The Core
Why We Are Here => Hardware & Technology => Topic started by: rcjordan on July 09, 2018, 02:49:46 AM
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1 - hydraulic power
2 - barcodes
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artificial fertilizer
transistor
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Not so much technologies as discoveries
penicillin
electricity
pure tech
telegraph
mass production
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safe tap water
anesthetics
vaccinations
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Birth control aka The Pill, nothing even comes close.
I'm reserving judgement on number 2 but CDB oil might pan out.
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Air Conditioning
Turbines
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The Web?
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>>> The Web?
WELL, it is 2 words ;D
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- water purification
- the plow (including disk harrows, etc, etc... tech to turn earth)
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>Birth control
Having four kids in California in the 21st century I get some odd questions; mostly people ask what religion we are. It is like it is inconceivable that someone would actually want to have four kids.
>>> The Web
If this was a top 5 list the web would be in mine. I think the web is one of humanities greatest (as in long term impact & potential for global quality of life improvement) creations. Probably most of the impact is in the developing world.
>safe drinking water/vaccinations/anesthetics/the plow/artificial fertilizer/antibiotics/electricity
All things that make the modern first world possible. If you remove any of those life gets considerably harder. A few of them are going to get harder to have in the future.
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The question that I find more interesting, is typically something like "name 2 technologies with a bigger impact on social relations than people think."
The example I always like to give is matches. Before matches, women in rural villages would let the home fires go out and then have an excuse to go to the neighbor and beg some coals. It was an important social opportunity for women. When cheap matches were invented and pushed out to villages in the 1800s (to stop villages with thatch roofs from burning down due to blowing embers from women carrying coals), women lost a significant social outlet and their lives became significantly more isolated.
Refrigeration is another one. We think of it's huge impacts - food storage, all manner of poduce out of season shipped from miles away. But in 1950s France, people typically went to the grocery store twice a day. When refrigerators became common, they went once a week. This was a major factor in destroying the daily sociability of village life in rural France.
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There are others - the "iron feather" (plume de fer) that made writing much cheaper and much easier in the 1800s. Meanwhile, wood pulp paper, around the same time, made paper much cheaper. People think of the "print revolution" of Gutenberg et al, but this subtle change had a significant impact on society as well, not just in terms of literacy and communication, but also in terms of, within a century, destroying the occupation of "chiffonnier" (rag picker), who picked up all manner of detritus from the streets to recycle back into the paper-making industry.
It is what motivated Prefect Poubelle to require garbage cans to be placed around towns in his prefecture, beginning in 1884 - the people who once cleaned the streets and recycled these materials back into productive use, especially in the paper industry, were no longer needed. Instead, large forests of trees were needed and paper was almost always "virgin" paper, not part of a continuous cycle.
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Refrigeration is another one. We think of it's huge impacts - food storage, all manner of poduce out of season shipped from miles away. But in 1950s France, people typically went to the grocery store twice a day. When refrigerators became common, they went once a week. This was a major factor in destroying the daily sociability of village life in rural France.
I never thought of refrigeration being a spark of modern isolation on par with big box stores and ecommerce.
BTW, sort of related to this topic... Has anybody ever gone into a Sonic fastfood joint? What a dystopian nightmare!
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>Sonic
Louise takes the grandkids. I've never been.
>bigger impact on social relations than people think.
That was my intent, sorta, when I started the thread. Barcodes have become a universal language ...one that drones & bots will read fluently.
>hydraulics
Taken for granted -like steam power before it- but we're literally moving mountains with it now.
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>Sonic
There is one walking distance from the office here. I went once and felt really, really weird not eating it in my car. Haven't been there on foot since.
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> Sonic
Some of us don't know ... why is Sonic noteworthy?
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I didn't mean to hijack the topic of the thread, sorry.
To be fair, I've only been to one in rural Oregon on my way up to watch the eclipse, but it was like being in a giant vending machine. The business is set up so that one is completely cut off from the employees with the exception of the server if you eat in your car. The food was ordered via buttons on a menu screen. I guess the typical setup is you pull your car in to a station, order your food via the menu, someone brings the food to you, then you drive off. I think it is suppose to be nostalgic, but it didn't feel that way to me. It felt extremely impersonal, cattle like. The kids had to use the restroom, so we went inside. There we were in basically a cinder-block room with a bench and the same impersonal button operated menu system.
As for the food, everything is fried and breaded and/or loaded with sugar*. Everyone eating there was obese and getting way too much to eat. I think the lack of human interaction seems to encourage anonymous binge eating.
*Apparently they have a shake that tops 2,000 calories
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I think the lack of human interaction seems to encourage anonymous binge eating.
I wonder if that is explicitly mentioned in some business strategy document somewhere.... and if it will eventually get them sued.
And the awful atmosphere probably encourages them to eat and leave quickly, which means you don't need as much space. Like the opposite of a nice French family dinner.
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>hijack the topic of the thread, sorry.
Have at it.
You guys know that Sonic has just modernized the old A&W car-hop drive-ins from the 50s? Except the communication tech is better.
Don't miss the Arby's thread, it's related.
>human interaction
Wait until the bots displace the cooks and waiters.