[dredmorbius]

I enjoy having a search engine in my pocket (though I'd prefer if it weren't Google), and the ability to haul a stack of 600 and counting articles, and a few score books, while nary putting a crease in my chinos.

But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable.

If you were to look at the inventions and advances of the last quarter of the 19th and first quart of the 20th centuries, I suspect you'd find a few more significant items than smartphones: electric light, telephones, phonographs, radio, television (just under the wire), indoor plumbing (made possible by central heating, so your pipes wouldn't freeze), air conditioning, and even the first practical computers. Oh, and airplanes.

If you had the choice of technology since 1925 or before, I think you'd go with the latter choice.

[jamesrcole]

> But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable.

Convenience is a big deal. There were books before the printing press (and if you want to argue that they weren't like printed books, then you're invalidating the premise of your argument that the books, telephones of a century ago are like the smartphone ones we have today), and all the printing press did was add a certain degree of convenience in their production, dissemination - and this was a big deal.

[toyg]

> Just ... not as distributed, or portable.

... or cheap. The greatest inventions of the XX century are the mass-market and the mass-democracy.

[jfb]

Sulfa drugs.

[adventured]

"But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable."

Or as fast, or as comprehensive, or as cheap per unit of accessible data, or as connected, or as quick to improve and update, or as multi-functional, or as useful, and so on.

It's the difference between having "food" as a barbarian in 10,000 BC and having an integrated and highly advanced system of feeding an entire civilization of 300 million people. That is to say, the difference between night and day.

[dredmorbius]

What had a bigger impact on the availability of information? The laptop / tablet and Google, or Gutenberg's press?

Prior to Gutenberg, if you wanted a copy of something, it had to be copied out by hand (often with errors introduced). Copies of a great book might be numbered in the double digits. Newspapers didn't exist. Few people were literate, let alone possessed a library. By the 19th century you had penny dreadfuls, mass-market novels, and literacy rates in some countries approaching 100% (Sweden, Finland, and Estonia in particular -- England as late as 1843 had a literacy rate of 67% among men and around 55% for women).

The marginal benefit of additional technology, as with all marginal returns with stunningly few exceptions (Moore's law chief among them) is increasingly low, while the costs of its discovery increases in real energy terms.