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by saurik 1213 days ago
That phrase is important because otherwise it wouldn't be there: it is load-bearing in that quotation.

All of the things you mentioned seem like the kind of incremental improvements you get over an additional hundred years of iteration and improvement... but I think it is non-sensical to try to sell that refinement as as impressive as the burst of improvement and innovation you saw as cars were first being defined.

In practice, I think a lot of people want every individual thing we do to follow some kind of exponential or even linear growth curve, but it seems much more likely that everything follows a sigmoid curve: an S-shapes trajectory wherein after a period of slow improvements the actual meat of a particular innovation are really experienced during a much faster and almost explosive growth followed by a return to slow incremental improvements to wring out the last benefits (but never just becomes fully flat).

The reason why, on a whole, we see such great improvements in our lives is then because of the combination of numerous S curves from new paradigms that overtake the old and provide an illusion of smooth and continual progress.

Like, I do think the premise of "tech progress" slowing down is strange: in the past few years alone we've seen disruptive "radical" paradigm shifts occurring that have altered how people live their lives to a pretty radical extent--though if you wanted to discount anything that was catalyzed by political and medical crises I might be forced to cede my stance? like, looking back in 40 years, this might all look incremental as I guess a lot of it is still speculative--but banal things like word processors or even laptops, we're clearly pretty far past the growth phase of the S-curve, and so all the things we already have aren't really improving much anymore and likely never will.

1 comments

> In practice, I think a lot of people want every individual thing we do to follow some kind of exponential or even linear growth curve,

Greed.

The stakeholders just want more.