded to over 850 individuals,[2] of whom at least 20% were Jews, although Jews comprise less than 0.2% of the world’s population[3] (or 1 in every 500 people). Overall, Jews have won a total of 41% of all the Nobel Prizes in economics, 28% of medicine, 26% of physics, 19% of chemistry, 13% of literature and 9% of all peace awards.
As long as we can keep the RoPers from killing Jews we’ll be okay.
The iPhone came out with a 2.0 Megapixel camera. The newer ones are now up to 8.0 Megapixels.
Pixels aren’t everything, and above about 10 megapixels it doesn’t make much difference. Sensor size matters, as does the compression software, as does noise, as does the quality of glass you’re using. There’s a good reason why professional photographers still lug kgs of glass around instead of just pulling out an iPhone. Try taking a pic with an iPhone in low light, or facing the sun, and you’ll find they are seriously limited. They do take awesome photos in perfect conditions though.
In 1970 we had commercial aircraft that could cross the Atlantic in three hours and men were landing on the Moon. Today, not so much.
“The info above plus the fact that sans oil the entire Arab world produces less goods and services than Finland demonstrate that by itself islam is no threat to the West.”
“Islam per se and even Islamist nutters are no systemic threat to the West and never have been despite a lot a major shit spouted by successive presidents and PMs to justify their tightening their grip on the levers of power.”
It’s not about Islam, it’s about the people. As SMFS points out, these people are not productive. If you replace the declining white population with them, things will get worse.
If we’re extrapolating from past trends, the invisible hand of the market will gradually make many things cheaper. Meanwhile, the sectors where the government’s clunking fist intervenes (housing, healthcare, education, transport, welfare, law, etc.) will continue to get less efficient and more expensive.
If we’re lucky, gains in the former will outpace losses in the latter. I’m not holding out much hope though.
There’s a recent book out about this called “Hive Mind”.
We know that entrepreneurs and inventors only capture a small percentage of the value of their innovations and inventions. Most of the newly created value goes to the consumers in the form of lower prices and new products.
Well, the same is true of IQ. Having a higher IQ leads to higher wages for you, but most of the benefits go to other people. IQ has huge externalities. It’s much more important to live in a coutnry where other people have high IQ than it is to have a high IQ yourself. A person with a low IQ living in Britain will be better off than a person with a high IQ living in Congo.
Therefore, importing stupid people from stupid countries will ruin Britain.
Tim Newman – “Pixels aren’t everything, and above about 10 megapixels it doesn’t make much difference.”
I bet the people who operate Hubble would appreciate them. I think it is impressive that the latest iPhone has a CCD that produces about as many pixels as those on the Hubble do. It doesn’t mean that they are the same or that professionals do not use lenses and other things if they are sensible. But it does show how close to the same ball park they are. And how much progress Silicon Valley has made to make these things cheap and ubiquitous.
It is not that these phones are crap. They really are marvels. Used by idiots for stupid purposes of course. But pearls before swine.
I think the main thing with hubble is to do with its mirrors.
I do think some of this first world chauvinism is sorely misplaced. We have a few competent people, who know what they’re doing. If you’ve experienced the pleasures of coping with the fuck-ups occasioned by the rest, you soon learn that most people are not only completely clueless but actively malicious. So the developing world lacks as many of those few. Not surprising when they’re doing 200 years of catch-up in a generation. But I’ve a strong suspicion most third-worlders are eminently more practically capable than you lot.
“what I think is really fun there is that the bloke from 1984 wouldn’t have a clue what a DVD was. “
You’d tell him that it’s a kind of like a laserdisc and he would understand.
“And what I think is really fun there is that the bloke from 1984 wouldn’t have a clue what a DVD was. Weren’t invented for another 11 years, in 1995. ”
The bloke from 1984 would understand them as an improvement on CDs. CDs led on from Laserdiscs, which were themselves not a vast leap from vinyl.(An analogue pattern read by laser compared to an analogue pattern read by needle)
SMFS: “The Soviets had to teach them how to blow up airplanes and terrorism has really been their only area of technological innovation. ”
Hmmm.. I think you’ll find that quite a lot of that stuff was taught by US “military advisors” in the Fight Against The Evil Commies.
There’s even a nice Rambo propaganda flick about it featuring the core of the later Al Quaida as the perky underdog heroes…
But hey…
Grikath – “Hmmm.. I think you’ll find that quite a lot of that stuff was taught by US “military advisors” in the Fight Against The Evil Commies.”
Yeah? Well don’t take this the wrong way but f*&k off. No, the US did not teach anyone to blow up airlines. Nor did the Afghans do so in the fight against the Soviets. And the Communists were evil. So as I said.
“There’s even a nice Rambo propaganda flick about it featuring the core of the later Al Quaida as the perky underdog heroes…”
What a weapon’s grade cock end. Rambo did not fight with al-Qaeda.
I find it interesting that no one has bothered to discuss how wrong they think the predictions are. I assume we can all agree that any prediction is just a guess and most likely won’t happen in the envisioned form.
I will start suborbital recreational flights. Thanks in large part to the commercial cargo and crew contracts for trips to the ISS costs to orbit are dropping dramatically.
Assuming we continue to use public funds to continue these programs until a private market can develop then there will be virtually no suborbital joy ride market. I find it much more likely that in 34 years rich wankers will be taking their mistress to join the 0G club for a week rather than spend a few weightless minutes.
Sorry for picking the easiest, for me at least, prediction to counter.
BiS: the active discouragement of initiative, improvisation, unconventional positions and taking responsibility by the teaching profession, local government and higher authorities by the closed ranks of first world box tickers is a huge problem. The developing world requires these skills in order to survive the corruption, brutality and shit conditions.
I don’t think the world of 2016 is so different to 1984 and similarly 1984 so different to 1948. The steps are small but are the accumulated differences so great? Cars are still cars. People still burn stuff to keep warm. We still eat food.
One of Pirie’s thoughts is that a person from 1948 would astonished that by 1984 houses wouldn’t have lots of fireplaces. Yet even in 1948 central heating was unexceptional in large buildings, wealthy homes and industrial settings, and many houses still have a fireplace of some sort even today. All that happened is it became much more affordable to convert old houses.(economies of scale thanks to post war modern homes being centrally heated?)
Our culture of consumption and convenience has moved on in leaps and bounds but even that would be identifiable to someone from 1948, it’s just we have more disposable income and time.
Whatever shock a person from the past would feel I think they’d get over it quickly because the differences are small and can be rationalised.
Robert Heinlein actually predicted a lot of modern technology. Not just the technology, but the surrounding use culture.
Bob was riding his horse when his phone rang. He grabbed it from his pocked and answered it.
Mary checked her son’s phone locator and to her annoyance found it in his bedroom. He’d left it behind to stop Mary snoopingn on him.
Mike’s phone beeped. Hold on, that’s the fourth message, I’d better check them, he said.
To be fair the smartphone does all of those things badly, if in a conveniently small package.
Only badly compared to the 2016 equivalents.
As a camera, they compare more than favourably with 1984 versions. Film cameras were a nightmare, especially home versions.
Sound quality, even with ear buds, is far better than any portable tape player. Much better if one wears modern earphones. And they store vastly more songs than any person could port around back in 1984.
Actually, they’re even better as phones, provided you have good reception. (We used to get international calls back then from the UK to NZ, and sometimes they were so bad we gave up. Now such a call from cell phone to cell phone is much clearer and less laggy. The joys of digital.)
You can watch TV on them too. In 1984 we had a TV with reception worse than an iPad. And in black and white, of course.
Our culture of consumption and convenience has moved on in leaps and bounds but even that would be identifiable to someone from 1948, it’s just we have more disposable income and time.
Really? So this discussion we are having has what analogue back in 1984, given that I live in New Zealand? Today we can have international contact with friends and family in a way that was literally impossible. Letters and a few phone calls a year isn’t quite the same as modern Skype, e-mails of digital photos and the much reduced cost of flying to visit.
We’re so used to it, we forget that living any distance overseas in the past meant basically leaving family and friends for good.
Gareth,
Get real. Last Friday evening in London, the tube was filled with a pack of girls aged around 25, wearing identical costumes with individual slogans on them. In 1948, those girls would not have been on the tube. Clothing, meat and stuff was still rationed. The train would not have been heated. They were sending photos to friends and family without having to go to Boots to get the film developed. Some of them were making phone calls despite neither being at home nor queueing for a phone box. Some of them were watching films despite not being in an Odeon.
Warm, well fed, clothed as they wanted and doing as they wanted rather than as mandated by govt or the nanny state, watching films and making phone calls on the move.
You might think this is no great shakes but it represents freedom.
Plus some of them own cars. The proportion in 1948 would be exactly zero. It is a massive change in lifestyle.
Not to mention that back in 1980, going to university was deemed weird. Now it is essential.
Once a week, I have a Skype chat with my mother in the UK. Real-time, high definition with perfect audio fidelity. 8000 km apart. For free. It uses less than 4% of my Internet bandwidth.My equipment is a $30 webcam attached to a $1000 computer the size of a paperback which has about 60 GFLOPS of processing power, 16GB of RAM and 8TB of attached storage. The monitors attached to it cost less than $180 each and have a combined resolution of 3840×1080 pixels. My mother is using a $500 quarter-inch thick tablet that talks at a hundred megabits a second to the little box in the top bedroom that then connects to the outside world at 17 Mbps.
In 1984 I had a Commodore 64. My machine today has 260 thousand times as much RAM. It is about five million times faster doing floating point calculations. The screen real estate I have today is 65 times that of the C64 in ‘high resolution’ mode, and it’s in 32 bit colour. In 1984 a 1200/75 baud modem was state-of-the-art. My LAN speed is a gigabit per second, and 20 Mbps WAN. While I’m typing this, I’m listening to CD quality music from my 1600 album music collection. In a bit I might watch a Blu-Ray quality movie from my collection of hundreds of them on my media server, or I might pop into the office network via our VPN and do some more work.
It’s just a failure of recall to think that things haven’t changed much in the last 30 years. Just about the only thing that’s been nearly static is men’s clothing. I could wear my usual get-up of chinos, polo shirt and boots, step into a time machine and go back three decades and no-one would notice. Three decades before that and I’d look weird.
“I do think some of this first world chauvinism is sorely misplaced. We have a few competent people, who know what they’re doing. If you’ve experienced the pleasures of coping with the fuck-ups occasioned by the rest, you soon learn that most people are not only completely clueless but actively malicious. So the developing world lacks as many of those few. Not surprising when they’re doing 200 years of catch-up in a generation. But I’ve a strong suspicion most third-worlders are eminently more practically capable than you lot.”
Firstly, you are wrong. Third world countries have lower average IQs (some much lower), and therefore the quality of their average people is lower than the quality of average people here.
Secondly, as you point out, the average people aren’t as important as the intelligence elite. The wealth of a nation is more strongly correlated with the proportion of people it has above 105 IQ than it is with the proportion of people above 100 IQ. This is called “smart fraction theory”. The nature of the bell curve means that a small change in the average IQ leads to a big change in the number of geniuses, and that’s why third world countries have almost no geniuses. We depend on geniuses for inventions.
The camera thing depends on your comparator. At the enthusiastic amateur end it’s only this last couple of years that digital competitive with the film (slow, transparency or monochrome, colour neg has pretty much always been crap) of old has become available. Full-frame 35mm sensors, 25 mpix and up. Just about cuts it against long-defunct Kodachrome 64.
So, while the smartphone is a great leap forward for the convenience snapshot end of the market, we’ve had a 10-year hiatus between the practical elimination of film photography (economically impossible without the mass market) and digital actually being competitive in terms of quality. This is a unique event (to date) in the evolution of audio/visual entertainment technology – that the quality gets worse (at least temporarily/practically) for everyone because the mass market is happy with the low quality level already reached with the new (and much cheaper) technology.
I hope we don’t have a similar experience coming with MP3s killing CDs, or low-quality internet streaming killing blu-ray, but fear it’s a distinct possibility.