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sha1sum
October 27th, 2013, 11:53 PM
I was just on youtube, watching a bit of documentary on punch cards programming, marvelling at how much technology has come along in the past forty years. When I was at school I learned that between 1760 and 1820 there was the industrial revolution in Europe. I have a feeling that in 200 years from now people will say that between 1960 and 2020 there was a worldwide revolution in information and communications technology, which was waaaay more significant. What are you guys thinking?

ian-weisser
October 28th, 2013, 12:19 AM
The information revolution is big.
The industrial revolution was much bigger.

One took my illiterate, malnourished, short-lived, rural, impoverished ancestors and changed everything about their quality of life.
The other has changed the way we value, store, and retrieve information...and brought us Twitter, Netflix, and free pornography.

tgalati4
October 28th, 2013, 12:31 AM
First Wave: Manual Labor
Second Wave: Industrial Age, steam power, mechanization
Third Wave: Information Age, computers, the web, and mobile devices
Fourth Wave: ?

lykwydchykyn
October 28th, 2013, 04:18 AM
Well, every time is historic in some way :)

But I think very few people understood back in the 1990's how much the internet would change our lives. And it really has; we can belittle it by talking about Facebook and cat photos, but that's like saying the printing press was insignificant because of dime-store novels and tabloids.

The internet really dropped a bomb on human culture, and I don't think the smoke has cleared nor the dust settled yet.

coldraven
October 28th, 2013, 09:41 AM
First Wave: Manual Labor
Second Wave: Industrial Age, steam power, mechanization
Third Wave: Information Age, computers, the web, and mobile devices
Fourth Wave: ?

Fourth Wave: Workers replaced by robots.
Fifth Wave: Workers, now unemployed, go back to being rural starving peasants.
Sixth Wave: ?

sha1sum
October 28th, 2013, 10:20 AM
The information revolution is big.
The industrial revolution was much bigger.

One took my illiterate, malnourished, short-lived, rural, impoverished ancestors and changed everything about their quality of life.
The other has changed the way we value, store, and retrieve information...and brought us Twitter, Netflix, and free pornography.
The industrial revolution took the stuff people already had, like food and clothing, and made it easier to produce. The information revolution made the free flow of information all over the world possible. Basically everyone has all information available to man at his fingertips. You want to know what happened in Ukraine in the year 2? I have no clue, but you can find out with just a few keystrokes. How awesome is that?


Fourth Wave: Workers replaced by robots.
Fifth Wave: Workers, now unemployed, go back to being rural starving peasants.
Sixth Wave: ?
That's what they were afraid of during the industrial revolution also. Machines replacing people, people becoming useless and starving to death. But what really happened is that because the production of food and clothing didn't require as much labor anymore, people had more time to invent, design and produce other cool stuff like cars, phones and tablets. Life only gets more fun when technology replaces human labor.

SeijiSensei
October 28th, 2013, 05:36 PM
That's what they were afraid of during the industrial revolution also. Machines replacing people, people becoming useless and starving to death. But what really happened is that because the production of food and clothing didn't require as much labor anymore, people had more time to invent, design and produce other cool stuff like cars, phones and tablets. Life only gets more fun when technology replaces human labor.

I don't see much evidence for this rosy view myself. I remember growing up in the 1960s when we were told that automation would enable us to become so much more productive that we could reduce the work-week and give people more leisure time. Americans spend as much time working (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M08354USM310NNBR) as they did then yet still struggle to make ends meet. I'm especially concerned with the collapse in employment since 2008 as shown dramatically in this graph of employment as a percentage of the total US civilian population: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO/. Employment grew quickly after every other recession before 2008. It has hardly budged since then.

sha1sum
October 28th, 2013, 06:06 PM
Think long term. I donīt think that prosperity is a contiously increasing line; it can go down also. However, I think that people in 1820 had a better standard of life than people in 1620, and that people in 2020 will do much better than people in 1820. And continuing in the same way, I think that the year 2220 will be pretty cool. Because in the end, it has to be humanity that reaps the benefits of human progress.

ian-weisser
October 28th, 2013, 06:45 PM
The industrial revolution took the stuff people already had, like food and clothing[...]

There should probably be a 'barely' or 'strived for' in there.
Pre-industrial life, unless you were rich (or very lucky), stank and died young.

sha1sum
October 28th, 2013, 07:38 PM
There should probably be a 'barely' or 'strived for' in there.
Pre-industrial life, unless you were rich (or very lucky), stank and died young.
Fair enough. I guess I underestimated the impact of the industrial revolution. Viva industry!

david98
October 28th, 2013, 09:14 PM
Only time will tell. One thing's for sure we will get a lot more reliant on technology which could be a good or bad thing. Bottom line is learn how to do thing's manually before asking a machine to take your place.

MasterNetra
October 29th, 2013, 12:36 AM
Sixth Wave: Resource Based Economies are adopted, civilization prospers more then ever
Seventh Wave: The True Space Age Begins, and we're living on other worlds besides earth.
Eigth Wave: ?
Ninth Wave: Profit

llanitedave
October 29th, 2013, 04:40 AM
Yes, life in pre-industrial London was nasty, British, and short. :-\"

Part of the problem with the new technological revolution is not the technology itself, but the fact that our culture hasn't adapted to it. Where's all this extra leisure time? Well, it belongs to the unemployed. The blessings of technology and prosperity are more unevenly distributed today than they have been in a very long time. Before they can be real blessings for most people, that has to change.

SeijiSensei
October 29th, 2013, 05:01 PM
Think long term.

In the long run, we're all dead. I'm more focused on the current dislocations because the fates of over seven billion humans are being decided now. I'm also pretty concerned about the stagnation in wages and worsening income inequality we have seen in the United States since the 1980s. If lower-middle-class incomes had kept up with productivity gains (http://rwer.wordpress.com/2010/11/20/graph-of-the-week-usa-productivity-and-real-hourly-wages-1964-2008/) over the past three decades, I suspect atavistic movements like the Tea Party would not have had such fertile grounds for development.

Political, economic, and technological factors have all played a role in these developments, but the effects on income distribution (http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/03/income-inequality) are pretty clear. I don't think anyone in 1965 thought the country would once again resemble the pre-1929 "Gilded Age" in just a few decades.

v1k1ng1001
October 31st, 2013, 05:32 AM
The belief in the significance of the information age is over hyped mostly because it depends upon a well-developed base of industrial capital as a condition of its existence. Take away the industiral base and youpre back in 1850.

The next step is to realize that right now, and into the foreseeable future, that industrial base itself is predicated on the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels. Oil and Coal were the gamechangers in the 19th century even more fundamentally than the industrial revolution.
But there are two problems with fossil fuels.

The first is that they are finite and non-renewable. This is bad since our population, industrial base and therefore our demand for fuels--especially oil--are all growing at an exponential rates. As we run out of fossil fuel, our industrial economy becomes stressed to the point of failure and no new technology. Ultimately uranium is finite too--the only long-term energy solutions are renewable but they provide a relatively low return on investment and require infrastructure that is not being built (except by the Germans who are somehow wiser than the rest of us.)

Even more pressing is the second problem which is that as we consume fossil fuels we emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. GHGs, in turn, impact our climate which puts a huge drag on our economy, as we will constantly need to adjust our infrastructure to compensate, and, ultimately, our ability to feed a global population that now adds 1,000,000,000 people every 12 years (a new Seattle every day). The climate models mapped against the economic models, mapped against the demographic models show a very high risk of a 3-5 degree celsius change by the end of the century which would be catastropic to human civilization (a shift as large as the last ice age to now--ending the climate regime that has made us happy for the last 10,000 years).

So yeah, we're living in a historical period but not for the reasons you're thinking. The irony is that we live in the information age yet we are so information saturated that we have buried the simple-to-understand data that suggests a very high risk of collapse in the next 50-100 years.

http://energyclub.nl/assets/Uploads/otherprojects/limits.jpg

http://www.alternativeconsumer.com/wp-content/uploads/002012/March/world_in_2050_paperback.jpg

http://www.billmckibben.com/images/eaarth-200.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-m9eTrILZ05g/T8U81U7-BFI/AAAAAAAADlU/JwiNH5Uu0ow/s1600/collapse.jpg

sha1sum
November 1st, 2013, 12:26 AM
Interesting. Thank you for your post.

I've watched the documentary "Guns, germs and steel" by the author of the last book, Jared Diamond.

One point he made I found especially interesting. He analysed why western societies became highly developed, while the indigenous population of Papua New Guinea stayed pretty much the same. The bottom line: because agricultural circumstances on the mainland (I believe the originally the middle east) were slightly better, people had a bit more time to dedicate to inventing things. That's how they invented things like food storage and better tools, which made their lives even easier, making it possible for them to dedicate even more time to evolving their methods. In that way they slowly built a sophisticated society, which would later become the basis of our society today.

That was also the reason why I'm not afraid of machines making humans superfluous. It's the same thing repeating itself.

I'm going to look into some of the titles you named there (Hopefully I'll get around to reading one of them, I read way fewer books than I should).

v1k1ng1001
November 1st, 2013, 01:26 AM
I'm going to look into some of the titles you named there (Hopefully I'll get around to reading one of them, I read way fewer books than I should).

There's a documentary on Diamond's Collapse as well. Blind Spot is another good, short documentary that introduces the problem.

I designed and am currently teaching a university course that focuses on the ethics of climate change and resource depletion so I'm neck deep in these issues. The thing that constantly astonishes me is the disjunction between the average person's understanding of the next 50-100 years vs. what the best projections are saying.

I suppose it was the same for the Roman Empire. If you asked what the prevailing attitudes were from 350 AD vs. 450 AD, you'd find very different answers.