Apart from the aqueduct, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, wine, public baths and public order - the Romans didn’t really do much at all.
Unironically, roman era concrete has been recently re-discovered (as in: understood how to reproduce) and this is very significant because roman-era-style concrete gets stronger with time instead of deteriorating as the regular concrete does.
I think it's less significant than it's often made out to be.
> You may wonder why we don’t use Roman concrete today if that is the case; well, one of the reasons as to why is because, although it gets stronger over time and withstands erosion from water, when this cement is still young and has not had time to develop its strength from seawater, it likely does not have the compressive strength to handle modern use.
Also, Roman concrete didn't contain rebar which is necessary in many modern applications and rebar rusts which reduces the overall lifespan of the structure.
That said, apparently Roman concrete has some potential issues in structures adjacent to bodies of saltwater since the saltwater would accelerate the strengthening process.
As i see it, Romans mainly gave us idea of "rule-based society" on which entire Western world stands. Even as Romans themselves made a joke out of it in their later history. But the idea was so transformative that even subsequent barbarian kings that ravaged Roman Empire after it's downfall, did not seek to formally overthrow it - rather, they pretended (with varying levels of plausibility) to lawfully inherit and rule it, or parts of it.
> As i see it, Romans mainly gave us idea of "rule-based society" on which entire Western world stands.
Rule-based societies predate the Romans by a lot of time ; Romans weren't even that good at it, considering how often violence was used as a political tool during the republic.
The administration and institutions usually survived a lot of political turmoil in Ancient Rome, but yes, compared to more autocratic kingdoms / empires of the time, transfer of power was probably a much more fragile affair (even in the Empire).
Nearly 2 millennia, and it was itself preceded by quite a few centuries by the Code of Ur-Nammu.
That's not to say there's not a grain of truth in this perspective. My impression is that Romans were notable for their pioneering work in the field of what could best be described as "civic pride" - the sense that "civilization" represented progress, the idea of the state as a kind of collective project that elevates everyone and that we should all be proud to participate in. They probably weren't the first to think like this - history is long - but they were the last to do so in a largely secular fashion in the West for a long time, and certainly directly influenced the thoughts of the Enlightenment thinkers who eventually inspired the American Revolution.
The Code of Hammurabi isn't what it seems at first glance. Modern people naïvely read it like a legal code, but that interpretation doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It contains too many inconsistencies to be a practical legal code. One of the more obvious examples is the case of property given to another for safekeeping without a document documenting the arrangement. Is the recipient a thief who should be put to death? Or can the recipient keep the property without consequence because the alleged owner has no proof of anything? Furthermore, records concerning disputes contemporary with the Code of Hammurabi exist. Other than a single reference to a standard wage for weavers on the stele, records do not reference the code. Indeed, legal decisions are often inconsistent with the code.
The Code of Hammurabi is best understood as royal propaganda designed to portray Hammurabi as a just king. The famous stele starts with a graphic depiction of him receiving the royal rod and ring from Shamash, the sun god who was emblematic of truth and justice. The laws are best understood as a statement of the kind of justice Hammurabi wished to see done in his kingdom, not a set of rules.
Code of Hammurabi was created based on a whim of a single person (the namesake) and solely served to simplify administration. He could also always change it at will, or ignore for his own needs.
Rule-based society is something different: when the Law itself has a power of it's own, stronger than power of any individual or group. It was first invented in Rome and provided them tremendous advantage, until started to crumble during the Long 3rd Century Crisis.
Passports are not a good invention. They are a dystopian evil we grew to take for granted and even see as something that exists for our own benefit.
Before WWI there were no passports and no need for them. Those were Good Old Days that are not coming back. It's weird to see some people seeing some kind of benefit in them.
Travel is more free today compared to in the past, at least in for example Europe. You used to need traveling papers from your boss/master/lord granting you specific permission to travel, otherwise you could be arrested. People didn’t trust visitors in general outside of some specific circumstances.
It's not like we would have free roaming in the modern age if passports weren't a thing. People would still face travel restrictions, they'd just be more nonstandard and unpredictable.
Consider how the days before passports also lacked air travel available to the masses. Even cars has only just started to become commonplace.
I don't see how you could possibly have travel that is so cheap, quick, and accessible to such a large population without some way to control who is coming and leaving your country? Especially with how we're quickly making different parts of the planet inhospitable, and given how rapidly populations have risen compared to a century ago.
If only there was a pre-WWI technology that enabled people to travel quickly and comfortably over long distances... Perhaps some sort of wagon on rails :)
The passport is but one piece of the greater system that we have nowadays of international worldwide travel. I can get on a plane and travel pretty much anywhere in the world now, whereas before travel like that was reserved for explorers, missionaries or high ranking dignitaries.
I don't think the passport is an invention itself, so to speak.
I don't think you understand the context. Much before 1920's, you didn't need a document at all to travel anywhere. If you had the resources, you just showed up - go to the border, said hello - and that's it.
Travel like that was never "reserved" for explorers, missionaries or high ranking dignitaries. If you had the money/resources, you could go anywhere.
Now there is a "caste" system of countries that have Visa on Arrival, Free Entry, or Visa required where you have to prove that you are financially capable, or even wanted in the country, or promise not to work or be illegally employed/compensated.
And then that alongside many countries in the developing world that still have undocumented people, no birth certificate, no identification, no tax ID, etc.
How does a country verify someones birth? Especially if someone wasn't born in a hospital? In the west, until 1950's, mostly this was done via church records. Also, are you granted citizenship by birth or only through parents? (Big deal, especially for Puerto Rican births - or countries that don't recognize foreign births in their land, e.g. United Arab Emirates / Saudi Arabia - even Japan or China, where sure you can be born there, but that means absolutely nothing.)
So, no, it isn't really a greater system for international worldwide travel - it is a system of control to ensure someones identity is who they are and that the country they are form atleast certified to some standard that their name, their picture, their birth date, their location of birth are somewhat tangibly real.
And this isn't even getting into information sharing. The above is just a standard, that now is "machine" readable and has an RFID so that collection is more easier for the state.
This simply isn't true outside of a relatively narrow window of time when very few could afford to travel anyway. Go back much past into the 1800s and beyond and you couldn't travel even within your own country without permission. In much of Europe for most of the medieval and early modern era laborers needed traveling papers granting permission just to leave their own village. In general people tended to be suspicious of visitors without a good reason to be there. Being exiled used to be quite a serious punishment.
It is very much true. You are talking about anecdotes of villagers going to neighboring villages which sounds more of being religiously excommunicated than free travel.
Why 1800s? Why not Roman times? All you had to do is state you were a roman citizen, and you could travel - Unimpaired “ Civis Romanus sum”
Borders existed but travel was not impaired, how else do you think trade and commerce worked? Do you think supply chains are a new thing?
It very much sounds like you are conflating serfdom, as an impairment to free travel - it is a different exercise. Because you did have a king, and you were a farmer in that land and in many ways you had lesser rights than a slave.
Trade was heavily restricted, governed, and controlled in the ancient world. Empires were built on collecting transit fees, cities often restricted the entry of sailors aboard merchant ships, and control of rivers and who could use them were dearly held by rulers the world over. There are a number of cities around the world today that started as trading cities, specifically designated places where merchants were allowed to visit to trade but restricted from going anywhere else.
The Roman Empire was a unique example among the thousands of years of history because along with their transportation network of roads they did actually have a couple of passport-like systems in place. Now a third of the people were literally slaves, so they definitely weren't going anywhere without permission, so maybe Rome is not a great starting point for what I presume to be the argument against passports. But the Romans and other Mediterranean civilizations did check your identity when you travelled. Romans had documents they called diplomas for people on official business and several civilizations used clay tablets called tesserae as a sort of ID card, but by far the most common method was simply having known people vouch for you.
Basically nowhere in the ancient world from the Middle East to the pre-colonial Americas could you just show up in a foreign village without people asking questions that you ought better have good answers for. There are a handful of exceptions, but this has never been the norm, and even with passports and visa restrictions it is definitely far easier today than it ever was in the past. I expect it will get easier and easier into the future. Perhaps quite soon in fact as the global population begins to decline and people become more and more valuable.
"Before WWI there were no passports and no need for them."
Passports are much older than that, but in pre-WWI Europe, most countries didn't require them for travel. (Russia and Turkey did.)
Passports certainly do have a dystopian element to them, especially if they are demanded too frequently / aggressively. But on their own, they aren't particularly evil; they just identify you much like your face does.
I got the list from 50 things that made the modern economy. Maybe you’d learn something by listening to the episode on passports - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p052spyb
> Before WWI there were no passports and no need for them.
This combination of ignorance and confidence isn’t a good look.
From Hong Kong, I have a mixed feeling for this. UK made everyone of us to apply for a Hong Kong ID since 50 years ago, but when I come to UK it is way worse because UK doesn’t have a National ID while relying on every private entity to verify your identification.
So unless private collection of personal data is completely illegal, I’d rather have a centralised ID system instead
A minor observation - pretty much all of those describe a type where applicable, except for iPhone. "Smartphone" would have been consistent and more accurate. I don't know if that's a bias or proofreading issue.
It's an interesting and thought-provoking list though.
Yes, I fully understand that but the segment would have existed without them though may have taken a little longer to mature the user experience and ubiquity.
Respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about if you think GPS “isn’t impactful enough”.
Don’t fall into the trap of reacting with “meh” to everything. Maybe you just don’t know? Maybe you don’t realise how much modern life depends on say, the Haeber-Bosch process or the shipping container? “Oh it’s just a metal box”, a person who doesn’t understand it might say.
Is it a black swan though? I can imagine something like GPS was envisioned well before the first satellites were even launched into orbit. Note, I'm not disputing you. This got me thinking about the nature of invention and discovery.
GPS is a pretty cool case. It's not the first navigation system out there, not even close. But the designers did something pretty forward-thinking and a bit risky: they made a big chart of all the different ways to implement GPS. A system where the ground based receivers has to talk back to the satellite. A system where every user needs their own atomic clock. A system where every user needs to communicate with a satellite. A system where every user needs to communicate with a separate ground station. Systems whose accuracy decreased at higher velocities. etc. The final solution was one that required more satellites, but allowed users to determine their own 4D position without needing any outside resources. The only downside was that it required portable atomic clocks, which didn't exist yet.
Not sure if that's black swan territory or not, but IMO it was a great piece of forward-thinking that made GPS useful beyond just the original military applications.
The most amazing thing to me about GPS is that it required compensation for relativistic effects to work. It is as far as I know the most direct impact relativity has on our every day life in a way that just sticking to Newton would have led to the project being abandoned or to the discovery of relativity if Einstein had not given it to us on a platter.
The most interesting thing to me about relativistic corrections for GPS is that we didn't even have to know about or understand relativity in advance in order for GPS to work.
That sounds strange .. but .. there are many small corrections that need to be applied to "straight forward" triangulated fixing off of moving monuments (term from surveying), relativitic time shift being just one.
There are several recent HN threads about Kalman filters [e].
It's possible (and more or less roughly what already happens) to record GPS fixes against a fixed master station and compute the time series error twixt the naive computation and known location (or, indeed, mesh of locations across (say) Australia) and generate a Kalman filter to correct and return more precise positions for moving recievers in the mesh area.
Had we not been aware of relativity we very likely would have discovered it via the time slip 'error' terms in the correction filter.
In a similar manner we have improved our understanding for atmospheric wobble, continental drip [1], and other fine effects.
No. You're correct. GPS is the culmination of 50 years of work in radionavigation, and it wasn't the first satellite navigation system either.
As so often, the refinement of the technique makes it so widely available and effective that, without being revolutionary in principle, it becomes revolutionary in effect.
Telecommunications is like that. A century ago a telex from Australia to England could make it from desk to desk in under an hour. The Internet is not revolutionary in that sense. And yet it is revolutionary anyway.
> I can imagine something like GPS was envisioned well before the first satellites were even launched into orbit.
I don’t know about that. Maybe it was. What I do know is that we have documented speculation about satelite based navigation the days right after the launch of Sputnik.
American scientist figured out the orbit of Sputnik independently from the Russians by measuring the dopler shift of the radio transmission with their radios. Then knowing where their radio is located they used an iterative optimisation process to identify the orbital parameters of the satelite. Immediately there they were talking about how if the orbit of the satelite were known they could use the same process backwards to fix their location. That was 21 years before the launch of the first GPS satelite.
Now, that is not exactly how GPS signals work, and with good reasons. But it is the first documented seed of the idea of satelite based navigation that I am aware of.
> Respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about if you think GPS “isn’t impactful enough”.
How informative of you.
GPS does things better but we can do generally the same things without it.
Don't think about what would happen if we ripped out all GPS functionality overnight, think about what would happen if we had a decade to implement replacements.
The loss of accuracy wouldn't be that important.
> the Haeber-Bosch proces
That one's pretty great, it's probably worth including.
> or the shipping container? “Oh it’s just a metal box”, a person who doesn’t understand it might say.
Hmm, focus on cargo ships and you can see a pretty rapid revolution, but in a wider lens maybe it was more of a broad evolution. I'm not sure.
But my point was that the list was too long, not that it didn't have any valid examples.
It goes in depth on the introduction of the shipping container and how revolutionary it was. There was also a fair bit of legal wrangling to make it possible as well.
> And things like clocks and batteries were slowly refined over many, many years, so they don't fit either.
Everything started with a thought, or a discovery. What happens after is irrelevant. The event, that kicks off Dramatic Change(tm), is at the start.
> That's just a list of good inventions.
No. It isn't just a list of good inventions. Ignoring that it's not all inventions, you seem to lack the understanding of the impact. For example:
> Antibiotics
A discovery. It literally changed how humanity moves forward. One of the whitest swan moments in human history.
> public key cryptography
It took until 1975 for someone to figure this out and it changed how we exchange information, legitimize ourselves and deal with our privacy.
> contraceptive pill
The invention of the pill was an event that had massive impact on how Humanity moved forward.
> printing press
The invention of mass production of books lead to the first information explosion, dramatically changing humanity's future.
What you're doing here is mixing your ignorance of the impactfullness of some of the things on the list, with your own personal idea of what's "great", or however you want to call it.
Even if I agree that not everything on that list is equally meaningfull in terms of impact, some of them are really fucking high up the ladder, just like room temperature superconductors.
> It took until 1975 for someone to figure this out
Sketched out in 1874 as a concept by Jevons, firmed up (sans implementation) in 1970, first implemented in 1973 (classified for nigh on 30 years by the UK Govt).
First public example (of a different schema) was 1976.
Other examples worked out in 1974, not published until 1978. etc.
I have no great quibble here, 1975 is a good approximate ballpark figure but I wasn't sure which scheme you had in mind as it's almost the only year in the 1970s that nothing particularly significant happened in public key crypto.
> Everything started with a thought, or a discovery. What happens after is irrelevant. The event, that kicks off Dramatic Change(tm), is at the start.
Clocks did not have an event that kicks off a dramatic change. We've had them for thousands of years. I don't see how anyone could disagree with that.
I could see disagreement about batteries, but even then I feel like they were quite marginal for quite a while. A slow buildup is not a "black swan but good". There needs to be quite a lot of suddenness to it all.
And I didn't even mention the ones in the rest of your post so I don't want to argue those.
If you talked about all those because I said "list of good inventions", let me clarify. It's a list of "good or better inventions", mixing ones that qualify as 'black swan but good" with ones that don't.
The conversation is about "black swan but good" events and white is often used as short hand for good as opposed to black being used as short hand for something bad. It's pretty obvious what he means (even if "white swan" is most commonly used to refer to predictable major events and the term "black swan" not being limited to unfavourable events) so I'm guessing you're just being mean for no reason.
I am wondering though what exactly you think "black swan event" means and why you think that since your post here makes it rather clear you don't understand what the term refers to or where it comes from either.
Black swans are not at all rare and a "black swan event" is not called that because of the rarity of black swans. It's called that because "black swan" was at one time used to refer to non-existent or impossible things in Europe then when Australia was discovered they found out black swans are actually extremely common, a very improbable event given the data available beforehand. It's the discovery of black swans that was unlikely, not black swans, and it's the unexpectedness of their discovery that is relevant to the "black swan" metaphor. [1]
If black swans were rare seeing one would not be a "black swan event" because it would be possible to predict that one could be seen, just not very often, thus not having the required characteristic of being unpredictable beforehand. So yes, despite their post being easily understandable, the person you responded to did use "white swan" incorrectly, but your correction is just plain wrong as well.
Please if you are going to be pedantic try to also actually be correct on what you're being a jerk about first.
I wonder if the lead acid battery or the lithium battery would be more appropriate to put on the list.
Lead acid got us from, what 1940 to 2005? Something like that? But the utility of Lithium Batteries has blown what was already a gigantic market even wider open.
Those who disagree likely never had to calculate their position on the globe measuring stars or desperately tried to compare geographical reference points in a map to the terrain I front of them.
Military without GPS would be blocked. Try navigating in jungle environments where everything is green and looks the same. I've experienced both with GPS and without, that was one heck of a game changer.
I think people are missing a huge impact that GPS has beyond positioning. GPS transmits timing signals. Those timing signals are used in industries throughout the world to sync transactions. Without which, you are left to syncing via potentially untrusted clocks. Finance [1] is a huge example of the ubiquity of adoption of GPS timing.
ATMs may be designed to use super precise timstamps, but they don't need to be. At all.
The interesting timing constraints are between stock exchanges... but in those situations the speed of light is a bigger factor than clock drift, even if you're just using NTP, and you can't avoid speed of light delays/desyncs.
Good point of view. From an ATM point of view, there is no need to rush other than verifying the user authenticity and available funds. Any double/triple/quadruple requests to withdraw funds within a short amount of time can be delayed since they would likely indicate malicious actors.
For stock exchanges you are absolutely correct. I remember many years ago paying so much extra for the fastest internet access and sub-second delay access to our local stock exchange. Even so it was still slower (lag) when compared to those with offices placed very close to the stock exchange building/infrastruture at that time.
Looking at that list, I feel like we would first have to establish which things actually do make life better and which only make it more comfortable. This is going to be highly subjective.
For some reason, I'm not entirely willing to believe that my parents (who are still alive) had a less happy life than I have even though they didn't grow up with an iPhone. And it's not like modern conveniences have no downsides (e.g. increase in stress). That's not to say I would give up on these things readily, I'm just way too used to them.
I think probably most people could agree that treatments for diseases that regularly also affect young / middle-aged peolle are a good thing. It's hard to argue that someone in the prime of their life should die of some silly infection.
Language, standards, the internet, agriculture, glass, sunscreen, resilient rice, sterilization, human flight, spontaneous development of sentient life in the universe…
When you think about it all, you start to appreciate how miraculous things actually are.
Does language really count? It emerged as noises and refined over the years. It's not something anyone invented, or even discovered. It simply came to be all by itself, until humanity reached a point where it could be formalized/standardized (idk the proper term, I'm sure you get what I mean).
Regardless ... people's ignorance is showing. Too many never think about the fact that people just 200-100 years ago would have considered modern technology magic.
Imagine showing off to one of these people:
Omfg you're speaking into a flat rectangle!
Omfg it speaks back!
Omfg it shows pictures!
Omfg that box speaks!
Omfg that box speaks and shows people!
O M F G YOU GUYS FLY EVERY DAY???
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, SYPHILIS ISN'T AN ISSUE ANYMORE??? AND THERE'S A PILL PREVENTING PREGNANCY ???????????
Similar to language, money, which Nick Szabo—the person who first conceptualized a decentralized blockchain—speculates may have increased the carrying capacity of the environment ten fold and allowed humans to outcompete Neanderthals.
I don't understand why passports would be a good swan invention. Are we happy about having less freedom? I can't just cross USA to Mexico, I need to be identifiable. Governments could screw me up if they wanted to and the passport is only helping them.
I thought the same when I was listening to the podcast! Interchangeable parts especially! They’re so impactful, but they’re taken for granted outside of this podcast and Civ.
Unless it's too comment on 'throwaway mentality', modern consumerism, etc., the book meaning 'made the modern economy' more literally/broadly than you're referencing it for here?
As referenced by GP - it's a list of inventions from the podcast '50 Things That Made the Modern Economy.' [0]
The first series is my favorite podcast of all time. They're short (~8 minutes, iirc) but pack a lot of interesting info in each episode. In particular, they explore some of the second-order effects of each invention.
The disposable razor might not be a true 'black swan' like the transistor or LK-99, but some of the background and influence around the invention might surprise you! I recommend checking it out. [1]
In the grand tradition of podcasts being a single wikipedia page stretched out to an hour long podcast (which is freaking 90% of "tech" podcasts), this one is apparently an hour long podcast from reading the tech tree of Sid Meier's Civilization.
Penicillin has gotta be on that list. Just randomly happened to culture on a Petri dish left out on vacation, happened to be the worlds first antibiotic
I can't imagine what it must have been like for people to hear about yet another "miracle drug" that cures most diseases – and then gradually realize that this one actually works.
Ha, true! I forgot that used to not be a thing, and people were trying everything from crushed beetles to insanely hot chili peppers to crazy dangerous poisons, and still nothing really worked.
It wasn't. "Stuff that kills bacteria" has been known for a long time, including times when nobody knew what bacteria were. Not every dirty wound was fatal, there's mixes of plants, applied to wounds, that do a good job.
Penicillin was the first highly effective AND mass producible antibiotic, though.
While true, actually applying it in practice took a long time. Imagine the shock and horror when male doctors were told by midwives that washing hands and keeping things clean reduced infant mortality.
Capitalism also didn't build indoor plumbing though.
Or let me put it a different way: do you think the USSR did not have an industrial base?
And who do you think paid for the construction of the municipal sewer systems in American cities? Like in Chicago where the whole city was raised 4 ft to accomplish it[1].
I can throw a dart on an italian map and the nearby houses will have indoor plumbing if there's some resident. can you do the same in russia today?
> And who do you think paid
state resources are always a fraction of the gdp trough whatever form of taxation. larger industrial base means proportional less burden on the society. that is why for example urss imploded, taxation was too high and spent too wastefully on military budget to be sustainable long term, while usa could spend that money on the defense budget, infrastructure, et etc, while still being sutainable from the economy, because the industrial base was so much larger.
Sewage systems are a requirement for properly factory farming the humans. You could do it without it to some extend but if the human laborer is to be specialized into a somewhat sharper tool it is rather inefficient to have them randomly die from diseases. Sewage systems are what allows cramping them together much tighter.
Therefore we have sewage systems thanks to capitalism as much as we have cold winters thanks to chimneys.
Hey, you're free to go live in the bush and die from sickness if that's your prerogative, capitalism doesn't prevent you from doing that or a myriad of other things (apart from externalities).
In fact it's one of the most voluntary systems of organization that are known to man (assuming a government that protects individual rights), unlike other systems which are fundamentally based on coercion and/or, as you alluded to, did not lead to much progress in bettering the human condition.
It is all the same sir. Last I checked we had registered owners for each cm of the world. Like a game of monopoly where one player gets all the streets and all the money and the other player starts with nothing. Perhaps it is still the most voluntary, it's still a strange word to describe it. It is just more coercion, more of the same.
More funny, if the species (in the long run) wants to survive this wild ride though space on this ball of mud coercion is the only possible answer. I'm trying to doubt it as hard as I can but wanting something to be true doesn't usually make it so.
> Last I checked we had registered owners for each cm of the world.
It's not very different from a world where there aren't registered owners, if you think about it.
Even in complete anarchy, in the best case scenario most people would want the world to function in a similar way, using similar mechanisms. Except that people that couldn't defend themselves or have enough social capital would be even less protected.
So perhaps you wouldn't have an official "registry", but everyone would know which parts of the territory "belongs" to whom anyway. In the worst case, it would lead to a lot more territorial conflict.
Or you could have a government enforcing equal amounts of land for every person, but this would be extremely wasteful for many reasons.
Capitalism is what allows you to globally allocate land in the most efficient way that we know of, just like any other limited resource.
> Like a game of monopoly where one player gets all the streets and all the money and the other player starts with nothing.
Capitalism allows for social / class mobility without coercion. In fact, it's the only system that directly rewards you with upwards social / class mobility in proportion to how much you are helping other humans.
> It is just more coercion, more of the same.
> More funny, if the species (in the long run) wants to survive this wild ride though space on this ball of mud coercion is the only possible answer. I'm trying to doubt it as hard as I can but wanting something to be true doesn't usually make it so.
What are you being coerced into?
Helping other people so that other people also help you getting food cheaply and conveniently so that you don't die, as well as thousands of other goods and services that even the most powerful king of a thousand years ago could not even dream of having?
You don't even have to do that, you could grow your own food and just don't go to the supermarket if you think you are up for it.
Although yes, you would need to get access to some exclusive parcel of land, just like in any alternative system. Most people would not be very happy if you go plant things in their front yard without their permission, no matter which system you live under.
they make available the capital for innovation, their investment in the most lucrative markets is propelling research to heights that state planned investment can only envy from the sidelines, and the availability of concentrated capital allows for production methods that are unavailable to distributed means of produciton, so much that the production output for bleeding edge technology is absolutely overwhelming even when distributed or stated owner proprietorship had a head start in research, see for example radar "stealth" technology originating in russia in the 60s.
so Haber-Bosch which is very energy intensive, fueled by fossil fuels. So in a way, the fossil fuel supply chain over the last century is another black swan (it wasn't a singular moment, but a systemic shift and adoption).
If we developed the will to sustainably mitigate its toxic by-products including plastic, that would be another nice black-swan for the future. Though it also won't be singular moment but a systemic change that is hard to notice.
A good one would be "productive AI." People forget, but a short while ago, AI was treated as something where being actually useful was perpetually 20 years away, and the real-world status of it was exemplified by a chatbot like Eliza.
More seriously AI has made lots of things better, it’s really the hype cycle that’s disappointing. More FPS in games just isn’t as exciting as self driving cars. But by the time you can buy a level 5 self driving car the technology will be pedestrian.
When COVID hit, my American Airlines flight got canceled and when I went online to ask about getting credit, I got connected to a bot. When I asked to be connected to a real person instead of a bot, the person came online and said: "My name is Eliza. How can I help you today?" At this point, I was very skeptical, but she was indeed a person.
If a city banned all manually driven cars and allowed only self driving cars, the number of car-related deaths would drop to almost nothing. Goods could also be transported more efficiently. The technology to achive this exists right now, L5 or not. The only thing stopping citites from doing this is the cost that inhabitants will have in connection with selling or switching our their car. And all the complaining. But lives would be saved, and the city would be safer and more efficient.
Cities will not need to do that. In Europe they are gradually banning cars as a whole from city centers an you are right, it saves lives. And it also makes those cities more livable.
When I say gradually, it's an euphemism, it's an _extremely_ slow process, but it's the global tendency here.
They aren't banning cars. They're requiring special permits. That's a difference. In effect, they're banning cars for the masses and keep them for a small group (the wealthy, all sorts of delivery drivers, officials).
* making pedestrian zones (i.e. banning)
* deny access to certain types / times (no vans, no old cars, etc.. i.e. also banning)
* reducing roads (i.e. 2 > 1 lane, thus reducing attractivity)
* raising driving prices (the congestion / air quality certificates you mention)
* reducing access to parking (remove places, make them more expensive, etc)
.. all the while increasing alternatives (i.e. use those reduced lanes for bikes)
In addition to this, Cities are more open to changing which rules cars should follow. The effects of climate change are more visible, and the effects of polluted air are better known.
Cruise is currently operating self-driving "taxi" service between the hours of 9pm and 5:30 am throughout the city to members of the general public who've waited on the wait-list. Waymo is too, in Phoenix, and supposedly SF too, but I don't know anybody personally of the general public in SF that has ridden one.
Creating a self driving car which can navigate a dark, rainy parking lot is something we do not know how. Not even in theory. You can't just throw more compute at it. You can't go from a Vickers Type 464 bomb -- one of the most complex bombs in WW II -- to the "Little Boy" by just putting more explosives in there.
> Creating a self driving car which can navigate a dark, rainy parking lot is something we do not know how. Not even in theory.
I do not recognise the reality you are in.
Navigating dark and rainy parking lots is not hard. At all. Not hard in theory, and not hard in practice either.
We have lidars which work very well in rain. We have cameras with excellent dynamic range. Parking lots are slow environments where everyone moves slowly and you are generally allowed to stop if you are suddenly spooked or need a bit more time to check things.
There are hard problems about self driving cars, but dark and rainy parking lots are not the stumbling block.
Where do you even get this idea?
Let me tell you two harder things about self driving cars: "How many nines do you want in your certainty that the car won't hit anyone?" and "How do you want that proven? With stats or with fault tree analysis, or a mix of both?"
Level 5 driving just means it can drive a child or blind person around who can’t take over in an emergency. That’s the difference between Little Boy and a Moab.
However current level 5 cars aren’t something a consumer would buy. A car that refuses to drive in 99% of situations isn’t marketable. The minimum threshold for that might be a car that can only drive in Hawaii, not a large enough market to pay for R&D, but still plenty use for a blind person living in the area.
Level 4 is steering wheel mandatory. Level 5 is steering wheel optional.
Geofencing is part of the criteria, but a car that can only drive in the USA but can’t drive in Europe still qualifies as level 5.
Similarly a car that refuses to drive in a blizzard but can do everything else is level 5. Being able to drive at night or moderate rain is mandatory however.
That said, there is plenty of slightly different definitions thrown about. I am sure someone is going to argue a car needs to be able to drive in any country to qualify etc etc.
Edit: To be clear existing self driving taxi services aren’t level 5 services with existing restrictions, but the car is physically capable of much more than it’s being used for. It can operate at night and in the rain etc they are however being extremely cautious.
Steering wheel doesn't matter, despite the cute mnemonic.
Level 4 cars need a steering wheel to be generally useful. But a limited vehicle like a taxi doesn't need a wheel, no matter whether it's 4 or 5.
I agree with the rest of what you said. Geofencing entire continents isn't about driving ability, and blizzards are an acceptable human-level restriction.
“For vehicles designed to be solely operated by an ADS, manually operated driving controls are logically unnecessary.29 To account for this, the NPRM proposed a regulatory scheme in which the affected standards would not assume that a vehicle will always have a driver’s seat, a steering wheel and accompanying steering column, or just one front outboard passenger seating position.”
They are apparently allowing level 4 Taxi to be considered full ADS even if they have additional “Stowed controls” options.
These levels come from the US’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration formal definition in 2013. It’s been updated a few times since then with SAE introducing an extra level in 2014, but the point was really a formal definition for regulation.
When AI was 20 years away, people seemed more optimistic about it than now when its inevitable transformative societal impact is seemingly right around the corner, are you sure this is the kind of example they were going for?
Which actually highlights a problem in our society that we have to work to be able to afford living instead of living to be able to work on something more meaningful than earning money.
I think your point only demonstrates that useful AI was not something we could arrive at quickly like we thought we could, but rather over decades in a much more gradual process which slowly got people accustomed to its capabilities.
Even then, when ChatGPT came out it was a pretty big deal, due to the surprisingly sudden jump in capabilities, at least from the point of view of someone who didn't work in AI and didn't closely watch its progress.
According to Wikipedia, it was "the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users" (in ~2 months).
Because AI is a tool of corporations. Corporations that already show a massive indifference/hostility to "customer service". Corporations that reduce you to data points, that treat regulation with open disdain (see: Uber), corporations that built perpetual private surveillance empires (and therefore the actual state has a turnkey infrastructure for total information awareness).
THESE are the companies wielding AI, but this time without nary a "do no evil" in their ethos, long expunged. They are wielding AI with dystopian surveillance and the inputs.
In the era where the Supreme Court has declared them immortal citizens with allegedly the same rights as a real human, except they can't be killed, they can't be imprisoned, they can hop jurisdictions with the filing of a document. They operate under citizens United so there are no limits to their influence on elections and politicians. They can "bribe" with speaking/speech fees. They gain tax breaks that a "real" human can't possibly imagine.
Do you trust Google, especially these days? Do you trust Microsoft, unrepentant sociopathic MBA monopolizers galore? Do you trust Amazon who reduce humans to robots, with the outright stated goal of replacing them someday and churn through human resources at rates that make the Soviet Army in WWII blush?
If a firearm is just a tool and its danger depends on the owner, who is brandishing AI-the-tool?
It's perhaps not as life-changing as some of the sibling replies but one thing that has really amazed me over the past few decades is how much lighting has progressed.
When I was a kid in the 90's I already enjoyed electricity and electronics and I would play with those low power incandescent lightbulbs powered by 9V batteries. They would generate a lot of heat and very little light, to the point that it wasn't easy to tell if it was on when the sun was bright.
With a modern LED and the same setup you could generate enough light to blind yourself.
I like to point this out in relation to Star Trek. In TNG, they had tablet computers, replicators, teleportation, voice command, all these things that we consider future magic or current awesome technology. And then an away team goes down to the surface and pulls out a flashlight using an incandescent bulb that can barely be seen.
LEDs are genuinely revolutionary in a way everyone just kind of overlooks.
Fair point, I felt most people would have their own list. Powered flight, semiconductors, commercially competitive solar cells, antibiotics, sterile procedure. Etc.
Democratization of the free internet, a more informed populace through free education, a generation of coders and computer adepts, robust journalism and investigation, a space that incentivizes knowledge rather than capital or status, society about the exchange of important ideas rather than flippant goods, ad infinitum
Ukraine isn't a major power, and the fact that they've been able to hold back Russia so effectively, with so few resources, is mainly an indicator of how weak Russia is these days.
There's been plenty of war, and it could well be the first step on a path to the end of life on earth. I imagine this belief stems from all the "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary/good" propaganda.
The problem with game theory is that the actors do act rationally, and the most rational scenario is still the doomsday genocide: first strike, with a submarine counterstrike.
Full scale war between Russia and Ukraine (with help of NATO) progressing right now with constant threats to use nuclear weapons or blow up a nuclear power station.
Although I'm pretty sure there are plenty that many people can think of, so it doesn't really detract much from your point.