I agree for the most part. I video skyped with my mom today. It boggled her mind that we're able to do this. This is something that was only possible in cartoons in the 70s. She only just discovered Skype, whereas I've been using it for years and have seen it evolve.
I imagine it's like watching your nephew grow up. Don't see him for a few years, and suddenly, it's like, whoah! You're huge! But if you see him every day, maybe the difference isn't as dramatic.
I would also note that those more dramatic motives you discuss regarding things like the pyramids, space exploration, etc, may not exist today, which further decreases the dramatic level of today's technology.
Exactly. If you could travel back in time and bring an iPad back to 1985 (and somehow keep internet connectivity with the present) and showed it to someone, they'd probably consider it magical to the point that it must have been made by aliens. It's far too facile for someone in the present to dismiss it as an incrementally improved piece of technology that is no better, fundamentally, than what already existed in 1985.
lol, no, we would not have considered it magical. Based on television shows like Space:1999 we fully expected to have a large moon base and ray guns by 1999. My 1985 self would have looked at the iPad and said "That's all? The battery only lasts for a few hours, it's only two-dimensional, and I can't roll it. What happened, was there a nuclear war initiated dark age?"
Nonsense. In the previous decade we had gone from the introduction of LED watches to personal computers - by 1985 we had the Apple IIE, which is a bigger leap from what was available in 1975 than the IIE to the iPad. Kubrick included iPad-like devices in 2001 because he thought we would have them. I would have been surprised to see them earlier than 1995, but 2010? Late.
Stephenson is right, but he doesn't go far enough. It's not just the big things - since 1970 the pace of progress has been slowing down across the board.
When my grandfather was born cars were so brand new they weren't mass produced - they were only toys for rich people. By the time he was my age he saw the introduction of flight, jet flight, and space flight. He saw the introduction of radio and television. He saw the first effective treatments for bacterial infections.
There hasn't been any period of time like that recently. Progress hasn't been accelerating. The reason we thought we'd have fusion power and moon bases and a cure for cancer is that's the trajectory we were on. So no, progress isn't accelerating at all. It's slowing down, and more perceptibly every day.
Video skyping is a victory of hardware development, not software. The software methodologies are not fundamentally different from the 1970s -- they are faster, and (arguably) easier in certain ways, but code is still written one line at a time, building logical constructs that have been around for decades.
What has changed is the amount of code that a device is capable of executing per second, and that is what has enabled things like video decoding.
I think you're overlooking the many algorithmic advances in video & audio codecs in that time period too. It certainly has NOT been case of the software guys sitting around since the 70s waiting for the hardware guys to catch up.
I imagine it's like watching your nephew grow up. Don't see him for a few years, and suddenly, it's like, whoah! You're huge! But if you see him every day, maybe the difference isn't as dramatic.
I would also note that those more dramatic motives you discuss regarding things like the pyramids, space exploration, etc, may not exist today, which further decreases the dramatic level of today's technology.