Sure the glass slab from 1989 may have 50x or 70x bigger "wires" in it's microchips, and it may have bigger pixels, but I see more in common with the $100 1989 device and the modern glass slab than I see difference and change. Sure, certainly the extra miniaturization both chip- and product- scale is good incremental change, but the componentry is the same and rate of progress has tapered massively.
Wireless is certainly one place we've been radically helped, and that's hugely attributable to DSP processing, which is great. But see above tapering.
How's this for some bounding? Let's go back to 2000. AMD has just dropped a 1.4GHz Athlon, and is 3 years from Athlon 64. Intel, in November drops Netburst, 1.5-2GHz. Intel says are going to take NetBurst to 10GHz by 2005.
What I'd point out is that all these advances you cite have inflection points, something that took available technology that was on the shelf and under developed and mused over, into being radically ragingly important in a very short time. And then we milk that system heavily, get huge gains, and then... and then... cross our fingers hold our butts and wait for the next thing to jump up and remake the world. This "rocket" moves in fits and starts.
It's easy and convenient to point to historical context as you do, and to convince ourselves of progress. Rather than take hold of these mix of points and see amazement, I see very small case studies in a larger world that loses the radical element, the dynamics, and creeps towards stasis. The number of things left on the shelf to develop, to fully industrialize into, is not unboundedly infinite. It's up to us to dream hard, dream big, to fight the creeping in of stasis and assert our status as homo sapien, the shaper of the world about, and we need to find big enough dreams to fuel that. To do that, we need to keep everyone dreaming and potentiated, not just the Musks of today.
Most of your post is lost on me. I am sorry, I'm not a native English speaker...neither am I particularly good at deciphering stuff written by people smarter than me...my problem, I know...sorry...
However, I would like to say that I do know the importance of shoulders of the giants our current world stands on. If there were no Intel in 1961, then most likely there would be no iPhone in 2006, if there was no DNA model in early sixties then there will be no stem cell advances now. The point I was trying to make was that the fact standing on the shoulders of theses giants gives us a better shot at the kind of problems our predecessors couldn't even dream about. So the only time better than now, will be in future....when I am long gone up in smoke....I have absolutely no reason to complain...
Wireless is certainly one place we've been radically helped, and that's hugely attributable to DSP processing, which is great. But see above tapering.
How's this for some bounding? Let's go back to 2000. AMD has just dropped a 1.4GHz Athlon, and is 3 years from Athlon 64. Intel, in November drops Netburst, 1.5-2GHz. Intel says are going to take NetBurst to 10GHz by 2005.
What I'd point out is that all these advances you cite have inflection points, something that took available technology that was on the shelf and under developed and mused over, into being radically ragingly important in a very short time. And then we milk that system heavily, get huge gains, and then... and then... cross our fingers hold our butts and wait for the next thing to jump up and remake the world. This "rocket" moves in fits and starts.
It's easy and convenient to point to historical context as you do, and to convince ourselves of progress. Rather than take hold of these mix of points and see amazement, I see very small case studies in a larger world that loses the radical element, the dynamics, and creeps towards stasis. The number of things left on the shelf to develop, to fully industrialize into, is not unboundedly infinite. It's up to us to dream hard, dream big, to fight the creeping in of stasis and assert our status as homo sapien, the shaper of the world about, and we need to find big enough dreams to fuel that. To do that, we need to keep everyone dreaming and potentiated, not just the Musks of today.