From: Phillip Huggan (cdnprodigy@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Apr 19 2006 - 11:25:30 MDT
Not so much the PC, but the internet harnesses two exponential curves. All networking technologies follow an exponential curve in their uptake, once a critical mass of users is reached. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cond-mat/pdf/0309/0309544.pdf
Also education is exponential in there are copounding returns gained for each additional unit of education an individual has attained. The internet delivers the largest public body of knowledge the world has ever seen.
The PC ranks with some of the more trivial developments on the list below. But I think only printing can top the internet. Things like sanitation and antibiotics are probably on par with the internet. The internet has only been widely dispersed for 10-15 years and many items on the list have been around for centuries.
Philip Goetz <philgoetz@gmail.com> wrote:
What he said is that the Internet and the PC aren't any more important
than many other earlier developments, and that's true. Corporations,
secure locks, printing, ships that can sail upwind, banks, newspapers,
rifles, democracy, rights, coal, romanticism, economic theory, the
Enlightenment, Newton's laws, interchangeable parts, public schools,
eyeglasses, public libraries, steam power, an end to slavery, the
tractor and the automatic reaper, street lights, evolution, vaccines,
electricity, explosives, sanitation, police, tanks, machine guns,
antibiotics, airplanes, the assembly line, marketing, recorded music,
radio, quantum mechanics, insurance, income tax, social security,
phones, nuclear weapons, televisions, cars, indoor plumbing, air
conditioning, elimination of smallpox, environmentalism, civil rights,
rockety, globalization - which one of these has been less important
than the internet or the PC?
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