That took a world war.
This may be the biggest lie of the 20th century ( in a century of big lies).
Is Ferguson completely ignorant of the galloping advances in the understanding of biology and material science?
I tend to agree. When I see pictures of some tie-less dork tech CEO holding up the latest device on a stage, I don’t see real progress.
Disagree with Ferguson.
I worked with Cray-2 supercomputers at Norfolk Naval Ocean Processing Facility in the 1980s.
It occupied 16 square feet of floor space, weighed 5500 pounds and consumed 195 kW of power.
The fastest computer in the world at that time with a clock speed of 125 MHz.
My current home computer has a clock speed of 3300 MHz. Plus it is much smaller, lighter and consumes far less power.
Computer tech has advanced more from 1987 to 2012 than it has in all the time before.
It is due to Gov't theft of overall productivity gains through inflation and debasement.
Newsweak? mmmmmm....no.
I think Ferguson is on to something. The problem is not the advances or lack thereof in technology — it’s the dumbing down of society. We will continue to have substantial technological advances, but such advances will be put to increasingly trivial and unproductive pursuits. As the populace becomes more preoccupied with their Facebook accounts or playing Words with Friends, authoritarian governments will eagerly step in to “regulate and control” society. After all, the people won’t even know what an important issue is.
Information technology has taken (and continues to take) great leaps forward. Other technologies are somewhat at a plateau. Overall, we continue to refine the capabilities we have: making them faster, cheaper, more capable and more elegant.
My own feeling is that the next great leap forward will come when we start to colonize space. First the solar system, then the stars. Unfortunately, that’s probably not going to happen in my lifetime—maybe not even this century. I think we made a great mistake after the moon landing in 1969. We decided to look inward to fix social ills instead of continuing to expand outward. If we had done the latter, we’d have permanent colonies on the Moon and Mars by now.
He’s wrong, very wrong.
The biggest technological change in the past 50 years has been the Internet. It affects almost everyone, everyday. For both Business and entertainment. It has generated trillions in wealth.
You literally have almost the entire knowledge of the world in your hand. (smart phones). I realize that most people do not use it for that purpose, but that is another issue.
The explosion in knowledge in Biology is going to change the world in the next 10, 20 years.
The problem is not technological advancement, but society. We are literally separating into the smarter and dumber tribes and that will probably not end well.
Its true we turned out backs on Space, which was a major mistake. But what is needed here is two things. Cheaper access to space and a cash crop to pull investment and people into space. Some minor progress is being made on both fronts.
Half right. It took a Republican Congress in 1946 that dramatically cut the tax rate. Unemployment only went down earlier because every male between the ages of 18 and 37 got a draft notice. ----14 million in the military does wonders for the unemployment rate, but does not improve the underlying economic distress.
Life on the homefront during WWII was awful...
I get his point.
If you look at the leaps from horse and buggy to the Apollo missions, then from Apollo to today, we have slowed down.
It's bursty for one thing. Thomas Kuhn called it paradigm shifting. It's not linear, and space travel is a perfect example.
What is happening with information technology is very much in its nascent stage - most of the toys for the masses are more a function of communications technology, no better or worse than the ability the individual already possesses to process the information communicated. If you're a thug, a flash mob is pretty exciting, but you're still just a thug. If you're a propagandist, it's incredible to get your story into millions of people's heads before they can call on a proper skepticism. But you're still just a propagandist.
But if you happen to be a thinker - a researcher in any field from psychology to quantum mechanics - the availability of raw data is unprecedented, and we are only beginning to notice its benefit. I'm suggesting that the talkers are overshadowing the doers at the moment in the popular eye, which is, after all, a function of talking. It won't be so in fifty years, and I think a wise observer would be well-served by waiting to pass judgment.
and the thing about information is it objectifies human lives. A despot's dream.