The Invention of Progress

Today will be looking at how technology has changed the world over time.

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[TravisGilbert]

Is anyone was curious the video is actually 5 gigabytes

[ParallelPenguins]

The only ‘I was born in the wrong generation’ I can agree with is ‘l wish I was born in the post scarcity Star Trek like world of future generations, supposing we get to that.’ Cuz it may not be a perfect all around utopia but it’s still leagues ahead of nowadays.

[mandolinda]

It is amazing to me that you are only 22, and yet you have such deep insight and wisdom. You are destined for greatness, young one. Just remember to be gentle with yourself, and trust your intuition. You are the most important person in your life. Thanks for helping me keep learning even through my advanced age (which I now know I owe to a hardworking farmer!)

[LoraK]

As someone with a chronic health condition that 100 years ago would have been fatal, I always find those "what time period do you want to live in" questions so funny. Saying you wish you grew up in an earlier decade is such a sign of privilege.

[strange]

Maternal mortality is actually even pretty high in the US for a developed country. In Germany, it's 7 and it Italy, it's just 2.

[LaytonObserves]

This video was incredible, and I wish it - or some variety of it - was shown to every living person. It's so easy, so dismally easy, to be cynical and ungrateful about our world today, but by almost every conceivable metric it's a miracle. Of course it has its problems, but we also can't even imagine how many problem it _doesn't_ have any more, thanks to the hardships overcome by our ancestors.
Thank you for making this.

[AntonWongVideo]

11:33 the industrial revolution powered Travis' haircut and shirt change

[yostinator]

I’d honestly say the creation of progress is the start of the human story, and the story of how we spread the world.
Now industrial progress is something far different, and far quicker. Industry is what leads a lot of people who live in complex societies (the best definition I can think of is production of items for surplus-instead of sustenance) a lot of our modern problems can be traced be back to the Dawn of Industry. But in a way industry happened and we can’t stop it now.

[liem]

I think I was born in the wrong generation. I want to be born 100 years from now and be an asteroid miner!

[nimrodgirl]

You've knocked it out the park again with this video - really interesting discussion!

As easy as it is to feel cynical about the future because the Earth is burning and we're not doing enough to stop it, I've always been an optimist about humanity. It's hard to make decisions for my long-term future when the cynicism takes hold. The thought experiment of being unable to predict how much progress can be made in the future makes me feel like my optimism is not misplaced. Thank you

[juliegolick]

I've got a graduate degree in medieval history. Whenever anyone asks me "if you could choose any time and place in which to live, where would you choose?", my answer is an immediate, "Right here and now, in Canada, in the 21st century." Being an historian gives me a really great perspective on how good we have it here. Not even accounting for things like the internet, the combination of modern medicine and sanitation, refrigeration, electricity, communication grids, and long-distance travel means that even relatively poor people can live at a level of luxury that would have been unthinkable to earlier generations. I can have fresh fruit at any time of year! Hot, clean running water with the turn of a tap! Light at night with the flick of a switch! Medication that turns otherwise debilitating or fatal conditions into minor annoyances! Conversations with people on the other side of the world in real time! Seriously, I wish more people knew about the actual lived conditions of historical people -- you'd get a lot fewer modern-day people saying "I wish I lived in the past."

Oh, and also: I'm a woman, a Jew, and a divorcée. There's almost no period in history where I'd have the rights I have right now in Canada. But that's a separate rant. :)

[sbadxd]

Yo this video was so good. It made me hopeful for the future. I'm glad this is part of a series. Can't wait for the next episodes!! 🌸🌸

[DampeSN]

A lot of people have imagined what living through the end of the world as we know it would be like. The funny thing is, we are living through it right now. Even _if_ we managed to defeat covid within the next year, our world will never be the same as it was before the pandemic. Even just on the social and medical fronts; the world will never quite go back to how it was. But I mean on a deeper level than that.

Over the last year, I've watched two major changes happen that are going to significantly alter the immediate and long-term future in unpredictable ways. First, I've seen an enormous number of people around me, and others globally, become dramatically more aware of systemic issues in society. These people have become extremely active in trying to change these systems by any means. Secondly, I've seen the growth of a new Lysenkoist style anti-science movement that has absorbed a huge portion of the people that were left behind in that cultural awakening in the US.

Both of these movements have the potential to radically alter the future. On the one hand, finally _accepting_ our past as a species and working to change the course. And on the other hand, threatening to blindly steamroll a highway into our own hell. Probably _neither_ extreme will occur, but _something_ will.

One possible way this could play out is the anti-science folks end up taking over the US while the rest of the world undergoes a new renaissance of egalitarianism and prosperity. And maybe the anti-science folks end up ruining it for everyone, either indirectly through global warming, or directly with bombs. Another possibility is that both groups will, through social media echo chambers, fragment into useless factions and we'll finally fall fully into the corporate dystopia dreamed of in cyberpunk novels - everyone too wrapped up in their own personal fictions to notice reality. And still other futures may end up looking a lot like the world in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - a dying planet long-since abandoned by anyone with the means to do so, and left to rot full of the uneducated and the unwell. So many potential futures, but none of them _anything_ like the world was just a couple years ago.

[craigr.]

truly a profound and much needed presentation on humanity. this is a great start to your series, well done.

[agerardi]

This video is my new favorite video on this channel. I feel like we get so wrapped up in our everyday lives that we don't take a step back and examine how far we've come and the world that we've been building. We don't talk about this enough, and sometimes it can cause people to forget all the successes humanity has had. But it's so good for us to remember all the problems we've managed to solve.

[allanolley]

So I have this article from 1953 in front of me (High Speed Arithmetic: The Digital Computer as Research Tool, in Journal of the Optical Society of America (JOSA) Vol. 43, iss. 4 page 306, by H R J Grosch) where Grosch cites JW Forrester director of the Digital Computer Laboratory at MIT at a talk at the joint meeting on computers of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and Radio Engineers in 1951 entitled "Digital computers: present and future trends" (p. 109 of the Proceedings) said that if we combine the speed, reliability, memory capacity and cost of typical calculating machines (ie computers) into a suitable index that since 1945 this index would have increased year to year by a factor of 10 and showed no sign of slackening.

Grosch estimates that a computer just installed where he worked at GE had 20 000 times the speed, 200 times the memory capacity, 10 times as reliable and half as costly as the Harvard Mark I in 1944. Grosch estimates that the next generation of machines will see a 10 fold increase in memory and that the generation is about 2 or 3 years.

Now Grosch is not talking about storage here but only active memory, still storage had also massively increased in this period with the switch from paper cards and tape to magnet tape and magnet tape was constantly being refined and we have magnetic drums (usually used as memory) and then the disc drives you mention. It seems likely to me that a 1950s commentator would not have found an increase of six orders of magnitude (on the order of a million) over six computer generations (taking the generation as ~3 years), so fantastical.

However I think your point in general still stands in general our predictions about the future is that it will be like the present but more so and that we fail to properly understand how the future will diverge from the past. It is just in the case of the computer industry from the inception of electronic computers with vacuum tubes at the end of WWII and going on through transistors and microchips (Moore's Law) rapid exponential growth has been the constant background and while the full implications of this were hazy and difficult to grapple with the idea that growth would be of that magnitude was not the stumbling block (since the present is one of exponential growth we expect that growth to continue).

On a completely different note, I always remember that archaeologists can often date ancient sites to within a few decades based on the changes in things like the style of pottery decoration and so while progress as we now know it may have been absent or barely perceptible change has been a constant in subtler ways. Likewise while not necessarily undergoing marked improvement the technology and culture of ancient peoples both hunter gather and agriculturalist was often complicated and in some ways well adapted to way of life of those people (so complicated tools and weapons for hunting or the use of the water wheel Mill by ancient Romans and many people in Europe and Asia over subsequent millenia etc.

Anyway a very interesting and tricky topic you have chosen, it is very stimulating though, good luck.

[vivaankhabya]

Pleasantly surprised with the content quality, this was really great! Can’t wait for more videos like this!

[SievertSchreiber]

Wise words! CT certainly knows how to put hard topics into words! ❤️

[TristanSharman]

This reminds me of a quote (I have no idea where from) that our generation "was born to late to explore the world, and born to early to explore the universe". I wonder whether there's FOMO of exploration, as we've finished setting sail to find new lands and have paused exploration in a sense until we develop technology to launch off into space and settle other plants. But both are romanticised - colonialism and sea voyages were fraught and space is a brutal environment for humans (or most of anything else) to try and survive in.
Great vid Travis! Really got me thinking

[geoffbrom]

Loving the line "he would be crazy, and he would be right"