I agree with everyone else: the fact that certain (important) areas of technology have progressed hugely doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s a huge increase in overall wealth. It’s like Amdahl’s law (parallelizing code can’t possibly bring a speedup bigger than the ratio (all work) : (non-parallelizable work)): some things in life really don’t depend much on the sort of technology that’s improved hugely since 1960, and if those stay approximately the same while tech gets infinitely better, our wellbeing will be increasingly determined by the (not-much-improving) state of the things that aren’t improving so fast.
Having lightning-fast calculation and high-resolution streaming video and photorealistic games and so forth is very cool, but it doesn’t have much impact on how comfortably you sleep at night, or whether you have close and mutually fulfilling friendships, or how good your food tastes, or whether you die of malaria.
(Technology does impact those things, directly and indirectly. I think fewer people are dying of malaria than in 1960. But it’s not the 100x-better sort of improvement we see in techier areas, and in some cases it may not be an improvement: rightly or wrongly, many people claim that today’s social networking technology actually makes friendships and other social relationships worse.)
I agree with everyone else: the fact that certain (important) areas of technology have progressed hugely doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s a huge increase in overall wealth. It’s like Amdahl’s law (parallelizing code can’t possibly bring a speedup bigger than the ratio (all work) : (non-parallelizable work)): some things in life really don’t depend much on the sort of technology that’s improved hugely since 1960, and if those stay approximately the same while tech gets infinitely better, our wellbeing will be increasingly determined by the (not-much-improving) state of the things that aren’t improving so fast.
Having lightning-fast calculation and high-resolution streaming video and photorealistic games and so forth is very cool, but it doesn’t have much impact on how comfortably you sleep at night, or whether you have close and mutually fulfilling friendships, or how good your food tastes, or whether you die of malaria.
(Technology does impact those things, directly and indirectly. I think fewer people are dying of malaria than in 1960. But it’s not the 100x-better sort of improvement we see in techier areas, and in some cases it may not be an improvement: rightly or wrongly, many people claim that today’s social networking technology actually makes friendships and other social relationships worse.)