Why such a change?

[sniper762]

i diidn't say that there was NO advancement 10's of thousands of years ago. i just stated that the percentage of increase in the past few decades has drastically risen.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

i diidn't say that there was NO advancement 10's of thousands of years ago. i just stated that the percentage of increase in the past few decades has drastically risen.

Yes, you did. You specifically said that humanity had only advanced in the last dozen generations.

 

[sniper762]

my op does anyone care to attempt to explain WHY man has technologically advanced so much faster in the last few decades as opposed to his many thousands of years of existence?

TAKE NOTE OF THE WORDS "SO MUCH FASTER"

you ned to ponder what you read, in order to understand it, thus not making false statements.

 

[Morse]

It's actually not that difficult.

Technological advancement is an exponential function, such as population. However, technology, I believe, isn't logistic in practical use. Technological advancement begins slowly, but as the values compound the value m continually increases. Think of it like compound interest.

One factor that has continually prolonged or stretched the m increase we see now is what somebody mentioned earlier, about inefficient information storage. Oral tradition and non-mass produced writings were inefficient, especially when many people couldn't read. With the advent of proper databases and repositories for information, and the ability for most people to access this foundation, the exponential nature is coming through.

 

[sniper762]

morse, what brought about this newfound foundation? all of a sudden in the pool of time, in question, i might add.
With the advent of proper databases and repositories for information, and the ability for most people to access this foundation, the exponential nature is coming through.

 

[Herr Heinrich]

that might be because your bucket has a hole in it.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

my op does anyone care to attempt to explain WHY man has technologically advanced so much faster in the last few decades as opposed to his many thousands of years of existence?

TAKE NOTE OF THE WORDS "SO MUCH FASTER"

you ned to ponder what you read, in order to understand it, thus not making false statements.

Ahem:

man has had thousands of generations for that advancement to add up. notice that it has only advanced in the last dozen. doesnt look very gradual, to me.

Was it a different sniper762 that posted that? Don't blame me if you can't keep your own argument straight.

Anyhow, my general point remains: huge technological advances have happened all through human history. IMO, it's mainly cultural chauvinism that leads one to conclude that "our" advancements are better than the advancements of other eras.

 

[Alex_G]

does anyone care to attempt to explain WHY man has technologically advanced so much faster in the last few decades as opposed to his many thousands of years of existence?

Well i would think the scientific and technological advancement is somewhat exponential by nature, with new technologies facillitating the way to better ones, previously unavailable. The opening of new doors, like a tree branching out from its trunk.

I also think it has a lot to do with numbers, the ever increasing population, and more importantly the technologies of communication and travel, that have connected people in ways previously unrealised, leading to much better productivity.

Looking further back, i think such advancements began to pick up when the scientific method was initially being utilised correctly, and we could yield reliable results from well constructed studies, that began as stepping stones to future endeavours. Failures before were not necessarily down to lack of trying, or intelligence, but rather due process being incorrect, inhibiting the move forward.

the difference, i believe is that we are getting closer and more interconnected to the mysteries of god, through his help. we should be ready soon.

Just so you know comments like this one make you look like a crazy person. 'we should be ready soon'??....

sort of thing i expect to see painted on a sign being worn by the mad steet preacher!

 

[Kilgore Trout]

Technology builds on previous advancements; the more advancements we have, the more that are now accessible or within our grasp. Current technologies require precursor technologies in a wide variety of areas.

Also, the exponential growth of population, and availability of education/knowledge to that population, means there is an exponential growth in the man-hours being dedicated to technological advancement.

Essentially, technology is an exponential process. In this era, we are hitting the "knee of the curve," or the part of the curve which begins to noticably accelerate. It's actually a pretty simple concept.

 

[strikeviperMKII]

does anyone care to attempt to explain WHY man has technologically advanced so much faster in the last few decades as opposed to his many thousands of years of existence?

Globalization. The world is a lot smaller place, which means that people can collaborate more easily, quickly and efficiently. More minds working on the same problem usually means faster solutions. More minds also means more ideas in the mainstream. More ideas means more new avenues of thought, more new advances.

 

[Magic Man]

so we assembled a little over the past 100,000 years and a lot more in the last 200? big change, hey?

Think of it like this: the more you have, the more you can do. It's the snowball effect. Investing $1,000 doesn't go very far very fast, but once it gets up to $200,000, you'll see big gains very quickly.

Conditions are just very good for technological advances. We're less worried about just surviving than we have been in the past. We have more time and resources to put towards new technology and science, and we have a lot to build on.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

nothing that even remotely compares to today's technology, shadow. dont be so naive

No, but none-the-less technology isn't an exclusively modern idea. And as for Da Vinci's sketches of the human anatomy, they are still in use today because they are very detailed and accurate.

 

[sniper762]

everyone keeps attributing our increased technological advances to better communications, travel means, teaching and many other modern day influences. thats all true but it is the issue of the question which has not been addressed. WHY ALL THIS CAME TO BE "NOW" IS THE QUESTION.

IF you break down the advancement progression into time periods you will see that the past few decades (less than a century) has produced an over normal progression rate compared to that of man's total time of existence.

 

[Alex_G]

everyone keeps attributing our increased technological advances to better communications, travel means, teaching and many other modern day influences. thats all true but it is the issue of the question which has not been addressed. WHY ALL THIS CAME TO BE "NOW" IS THE QUESTION.

IF you break down the advancement progression into time periods you will see that the past few decades (less than a century) has produced an over normal progression rate compared to that of man's total time of existence.

I think what people are saying is that rate at which advancement is occuring has been increasing. You ask why? well the very nature of it is self promoting, and thus exponential.

You might ask why now? or how come now, and not 500 year ago, or 500 year into the future, well why would it be occuring at any other time? It just is the reality of our human development and advancement that its taken this long, and only in the last 200 say has seen the most change.

 

[Meow Mix]

does anyone care to attempt to explain WHY man has technologically advanced so much faster in the last few decades as opposed to his many thousands of years of existence?

Science is a new invention; so is a rigorous methodology of critical thought (of which science is just a subset).

Sagan argued in "The Demon-Haunted World" that rational thinking isn't inborn. I agree with him: it's a learned behavior. A person raised on an island isn't necessarily going to have a rational methodology for solving problems. If history shows us anything, a person who develops away from the norms of any society that uses rational techniques will probably instead fall prey to various fallacies like attributing the weather to an unrelated action (rain dancing, confirmation bias) and so forth.

Once methods of thinking rationally developed it progressed naturally from there: people understood that such systems actually worked, and then started understanding the importance of cataloguing discoveries.

Beyond that, when it came to electronics there emerged a predictable pattern for how quickly technology would advance based on how small we could etch things onto silicon chips.

It will be interesting to see what happens when we hit the Planck limit for making computers in this way -- the point at which we can't use lasers and silicon chips to make smaller computers because quantum effects become dominant. Moore's Law (I think that's what it's called, the one that predicts the rate at which computers advance) will no longer be true; so it will be very interesting to see at what rate quantum computers advance.

Another interesting side effect is that with quantum computers, building into a 3rd dimension does NOT help, so how size issues are dealt with will also be interesting. (I imagine that the inside of a computer will look something like a slinky, or rather the 2d circuits weaving through 3d space in some way like a folded towel). Thus it would still topologically be a 2d computer, just stored efficiently in 3d space. I blame God for this limitation ;P

 

[Penumbra]

does anyone care to attempt to explain WHY man has technologically advanced so much faster in the last few decades as opposed to his many thousands of years of existence?

I think it has to do with several key elements finally falling into place. They didn't fall into place all at once, but only in the last few hundred years have they all finally been in place.

From the dawn of civilization, technology has slowly improved, sometimes taken a few steps back, and different areas of the planet have experienced different rates of progress. But they had so little to work with, that little could be done in a given generation.

Once the scientific method was more thoroughly adopted by intellectuals, and once technology reached the point where energy was fairly abundant, communication was fairly easy, knowledge could be easily recorded, and the general population was living in relative freedom rather than in constant oppression or scarcity, then the foundations were put down for an explosion in progress.

And one shouldn't expect improvement to be entirely homogeneous. Certain things, like figuring out how to design and implement semiconductors resulted in astounding possibilities very, very quickly from that point onward. And when computers were finally in place, they also can aid technological advancement, so it becomes a scenario where technology directly leads to the next technology.

Some areas of technology haven't experienced as much progress. Compare the areas of electronics and aerospace to each other in the 1960s and now. Electronic technology has improved immensely, to the creation of personal computers, the internet, various gadgets, and society has changed very much around these creations. In aerospace, there have been considerable advancements but not nearly as much. Planes such as the Boeing 737 and 747 that were designed back in the 60s are still used today, and are still fairly competitive with newer planes. And even the newer planes, although improved, are not so dramatically different from older ones. And look at our space program- it was hard launching people into space decades ago and it's STILL really, really hard today. In a fairly short period of time, space exploration improved, but then it kind of flattened out and advancements were less dramatic for a while.

 

[Oberon]

does anyone care to attempt to explain WHY man has technologically advanced so much faster in the last few decades as opposed to his many thousands of years of existence?

The real technological advancement was agriculture, and this took place thousands of years ago. Humans had been on the planet for tens of thousands of years and had virtually nothing to show for it. Agriculture made sedentary lifestyles possible, allowed for larger populations, and civilization. A surplus of food, and being able to say in one place, allowed humans to engage in a plethora of activities which didn't revolve around survival.

For tens of thousands of years, humans just roamed around not really doing much. Then agriculture spreads and we get massive buildings, we get literature, we get great works of art, we get philosophy, and so on. Nothing in the past two decades really compares with this fundamental shift in human existence.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

my op does anyone care to attempt to explain WHY man has technologically advanced so much faster in the last few decades as opposed to his many thousands of years of existence?

I've already thrown out the idea that it has exploded recently because we have so much more free time to work on such things. We don't have to work all day in a field, feed livestock, make our own clothes and furniture, and water is only a short walk to a faucet away.

 

[Kilgore Trout]

IF you break down the advancement progression into time periods you will see that the past few decades (less than a century) has produced an over normal progression rate compared to that of man's total time of existence.

Perhaps you should look up what "exponential" means.

 

[outhouse]

greeks had cars, jet planes, computers? not even close.

Antikythera mechanism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

theres the computer

No jet planes but they did play with steam

they did have mechanical wooden carts that were rather brilliant in recording distance.

No cars though


I think the point is not to under estimate the ancient people.