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by adventured
4696 days ago
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"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. |
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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.