nevermind

[Ruin Explorer]

I feel like in the longer term, an awful lot of humanity is going to decide they want a life with more limited technology in certain areas, and the whole cellphone/social media thing is probably going to peak sometime in the mid to late 21st century.

I don't really like the idea of freezing technology because medical tech advances have saved so many lives, but at the same time, medical tech hasn't saved as many as it could have, because the maximum profit focus of the companies involved directs them to ignore cheap and effective solutions in favour of supposedly cutting-edge but often quite ineffective or unreliable treatments that can be patented.

Also re: freezing technology, would that prevent better utilization of technology we had already? With nuclear reactor technology, for example, we already invented and successfully tested and used vastly more advanced and efficient (and safer) reactors than those in use today by the mid-1960s. Almost all new-build reactors today are the inefficient and less-safe kind, not because we don't know how to do better, but because doing better would be less short-term profitable for the companies which build them (and which have the money to lobby governments etc.).

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

steam punk ftw right?

If there was a blimp service going to Tokyo (with, say, Titanic (first class)-level amenities, full steampunk imagery), I'd prefer it to plane, even if it took 3 days to do that insteand of 10 hours.

 

[LordBP]

October 30th, 4004 BC. Right before Adam and Eve discover this "clothes" fancy new tech and are expelled from the Eden garden. It only went downhill from there.

While I wouldn't want to waste Genie Wish on it, really. If had to, because of a very specific genie, I'd probably choose 1800 and block oil extraction tech for going further. Not because of environmental concerns, really, but just because of the fun factor of having a wildly different progress development path to witness when going back to our time.

Whales would probably go extinct from that change.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I'd freeze humanity at the hunting / gathering phase. Farming was probably a mistake.

 

[aco175]

Not sure if here.

or here.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

The whole premise of the thread is that we can do it. A magical wand, a genies wish. What would happen instead is an interesting fantasy though, how would the web developed without modern social media for example. Would be just frozen in time or would some other big change evolve anyway?

Yes, but what exactly is this magic wand doing. I believe that we will culturally adapt to all this tech at some point and freezing the world in time has as many negatives as positives.
But to get back to the topic, is the magic wand preventing the underlying technologies from being developed which has some big implications for data analytics both good (medicine, epidemic study and control) and bad, targeted advertising and personal data scraping.
Both of these Technolgies were present in 2007 or there abouts, or the concepts of social media in which case what happens to forums and blogs? or is it just social media as standalone apps?

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I'd freeze humanity at the hunting / gathering phase. Farming was probably a mistake.

No beer, wine, definitely no spirits and eventually no books

 

[trappedslider]

Yes, but what exactly is this magic wand doing. I believe that we will culturally adapt to all this tech at some point and freezing the world in time has as many negatives as positives.
But to get back to the topic, is the magic wand preventing the underlying technologies from being developed which has some big implications for data analytics both good (medicine, epidemic study and control) and bad, targeted advertising and personal data scraping.
Both of these Technolgies were present in 2007 or there abouts, or the concepts of social media in which case what happens to forums and blogs? or is it just social media as standalone apps?

 

[Reynard]

None. Technology always has consequences, but humanity's purpose (if it can be called such) is to create technology. Since the first pointy stick, we have been making tools in order to become "better." it is what we do. Language? Technology. Math? Technology? Philosophy? Technology.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I feel like in the longer term, an awful lot of humanity is going to decide they want a life with more limited technology in certain areas, and the whole cellphone/social media thing is probably going to peak sometime in the mid to late 21st century.

I don't really like the idea of freezing technology because medical tech advances have saved so many lives, but at the same time, medical tech hasn't saved as many as it could have, because the maximum profit focus of the companies involved directs them to ignore cheap and effective solutions in favour of supposedly cutting-edge but often quite ineffective or unreliable treatments that can be patented.

Also re: freezing technology, would that prevent better utilization of technology we had already? With nuclear reactor technology, for example, we already invented and successfully tested and used vastly more advanced and efficient (and safer) reactors than those in use today by the mid-1960s. Almost all new-build reactors today are the inefficient and less-safe kind, not because we don't know how to do better, but because doing better would be less short-term profitable for the companies which build them (and which have the money to lobby governments etc.).

I mostly agree with this, but a lot depends on how the genie granting the tech freezing wish interprets that wish.

The biggest loss in the west regarding nuclear power is the loss of building and project management knowledge. There is a lot of practical construction and engineering knowledge lost, and we now cannot build a nuclear plant in less than 10 years or on budget.

One way of stopping social media in its tracks in the noughties would be to ban browser cookies as a gross violation of privacy. Particularly persistent cookies, that way one could probably strangle, social media, retail web commerce, web apps and some mobile apps at birth.