"Oh, but the world's not really changing all that fast..."
No, Dean. The world will be changing all that fast when people stop worrying about risks that might destroy their arms because replacements are cheap, easy, and equivalent.
Technology doesn't change the world when it's a novelty; it changes the world when people start relying on it.
It was Henry Ford who changed the world, not the guy who invented the car.
Mmm-hmm. And so it's 1890 and someone just showed you two working automobiles and some working light bulbs. But you decided at the time there was nothing there that a horse and a gas lamp couldn't do cheaper. It's 1935 and someone just showed you a transistor and you're thinking it's not that big a deal, a good tube can do most of that cheaper.
I mean, seriously, are you not getting this?
These are things that can be done TODAY, RIGHT NOW. Proven, working technology. All that remains now is to make the tech better and cheaper.
Am I the only one who remembers when replacement heart valves, hips, and knees cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and only a small handful of people had them at all, and they didn't work all that well? We're talking less than two decades on all of those. And I haven't even gotten into tooth implants.
Indeed. Or, even more importantly, eye surgery to correct your near/far sightedness and astigmatism. Which, when I was a teenager, was quite exotic and wildly expensive. The hip might have cost a quarter million dollars, and the eye surgery might have been a hundred thousand. Now the hip costs maybe thirty thousand, and you can buy the eye surgery for less than $2,000 per eye.
$2,000 used to be the cost of a good computer. Now a good computer that is ten times more powerful costs perhaps 35% of that.
It's true that govt research provides a useful breaking of the ice, which can hook private enterprise in later when they begin to see possible applications. I agree that this is a necessary precursor to things like commercial spaceflight, bionics, even energy production.
I didn't mean that the world in general hasn't changed, though I do think that only a few technologies have fundamentally changed society. The existence of reliable contraception has fundamentally altered sexual morality (in the sense that it's so thoroughly changed the situation as a great deal of how society was built wrt sexual morality is no longer applicable).
Telephones, email, and blogs have changed society to a great degree regarding how people form and keep friendships, and especially who they are friends with.
Widespread use of cars has probably altered society's structure to reduce the need for cities.
Airplanes, I think, mostly mean that vacations are shorter and perhaps more numerous; I'm not convinced that they have any great societal impact on the nature of life. Most people I know virtually never ride airplanes; the big impact of airplanes to anyone that I know is that people write to each other a little less, and conferences are less local. Some people fly a lot, of course. Some people are catholic priests. That doesn't mean that seminaries directly change the world, or that airplanes have.
I'm not trying to claim that life is just as it was 200 years ago. That would be silly. (Though reading novels from 200 years ago, the creatures in it are still recognizeable as people; life hasn't changed enough to make them alien to us.)
But when you say, "All that remains now is to make the tech better and cheaper," you're saying, "all that remains now is to make the technology generally useful".
Look at maglev trains. Wonderful technology. We're great at doing it. We've been pretty good at doing maglev for a decade or two. There are something like a dozen useful maglev lines in the world.
We've been able to build personal helicopters for 30-40 years (as in, small helicopters for your average Joe to commute to work with, or to go to the mall with). They're still a novelty.
We've been able to go to the moon since 1970. At the current cost and reliability, we've bothered to do it a few times, and then mostly out of habit.
All of life is cost-benefit analyses, Dean. That's why the cost of a technology is exactly as important as its benefits. Not every new technology, however cool, has its cost drop below its benefits.
Hand-held laser guns only need to have the technology get better and cheaper; that's been true for decades, and probably always will (it seems unlikely, given what we current know, that the physics in our universe is configured to allow one to carry large amounts of fast, light-weight energy safely, if you want to be able to get this energy as either light or electricity).
Some technology works out. Some of that really does change the world. Glasses have changed the world. The printing press has changed the world. The world wide web has changed the world.
But technology only changes the world when its costs fall below its benefits. Before that, it's just a cool novelty that sci-fi geeks like us will drool over.
I'm not saying that the world is static. I'm just saying that you're marking the changes with the wrong mile-stones.
I wonder about the composition of the costs. To the extent that the costs are in the actual device, they have the potential to drop sharply with volume. To the extent that they are in the surgical procedue to attach it, not so much--UNLESS the work is done in a low-cost country such as India.
The VA should look seriously at the feasibility of providing these devices for all amputees who are veterans.
The only thing in your entire comment I disagree with, Chris, is that you think I mark change by the wrong milestones. ;-)
The existence of working bionic limbs is not a milestone. It's a symptom of the rapid evolution of technology, and illustrative of the existence of the rapid change that's all around us.
Oh, wait, I have to disagree with you on flying, too. Business travellers have fundamentally altered our economics in ways that we're scarcely aware of but which are quite profound.
And I'd also have to say people write to each other less mostly because of telephones, automobiles, and airplanes, in descending order. It used to be that a friend or family member who lived 20 miles away was someone you saw perhaps once every year or two, if that. In any case it was a special event you treasured.
By the way: like all technology, lasers are getting cheaper and more reliable all the time. See Wicked Lasers.
You're right that bionic limbs are a symptom, but they're a symptom of the rapid progress of the bleeding edge, not useful technology.
The bleeding edge is a curiosity; it's littered with technologies which just need a few improvements to be generally useful, and still need them to this day. The bleeding edge is undeniably cool, but it's interesting to tech geeks, not anthropologists.
Wicked lasers are interesting, and I imagine not all that long away from being banned if their reality lives up to their hype (I followed that add months ago). But they're also quite a long way away from being able to kill several dozen armored people at 100 yards in a dusty environment.
Cars aren't much faster than they've been for 40 years; all technology seems to eventually hit practical limitations past which it doesn't improve. That there are better lasers now than there were a few years ago doesn't mean that we'll eventually have a hand-held laser gun which can blast a 5" hole in 2" thick steel from 100 yards away.
Technology is often held back in its march by physics.
Lasers used to be bleeding edge technology. You certainly couldn't buy one when I was a kid. Now you can buy a perfectly good one for personal use for under $15, and they're used in everyday military applications.
I don't know if we'll ever have laser guns. But we do have lasers.
It's foolish to think that bionic limbs are at the moment merely a curiosity and likely to never be more than that. No, they've now engineered one working arm, then a second that's better than the first. With further work, they will get cheaper all the time. Indeed, just looking at it you can see that the surgery is relatively simple and the tech is otherwise now fairly well understood. I suggest to you that by the 2020s at the latest such replacement limbs will be at least as common as hip replacement surgery is today.
Cars, by the way, reached their useful limit in speed mostly based on what human beings can handle safely. We could make cars go much, much faster--indeed, we've built cars that can break the sound barrier. But there's no point in mass producing such vehicles because they're far too dangerous for people to drive. On the other hand, once most cars are self-driving and no longer under the control of fallible humans, I can easily see cars starting to routinely run several times faster than they do now, because it's safe enough.
It is not necessary to explain to me that some technologies reach their limits. But I really do wish that instead of explaining the obvious (and what you're saying is obvious) you look beyond that at the general growth of tech all around us. What's bleeding edge today will frequently be commonplace tomorrow. I have no doubt that bionic limbs are one of them, for there are millions of people who could benefit from them, and almost all technology that's viable goes through these stages:
1) Extremely expensive, doesn't work very well
2) A little less expensive, works better
3) Not particularly expensive, works better still
4) Cheap. Works extremely well.
Almost any technology you can think of that we see on an everyday basis has followed this path.
Also: while it's true that a particular technology will tend to slow its acceleration at some point, there are some pretty old technologies that are still subject to practical improvement. The railroad, for example, is about two centuries old, but over the next decade you can expect to see the deployment of improvements including:
--hybrid locomotives
--GPS-based train location allowing more traffic on the same line
--electropneumatic brakes, improving both safety and traffic density
--remote-controlled locomotives (already being used by Canadian National in railyards)
As these examples demonstrate, improvements to an older technology often occur by merging it with a newer technology.
GPS-based train location allowing more traffic on the same line
Seems to me like this one should've been in place a couple of years ago. The technology for it all existed then. I'll admit, I didn't think of it, but it's all there. About all that's really needed, I expect, is time to test it, certify it for safety, and roll it out.
"It's foolish to think that bionic limbs are at the moment merely a curiosity and likely to never be more than that."
Whoa. Hold on there. I never said that second part. I hope to God that they progress to a very useful and commonplace technology. They'd dramatically improve the lives of many people.
I've just been excited about way too many cool technologies which never materialized to get excited over technology which isn't currently doable for reasonable cost. That's all.
If this ever gets to the point where it's affordable and convenient (I didn't notice what sort of battery pack this thing needs), I'll thank God for it.
"On the other hand, once most cars are self-driving and no longer under the control of fallible humans, I can easily see cars starting to routinely run several times faster than they do now, because it's safe enough."
Assuming that you're willing to measure your fuel efficiency in gallons to the mile.
(Incidentally, I've been dreaming about and praying for the day when we have autopilot in cars, even just for highway driving. I can wait, since there's nothing else that I can do, but oh man am I looking forward to that day.)
"What's bleeding edge today will frequently be commonplace tomorrow."
Now you're explaining what's obvious to me. But the mere fact that technology generally follows this path doesn't mean that being at step 1 is any reason to start celebrating step 4.
It reminds me a bit of the people who quote Ghandi's "First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win", and start celebrating their victory when people laugh at them.
It would be much more informative to say why you think that this technology is going to become generally viable. To take one simple reason to be suspicious: what's the power source for this thing? A power cord would be too limiting, but batteries are heavy and have a number of other constraints. And battery technology is under extremely heavy development and isn't progressing very fast. (The way that Popular Mechanics explained it, batteries have been very interesting and useful for something like 130 years, and so an awful lot of compounds have already been tried, and there's no low-hanging fruit left.)
I'm not arguing that the world is static, or that technology doesn't progress, or that the we should all be pessimists. Where I disagree with you is that I think that you're going too far in the other direction — that a $4E6 bionic arm which requires surgery that makes some of your muscles useless is a significant improvement over what we had before doesn't mean that it's a good replacement for an arm. The arm described gives rudimentary functionality, which of course is a blessing to people who've lost a limb. But you're as enthusiastic as if the limb would be useful for going on a 5 day rock climbing expedition to your favorite spot in yellowstone national park to play the violin, giving a concert to the birds and the trees, and then rock climbing back.
We're still a very long way away from Handscrafters (Furama reference). Handscrafters will result in a really different world; this sort of bionic arm is just a small step on that path.
I guess in the end, our main difference is that you have a much lower threshold for what "changing the world" consists of.
No, Dean. The world will be changing all that fast when people stop worrying about risks that might destroy their arms because replacements are cheap, easy, and equivalent.
Technology doesn't change the world when it's a novelty; it changes the world when people start relying on it.
It was Henry Ford who changed the world, not the guy who invented the car.
I mean, seriously, are you not getting this?
These are things that can be done TODAY, RIGHT NOW. Proven, working technology. All that remains now is to make the tech better and cheaper.
Am I the only one who remembers when replacement heart valves, hips, and knees cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and only a small handful of people had them at all, and they didn't work all that well? We're talking less than two decades on all of those. And I haven't even gotten into tooth implants.
Indeed. Or, even more importantly, eye surgery to correct your near/far sightedness and astigmatism. Which, when I was a teenager, was quite exotic and wildly expensive. The hip might have cost a quarter million dollars, and the eye surgery might have been a hundred thousand. Now the hip costs maybe thirty thousand, and you can buy the eye surgery for less than $2,000 per eye.
$2,000 used to be the cost of a good computer. Now a good computer that is ten times more powerful costs perhaps 35% of that.
But nothing fundamental has changed.
I didn't mean that the world in general hasn't changed, though I do think that only a few technologies have fundamentally changed society. The existence of reliable contraception has fundamentally altered sexual morality (in the sense that it's so thoroughly changed the situation as a great deal of how society was built wrt sexual morality is no longer applicable).
Telephones, email, and blogs have changed society to a great degree regarding how people form and keep friendships, and especially who they are friends with.
Widespread use of cars has probably altered society's structure to reduce the need for cities.
Airplanes, I think, mostly mean that vacations are shorter and perhaps more numerous; I'm not convinced that they have any great societal impact on the nature of life. Most people I know virtually never ride airplanes; the big impact of airplanes to anyone that I know is that people write to each other a little less, and conferences are less local. Some people fly a lot, of course. Some people are catholic priests. That doesn't mean that seminaries directly change the world, or that airplanes have.
I'm not trying to claim that life is just as it was 200 years ago. That would be silly. (Though reading novels from 200 years ago, the creatures in it are still recognizeable as people; life hasn't changed enough to make them alien to us.)
But when you say, "All that remains now is to make the tech better and cheaper," you're saying, "all that remains now is to make the technology generally useful".
Look at maglev trains. Wonderful technology. We're great at doing it. We've been pretty good at doing maglev for a decade or two. There are something like a dozen useful maglev lines in the world.
We've been able to build personal helicopters for 30-40 years (as in, small helicopters for your average Joe to commute to work with, or to go to the mall with). They're still a novelty.
We've been able to go to the moon since 1970. At the current cost and reliability, we've bothered to do it a few times, and then mostly out of habit.
All of life is cost-benefit analyses, Dean. That's why the cost of a technology is exactly as important as its benefits. Not every new technology, however cool, has its cost drop below its benefits.
Hand-held laser guns only need to have the technology get better and cheaper; that's been true for decades, and probably always will (it seems unlikely, given what we current know, that the physics in our universe is configured to allow one to carry large amounts of fast, light-weight energy safely, if you want to be able to get this energy as either light or electricity).
Some technology works out. Some of that really does change the world. Glasses have changed the world. The printing press has changed the world. The world wide web has changed the world.
But technology only changes the world when its costs fall below its benefits. Before that, it's just a cool novelty that sci-fi geeks like us will drool over.
I'm not saying that the world is static. I'm just saying that you're marking the changes with the wrong mile-stones.
The VA should look seriously at the feasibility of providing these devices for all amputees who are veterans.
The existence of working bionic limbs is not a milestone. It's a symptom of the rapid evolution of technology, and illustrative of the existence of the rapid change that's all around us.
Oh, wait, I have to disagree with you on flying, too. Business travellers have fundamentally altered our economics in ways that we're scarcely aware of but which are quite profound.
And I'd also have to say people write to each other less mostly because of telephones, automobiles, and airplanes, in descending order. It used to be that a friend or family member who lived 20 miles away was someone you saw perhaps once every year or two, if that. In any case it was a special event you treasured.
By the way: like all technology, lasers are getting cheaper and more reliable all the time. See Wicked Lasers.
You're right that bionic limbs are a symptom, but they're a symptom of the rapid progress of the bleeding edge, not useful technology.
The bleeding edge is a curiosity; it's littered with technologies which just need a few improvements to be generally useful, and still need them to this day. The bleeding edge is undeniably cool, but it's interesting to tech geeks, not anthropologists.
Wicked lasers are interesting, and I imagine not all that long away from being banned if their reality lives up to their hype (I followed that add months ago). But they're also quite a long way away from being able to kill several dozen armored people at 100 yards in a dusty environment.
Cars aren't much faster than they've been for 40 years; all technology seems to eventually hit practical limitations past which it doesn't improve. That there are better lasers now than there were a few years ago doesn't mean that we'll eventually have a hand-held laser gun which can blast a 5" hole in 2" thick steel from 100 yards away.
Technology is often held back in its march by physics.
I don't know if we'll ever have laser guns. But we do have lasers.
It's foolish to think that bionic limbs are at the moment merely a curiosity and likely to never be more than that. No, they've now engineered one working arm, then a second that's better than the first. With further work, they will get cheaper all the time. Indeed, just looking at it you can see that the surgery is relatively simple and the tech is otherwise now fairly well understood. I suggest to you that by the 2020s at the latest such replacement limbs will be at least as common as hip replacement surgery is today.
Cars, by the way, reached their useful limit in speed mostly based on what human beings can handle safely. We could make cars go much, much faster--indeed, we've built cars that can break the sound barrier. But there's no point in mass producing such vehicles because they're far too dangerous for people to drive. On the other hand, once most cars are self-driving and no longer under the control of fallible humans, I can easily see cars starting to routinely run several times faster than they do now, because it's safe enough.
It is not necessary to explain to me that some technologies reach their limits. But I really do wish that instead of explaining the obvious (and what you're saying is obvious) you look beyond that at the general growth of tech all around us. What's bleeding edge today will frequently be commonplace tomorrow. I have no doubt that bionic limbs are one of them, for there are millions of people who could benefit from them, and almost all technology that's viable goes through these stages:
1) Extremely expensive, doesn't work very well
2) A little less expensive, works better
3) Not particularly expensive, works better still
4) Cheap. Works extremely well.
Almost any technology you can think of that we see on an everyday basis has followed this path.
--hybrid locomotives
--GPS-based train location allowing more traffic on the same line
--electropneumatic brakes, improving both safety and traffic density
--remote-controlled locomotives (already being used by Canadian National in railyards)
As these examples demonstrate, improvements to an older technology often occur by merging it with a newer technology.
Seems to me like this one should've been in place a couple of years ago. The technology for it all existed then. I'll admit, I didn't think of it, but it's all there. About all that's really needed, I expect, is time to test it, certify it for safety, and roll it out.
Whoa. Hold on there. I never said that second part. I hope to God that they progress to a very useful and commonplace technology. They'd dramatically improve the lives of many people.
I've just been excited about way too many cool technologies which never materialized to get excited over technology which isn't currently doable for reasonable cost. That's all.
If this ever gets to the point where it's affordable and convenient (I didn't notice what sort of battery pack this thing needs), I'll thank God for it.
Assuming that you're willing to measure your fuel efficiency in gallons to the mile.
(Incidentally, I've been dreaming about and praying for the day when we have autopilot in cars, even just for highway driving. I can wait, since there's nothing else that I can do, but oh man am I looking forward to that day.)
Now you're explaining what's obvious to me. But the mere fact that technology generally follows this path doesn't mean that being at step 1 is any reason to start celebrating step 4.
It reminds me a bit of the people who quote Ghandi's "First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win", and start celebrating their victory when people laugh at them.
It would be much more informative to say why you think that this technology is going to become generally viable. To take one simple reason to be suspicious: what's the power source for this thing? A power cord would be too limiting, but batteries are heavy and have a number of other constraints. And battery technology is under extremely heavy development and isn't progressing very fast. (The way that Popular Mechanics explained it, batteries have been very interesting and useful for something like 130 years, and so an awful lot of compounds have already been tried, and there's no low-hanging fruit left.)
I'm not arguing that the world is static, or that technology doesn't progress, or that the we should all be pessimists. Where I disagree with you is that I think that you're going too far in the other direction — that a $4E6 bionic arm which requires surgery that makes some of your muscles useless is a significant improvement over what we had before doesn't mean that it's a good replacement for an arm. The arm described gives rudimentary functionality, which of course is a blessing to people who've lost a limb. But you're as enthusiastic as if the limb would be useful for going on a 5 day rock climbing expedition to your favorite spot in yellowstone national park to play the violin, giving a concert to the birds and the trees, and then rock climbing back.
We're still a very long way away from Handscrafters (Furama reference). Handscrafters will result in a really different world; this sort of bionic arm is just a small step on that path.
I guess in the end, our main difference is that you have a much lower threshold for what "changing the world" consists of.