(This post was inspired by George Foreman, who passed away March 21, 2025, at the age of 76.)
About 10 years ago I asked my class
What is the best invention or tech advance of the last 50 years?
Here are the answers I got NOT ranked.
1) The internet. We can look things up so easily! (see my post on one aspect of this here). Young people reading this blog have no idea what the world was like before the internet. Here is a short story that shows how much has changed.
At MIT in 1982 I saw Anil Nerode give a great talk about Recursive Mathematics: using recursion theory to show that some theorems whose proofs were not effective could not be made effective (e.g., there is a computable 2-coloring of pairs of naturals with no decidable infinite homogeneous set, so the proof of Ramsey theory on \(K_N\) has to be non-effective). The talk got me interested in the topic, so that day I went to the math library (ask your grandparents what a library is) and found the paper journals that had some of the articles he talked about (Journals used to be on paper? See my post here about that.) I then copied the articles on the copy machine (ask your grandparents what a copy machine is) and read them. A few years later Anil Nerode asked me to write a survey of recursive combinatorics for a collection of articles in recursive mathematics. He was one of the editors of a joint America/USSR project (ask your parents what the USSR was) which I was happy to do. The book was delayed when the USSR fell apart (ask your parents about that important historical era), but was eventually published. The survey is 131 pages and is here. The book, Handbook of Recursive Mathematics, is in two volumes. Its available on Amazon Volume 1 and Volume 2. I've also sometimes seen it available for free download though I don't know if it really is or if thats some kind of scam (if your grandparents try to download it warn them that it might be a scam).
2) Advances in medicine. You can have an operation and be home that night (this is partially medical advances and partially the insurance companies forcing you to have short stays). I asked the question pre-COVID. If I asked it again, I may have some people saying vaccines.
3) VCR/DVD/DVR/Streaming so we have a lot more control over our entertainment (Is this really on a par with medical advances? Yes- you can watch TV of your choice while you recover.)
4) Easy Pass for Toll Booths. The students said that it was always a pain having to bring change to toss into a basket at the toll booth. And sometimes they missed.
5) The George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine. The student really liked using it and said that burgers were tastier and healthier. I asked him if he really thought George Foreman got to be the heavyweight champion of the world (twice!) because of the grill. He didn't know George Foreman had been a boxer, he thought that George Foreman was a pitchman. Which is true but inomplete. Whether he is a pitchman or a boxer or an ex-boxer, does he really know enough about healthy eating so that you should take his advice? Note also that he has a financial incentive to believe that the grill produces tasty and healthy food. See here for a blog post on the illogic of advertising.
6) The Cell phone. It would be rude to, at a party, go into a corner and read a newspaper. But it is socially acceptable to go into a corner and read the news (or anything else) on your phone. I discussed this, though about laptops, as part of a post here. On the one hand, maybe it was good to be forced to talk to people. On the other hand, I can check my mail without being at home or the office!
7) THE CELL PHONE!!!!!! See Lance's post here.
8) Caller ID. The Cell Phone makes it possible to call anyone, anytime. Caller ID makes it possible to avoid talking to anyone, anytime. Symmetry!
9) ChatGPT was not on the list 10 years ago but might be now. And other AI things will be also.
But for now I ask: What do YOU think were the greatest tech advances of the last 50 years? If you prefer thinking on a full stomach then grill some burgers and eat them before answering.
BILL to LANCE: Anything you want to add?
LANCE:
9) GPS - First launched in 1978 and now you never get lost, even at sea.
BILL: Some people trust their GPS to much, see here, though I think these stories happen less and less over time.
10) CNN - Watching wars play out in real time was a game changer.
BILL comment on CNN: In 1991 I was on a cruise. In the time I was gone there was an attempted coup against Gorbachev. I didn't hear anything about it until the cruise was over. CNN existed but it was not-a-thing to have it wherever you go. The next time I went on a cruise was 2022. While on that cruise, Gorbachev died and I heard about it right away. Two points here:(a) How fast we got news anytime-anywhere has changed a lot, and (b) For the sake of the Gorbachev family I should stop going on cruises.
11) Cloud Computing - Enabled small startups to do big things.
BILL Sometimes very small, like one person. New word: Solopreneur
Navigational aids (Waze) have caused people to lose their ability to navigate on their own. Will LLMs (Chat-GPT) cause people to lose their ability to string sentences or complete arguments on their own?
ReplyDelete1) Surely yes, (2) in both cases is this a bad thing? People are losing the ability to do arithmetic in their head since we all have calculators, but I am not sure this is a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteI have verified that the Handbook of Recursive Mathematics can be downloaded for free, this is not a scam. Both volumes are available.
ReplyDeleteNote: there may also be scams involving this book, in addition to the actual download options. Warn your grandparents accordingly.
great- email me the link and I will put it into the post and/or leave a comment with the link.
DeleteI always thought George Foreman Grills were spherical and coal powered. But no, they are just leaky waffle irons.
ReplyDeleteOn technology i vote for video games. Back in the days children had to be outside and destroy agricultural land, but since they are inside, farm productivity has skyrocketed.
5r it might be radioactive seedling mutation and slow release fertilizer technology.
Not necessarily the best, but I'd put car safety features on the list: blind spot detection, radar cruise control, pedestrian/collision detection, lane departure warning, automatic high beams.
ReplyDeleteYou left out smart (non-skid) braking. People are good at recognizing that there's a problem, but we stomp the brakes in proportion to the nastiness of the problem, which means low-tech brakes fail to brake when they're needed the most.
DeleteI vote for the post-2005 or so superscaler pipelined single-chip CPUs as the best invention of the last 50 years.
ReplyDeleteFrom 1980 to 2000, computer designers just let Moore's Law and the associated faster clocks that we got in that part of the Moore's Law curve allow us to get peecees that were twice as fast every two years for 20 years. MHz became GHz. YAY!!!!! We got a factor of 1000 speedup in our computers for free. YAY!!!
But since then, Moore's Law doesn't give us clock speed improvements any more, so the CPU designers have had to bust their butts with insanely fancy superscaler/pipelined architectures, multi-level caches, and memory systems with insane burst rates.
So hooray for Intel and Apple (M series) and even ARM (Snapdragon (or is that someone other than ARM? Whatever)) for stepping up and busting their bust. Sure, it's only 30% or so every few years, but at least it's something.
Really. Those blokes are making peecees still be fun for us computer nerds. True heros of the computer revolution.
I'm sitting here with a 12th gen i7, and my next peecee will be at least a 15th gen i9. It'll whup my arse even worse at Go, even using pre-AlphaGo Go technology.
(Grumble, though. The GPU I have now is the 3080, and the 5080 is only about 50% faster. The 5090 is about twice as fast, but is currently insanely expensive. Maybe the AI bubble will burst, people will figure out that crypto is a scam, and GPU prices will come down.)