I was watching the Boardwalk Empire not so long ago. When the main character was a boy, people were wearing fancy clothes, sending letters, and riding horses. As a grown man, he talked on the phone and flew a plane. Whereas my parents were flying planes when they were young. I fly almost the same planes(yes, more safe and efficient) and it takes the same time to get from A to B.
Now you can contact almost anyone on earth using a pocket size computer and even see them, and share with them a very large portion of humanity’s knowledge.
I know that's the meme, but I think it's false and a dangerous thing to tell ourselves.
Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search?
And that's just the things that are publicly documented at all. There's libraries worth of implicit industrial knowledge too, including material that is explicitly proprietary. How does Intel or AMD design a modern computer chip? How does Rolls Royce design a jet engine? How do you fabricate a mono-crystalline solar cell? How do you mine for raw materials?
This is "I, Pencil" writ large. I would estimate only the smallest fraction of humanity's knowledge can be found on the internet - well under a percent, at least if you don't count "emailing an expert". If we had to rebuild society on the basis of what we could find on the internet, we'd be lucky to reach 20th century technology levels.
> Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search?
If you include pirating sites? Close to 100%, most books are scanned into pdf's and can be found free online. So only thing stopping this is legal and not technological.
> > Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search?
General Aviation was destroyed for many reasons, none of which were really technology or innovation problems. Commercial General Aviation was decimated by NIMBAs, Commercial Airline pressure, massive population growths, expensive to insure/maintain/own and to be honest, a lack of care of passion from aviation for the past few generations.
But.. the homebuilt and sport space has innovated quite a bit - glass cockpits, auto pilots, efficient engines, electric power plants, micro jets, composite aircraft..
I think appropriate comparison would be, what would equivalent travel cost, in money an time, to the parents of your parents.
The argument is not that nothing is getting better, but that the rate of improvement has slowed. So the frequently touted 'exponential progress' is a myth.
