I'd like to back this up and I am going to use a really bad example - the movie "Back to the Future". When they went from the present back to 1955, the world looked a little different. When the went back to 1885 in "Back to the Future 3", it was a different world. People were running around in dirt streets shooting each other.
Granted these dates are a little different. I would consider the 100 years more from 1900 to 1950 to 2000. In the earlier half century the got the widespread use to electricity, radio, TV, automobiles, airplanes, and in the healthcare we got antibiotics and vaccines. I'm sure someone else could make a much more impressive list than that. Someone from 1900 transported to 1950 would not recognize the world.
We didn't have nearly the same advances from 1950 to 2000. Cell phones and the internet are huge, but that didn't come until the very tail end. Those areas would look like science fiction. Other than that, when you place someone from 1950 in 2000, it just looks like everything got a little better.
Maybe starting with the computers and the internet we will start another big change, particularly with artificial intelligence and automation. But for a big part of those 50 years, a lot less happened than in the previous 50 years.
>In the earlier half century the got the widespread use to electricity, radio, TV, automobiles, airplanes, and in the healthcare we got antibiotics and vaccines.
Plus General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Those were huge advances in human understanding, and are still fundamental to physics.
I understand the singularity and I am not arguing against it. It is reasonable to expect exponential development as a rule, but that doesn't mean development happens smoothly. The intended point was about how foreign the world would look to an average person transplanted 50 years in the future. The original comment asserted the first half of the century had a more dramatic change than the second half, and there is a good argument for this.
The links you provided are very good but they deal more with theory than actual observations by a normal person.
There is one specific concrete example given in those articles - Moore's law. This is a very good example of exponential development, but only to a point. Someone correct me if I am wrong, but Moore's law was helped because its very existence affected the result. To some extent industry even scheduled their advances. If someone lied to Intel and said a competitor was getting much better speeds, I bet you we would have seen some faster improvements.
Granted these dates are a little different. I would consider the 100 years more from 1900 to 1950 to 2000. In the earlier half century the got the widespread use to electricity, radio, TV, automobiles, airplanes, and in the healthcare we got antibiotics and vaccines. I'm sure someone else could make a much more impressive list than that. Someone from 1900 transported to 1950 would not recognize the world.
We didn't have nearly the same advances from 1950 to 2000. Cell phones and the internet are huge, but that didn't come until the very tail end. Those areas would look like science fiction. Other than that, when you place someone from 1950 in 2000, it just looks like everything got a little better.
Maybe starting with the computers and the internet we will start another big change, particularly with artificial intelligence and automation. But for a big part of those 50 years, a lot less happened than in the previous 50 years.