I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be
amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the
present day in relation to a hundred years ago.
A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson
much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise
the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station.
From a technological perspective, I'm not sure they're wrong? 1922 had railways and cars and mass transit which had already started increasing urbanisation vs 1822, skyscrapers were already being built, passenger air travel was a go, telephones and electricity existed in cities.
The internet and computing is certainly a big shift, but from a visible changes to the world perspective I think 2022 is more alike 1922 than 1922 was alike 1822.
> The internet and computing is certainly a big shift, but from a visible changes to the world perspective I think 2022 is more alike 1922 than 1922 was alike 1822.
Lolwat? Handheld devices that have the power to process millions of calculations a sec, to record Ultra HD videos, to establish a video conference instantaniously with anyone in the whole world.
Thousands of satellites that orbit the earth constantly. Space missions that are already flying past the limits of our galaxy.
Bio-mechanical organs, giving the crippled back the ability to walk, the blind the ability to see, the deaf to hear.
Welp, I do think that technological progress has been growing at a logarithmic rate, and it's probably keep growing at that pace...
I think the one point in which the author was super correct is, when he says that the progress will be made on technology, rather than the "emotion that arises between a man and a maid" - as I understand it, emotional intelligence - , which will remain stagnant.
They had radio and video cameras in 1922, I don't think facetime would be all that shocking. 1822 had neither telephone nor electric light. Steam trains were just getting started; by 1922 they were running regular service at over 100 mph.
Evidently its debatable which century saw more change, from sailboats to Titanic, or gunpowder rockets to Apollo... certainly there have always been cynics and dreamers...
edit: GPS would be pretty shocking to either, I expect
> Lolwat? Handheld devices that have the power to process millions of calculations a sec, to record Ultra HD videos, to establish a video conference instantaniously with anyone in the whole world.
These are a different in quality more so than a different in kind. In 1922 you could already talk to someone 100s of miles away via the telephone. In 1822 you couldn't. And getting there was going to take weeks. So you basically couldn't talk to people long distance unless you were rich or important.
> Thousands of satellites that orbit the earth constantly. Space missions that are already flying past the limits of our galaxy.
Means rather than an end here. Google Maps is neat and convenient, but again, you _could_ use paper maps for much of what people use google maps for. And large paper mapping schemes (e.g. ordnance survey maps in countries of the british empire) were carried out in the 19th century and WW1. Communications could also be done, albeit more expensively. Space missions are still currently in the scientific curiosity stage, rather than impacting people's lives, but who knows maybe commercial near earth space missions end up being the one people get to to talk about for 2022-2122.
> Bio-mechanical organs, giving the crippled back the ability to walk, the blind the ability to see, the deaf to hear.
These are technically more accomplished achievements for sure, but I'm not sure they have the same sort of societal impacts as initiatives against cholera and tubercolosis of the late 19th century. Vaccination is probably the 20th century achievement to call out here.
The keyword here is “visible”; for most of these things, though the change is real, it is also easily missed, with the exception of, as you say, thousands of satellites that orbit the earth constantly (space missions are not however already flying past the limits of our galaxy, they’re just about reaching the heliopause; even just leaving the plane of the Galaxy is 200,000 times further than that, while leaving the rim of the Galaxy is about 12 million times further).
Video conferencing worldwide? If you draw attention to it, I suspect it would’ve surprised 1922 people that anyone richer than a literal subsistence farmer would also have a device of their own for the other end of the call, but the existence of the technology itself would not be surprising.
For visible changes between 1922 and 2022? New materials, new lighting, new fashion, drones, the public acceptability of same-sex relationships, race relations (in particular attitudes to those of pre-Colombian, African, and Chinese descent), and possibly also visible might be the absence of disfiguring illnesses that we have now vaccinated against.
But those are likely less than the changes from 1822 to 1922.
(The Blue Marble, or the photos of astronauts walking on the moon… I don’t know if those would’ve been shocking or not. Jules Verne died in 1905).
Hubris? I think he was right, and that the world of 1822 was more different from 1922 than 1922 is to now. Computers seem to be the primary novel invention in the last hundred years, but long-distance data transfer was normal - and the fax machine sending pictures was overseas was just two years away (1924).
1822 was a horse-drawn, gas-lit world that was in many ways the same as it had been for millennia. 1922 was a world where rapid transportation (planes , trains, and automobiles),recorded images and sounds, electric light, radio broadcasts and instantaneous intercontinental communication.
Of all the science fiction things that I knew when I was a kid in the 90s, only one actually happened, and that's handheld devices with touchscreens with all the world's information accessible through them.
Many others, like humanoid robots (that can do actual stuff like independently clean a home), general AI, actual real space travel (where people live on different planets or giant space wheels), flying cars, replicators, fusion energy, self driving cars (those are near though), brain uploads, nanobots, curing many diseases, etc... didn't happen and won't any time soon, and of course some are physically impossible like FTL travel, teleportation, time travel, ...
It's at least nice to have seen one science fiction fantasy come true so far :)
As always, when this kind of things come up, I'd like to mention "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit" (2012), by the late David Graeber. There's a reason late 20th and early 21st century technological development went the way it did, rather than the way it looked like it would from the mid 20th century.
In fact, gas light was bleeding edge tech in 1822 - confined to a few parts of cities like London and Baltimore. The New York City gas company was only chartered in 1823. Chicago didn't get gas light until 1850.
Whale oil was still a significant source of illumination right through the 19th century, especially in the US.
> but long-distance data transfer was normal - and the fax machine sending pictures was overseas was just two years away (1924).
"Quantity has a quality all its own"
-Joseph Stalin
Saying the fax let us move information long distance is like saying global trade was around in the middle ages because Macro Polo. The quantity difference is so big it becomes a qualitative difference.
I can arrange to have an arbitrary industrial doodad show up on my doorstep from literally the other side of the world while taking a shit. I can stream 1080p to/from damn near anywhere on the planet. In 30sec I can get answers to specific technical questions that would have taken hours for the president of the US to get an answer to in 1990. The list goes on. Communication and information are just so much more abundant than they were even 75yr ago.
I get what you're saying, but I think I disagree. Ordering on Amazon from your phone is a much faster experience that reaches more products, but it is an analogue to mailing in an order from the Sears catalog. I don't think there's an 1822 analogue to the Sears catalog.
And the quote was about "surprise". I don't think it'd be a complete shock to see that the world got more connected, ordering became easier, deliveries became faster. In 1822 the railroad was very much still in its early stages; the Erie Canal had just been completed, the Pony Express and the telegraph were still almost 40 years away.
Put differently, a lot of "0 to 1" stuff had happened by 1922.
>Put differently, a lot of "0 to 1" stuff had happened by 1922.
How much of that 0-1 is stuff that existed in some niche or experimental capacity prior to 1822 but simply became possible at scale?
We had writing for millennia but the printing press changed the world.
We've had steel for millennia but the Bessemer process changed the world.
We've always been able to send information long distances but digital communications changed the world.
You can always pick whatever specific innovations you want as the 0-1 transition point but it's the widespread availability of something that changes the world.
I don't think I disagree with your point, I just think that your point doesn't speak to the "who would be more surprised" question. And, thinking about it, maybe 0-1 wasn't a good way for me to make that case.
To order something from Amazon from your toilet, you need
- indoor plumbing
- computing
- electricity
- industrialized mass production
- global connectivity
- global transportation network
Someone in 1922 could imagine a telephone in a bathroom that could be used to contact a Sears-like company to order a mass-produced product and have it delivered from a faraway place.
In 1822 you barely have the idea of industrialization and electricity, let alone anything else. "Write a letter from your cesspit to have a product from St. Louis delivered to New York, but your letter is instantly delivered instead of taking six weeks, production is faster and cheaper than your local craftsman (it's not being made to order!), and instead of taking six weeks to ship it, it takes two days (2022) or a week(?) (1922)." It's not just that the same kind of thing is happening at a grander scale, it requires a fundamental reorientation of how you'd think about consuming products.
So yeah, Amazon's scale in 2022 is astronomically greater than Sears's in 1922 and that is significant, but they share way more fundamentals than 1822 and 1922 did.
Hubris yes, but perhaps not wrong. I'm not sure if the progress between 1922-2022 was as significant as the progress between 1822-1922. These are two 100-year periods of immense progress.
Have in mind that he's referring to the 100 yr period that brought us cars, airplanes, railroads, telephones, light bulbs, electricity, electromagnetism, relativity, evolution, etc.
Yep.
Penicilin,
Heart transplants,
Supersonic travel.
Nuclear power,
Nuclear weapons,
Nuclear naval propulsion.
Space exploration.
Artificial Satellites,
GPS,
Succesful cancer treatments,
NMR and other imaging diagnostic tools.
Wireless bi-directional personal television (the 20's name for making a zoom call from your phone).
And the list goes on.
Do any of those even come close to 1822-1922 changes of aviation, global telecommumications, ubiquitous electricity, cars, Quantum Mechanics, and so on? Space exploration, nuclear propulsion and satellites are great, but their impact on people’s daily lives is far smaller than the above, imo.
So did (even to a greater effect) the doctors washing their hands. Between 1822-1922, only in Physics humanity discovered/developed, the laws of Electromagnetism, the laws of Thermodynamics and their microscopic extension: Statistical Mechanics, the special theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and the General theory of relativity.
The last 100 years have been about doing things in large quantities in a cheaper, faster way. Of course there has been great progress (the era of the PC/Internet by far the most important one) but the rate is significantly lower.
They are definitely the biggest change in the past century and on par with those big innovations I mentioned, so I wouldn’t want to undersell them as they’ve been a major disruptive change to most / all fields.
However, they wouldn’t exactly be incomprehensible to someone from the early 1900’s, since they already had the telegraph, telephony, and fax machines which could send pictures over a long distance came very soon after this article was written.
Whereas I think a person from the early 1800’s would genuinely struggle with understanding the modern world.
In my earlier reply to GP, I had forgotten about space exploration, and I think that is a major technological advancement that would amaze someone from 1922. However, I still think that someone from 1922 would expect such things of 2022 in a way that someone from 1822 would not expect of 1922. 1822 - 1922 is the difference between being a barely-technological world to being a fully-blown one, in many, many fields.
I wouldn't call it hubris but lack of universal knowledge of the exponential nature of development. That was before I saw the universal lack of just this comprehension in the comments.
What people may mean is that a jump from 10^5 to 10^6 can feel bigger than a jump from 10^6 to 10^7? And that we are more surprised by large things than by some small piece of 'magical paper' which can completely change its display at will.
Yep, bet on an unchanging human nature,keeping things from the past around, some social progress in certain areas but not as fast as you would like it and that the world of 2122 will be less alien to a 2022 person than the 2022 world to a 1922 person.
