9 things that will disappear in our lifetime....

There is only one definition of progress - it just means to move forward (in time), so views of positive and negative progress are in the main subjective and dependant upon the destination of that forward movement being somewhere you want to be. Progress in that sense is an inevitability - just as putting one foot in front of the other and shifting your body-weight to that leading foot will inexorably result in forward movement. Progress can never die, it can just result in a change you like, don't like or don't give a hoot about (then, indifference is as likely to permit progress as it is to halt it).

 

I have conjectured a number of times that invention is in decline, but invention does not fuel progress as much as innovation does: Apple did not invent any of the products they sell, they innovated previous inventions in their application, how we perceive them and how we use them. All the "progress" that may (or may not) result in these 9 things (plus a myriad of others not listed) disappearing is an inevitability of invention finding an application through innovation - as long as mankind exists to find those applications technical progress will continue unabated. So while I believe that invention is in decline, innovation is not - a missile is just a spear with an engine after all.

 

Cloud computing is where networks started back in the 1950s & 1960s, be that a central computer linked by dumb terminals, or a network of intelligent terminals sharing processing over a wide geographic area, the concept is as old as computing itself and the Internet grew from that, married to the pre-existing telecommunications networks and fed by innovation of relatively minor inventions. Progress in this case was/is a product of doing those things that made networks work in past better and faster in the present, allowing more bandwidth so the application of those inventions and innovations can be used by more people simultaneously - how we use that in the future is not necessarily something we can control or predict with any certainty, and neither can Microsoft, Apple, Amazon or Google.

 

The Luddites weren't wrong, they just faced a product that worked all of the time - this time around the techno-luddites are up against a product that only works some of the time, so the result is a lot less certain.

Yeah this is really pissing me off. I ordered In The Land Of Grey and Pink on vinyl a week ago without knowing about this retarded strike. Oh well, It should be over in a week or so

Swallow us? The sea level won't rise that much, jeeze. And maybe we'll be f**ked in the future, but I very much doubt humanity as a whole will go extinct any time soon.

I have no idea why I felt it necessary to post all those links when a link to a Google search probably would have been as illustrative, but I already did it so I'm not going to delete them.