Comment on Existing Absurd Technologies

Tue, 31 May 2011 15:57:56 GMT

Hmm, that just isn't true. There isn't a perfect match (indoor plumbing is low-tech with big benefits, I've seen really cool tech that's useless out of tiny niches), but there's a correlation (like, I could name five laser-based things you've used this week). There have been huge social changes (farming, literacy, urbanization, medicine, electric lighting, the Internet) due to technology.

They have more of a point about time scales. "Technology improves too slowly for us to benefit." But that's not so true since the industrial revolution, and completely false now.

If the Internet hasn't changed their lives (it sure changed mine), and neither have cell phones or cheap TV or recent medical advances or new kinds of jobs or satellite TV that reports on revolutions in nearby countries, then at least they could have noticed that as it accelerates so does social change (you mean they don't marry two black genderqueer atheists, either?).

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