I have this recurring fantasy of what would happen if, say, you dropped a modern smartphone (let's include an SD card and a bunch of installed apps that don't need network connectivity) onto a table in a lab at Bell Labs circa say 1940. Be nice and provide a usb wall power plug too so they can keep it going. I wonder how far they'd get and how badly the timeline would be disrupted (or not).
Sorry but I can't read this without thinking of the episode of Doctor Who where they end up helping Churchill, and Amelia Pond is wearing a short skirt which somehow nobody takes any notice of at all.
Self-referential signatures are for people too boring to come up with more interesting alternatives.
Very likely they'd be able to duplicate it within 70 years.
Would they understand what they're looking at? Certainly; the computer had just been invented; there were cameras, electronic devices, televisions (for the idea of informational screens). The invention of the transistor was not far away— 1947.
The problem in these scenarios is manufacturing. The first transistor was the size of a paperclip; a modern smartphone has 10 billion transistors. (American sense of "billion.") You could not hand a diagram of the phone to a 1940s manufacturer and have them duplicate it. Too much missing technology, and without being able to see the factory, no clear path to developing it. It's about the same reason sending a boiler to the ancient Romans wouldn't give you a steampunk Rome: they didn't have the ability to make high-quality steel in bulk.
The best you could say is that the phone would be a stimulating proof of concept. But no one really needed that. People could imagine "electronic brains" just fine— the basic idea would not have shocked Edward Bellamy in 1887. The most famous good prediction in engineering history, Moore's Law, dates to 1965. In effect engineers knew that transistors could be made smaller and smaller, but they still had to proceed step by step for fifty years.
(Arguably the real stimulus would be the UI. Doug Englehart developed a GUI by 1968, though it took 16 years before it became a consumer product. But this too is limited by available technology— namely, the achievable screen resolution. You can't get much of a GUI going on with the Apple ][ 140x192 "hi-res" display.)
I kind of think a scenario like this is a way to gawk at the progress of technology— "look how far we've come; our ancestors would be gobsmacked!" But "gobsmackingness" is not a good way to look at technology. A toddler can figure out how to use that smartphone in a couple of years. And a developing country can develop smartphone technology if it wants— e.g. Rwanda was able to do it in 2019.
zompist wrote: ↑Tue Nov 21, 2023 3:28 pm
I kind of think a scenario like this is a way to gawk at the progress of technology— "look how far we've come; our ancestors would be gobsmacked!" But "gobsmackingness" is not a good way to look at technology. A toddler can figure out how to use that smartphone in a couple of years. And a developing country can develop smartphone technology if it wants— e.g. Rwanda was able to do it in 2019.
I see it in a slightly different way - that is, it's based on the idea that people in the past, given a bit of foresight, could have leapfrogged ahead technologically far further and faster than they did in reality. Take for instance steampunk - there is the idea that the digital age could have started almost a hundred years earlier had the Victorians had the foresight to realize what the analytic engine really could do.
zompist wrote: ↑Tue Nov 21, 2023 3:28 pm
I kind of think a scenario like this is a way to gawk at the progress of technology— "look how far we've come; our ancestors would be gobsmacked!" But "gobsmackingness" is not a good way to look at technology. A toddler can figure out how to use that smartphone in a couple of years. And a developing country can develop smartphone technology if it wants— e.g. Rwanda was able to do it in 2019.
I see it in a slightly different way - that is, it's based on the idea that people in the past, given a bit of foresight, could have leapfrogged ahead technologically far further and faster than they did in reality. Take for instance steampunk - there is the idea that the digital age could have started almost a hundred years earlier had the Victorians had the foresight to realize what the analytic engine really could do.
zompist wrote: ↑Tue Nov 21, 2023 3:28 pm
I kind of think a scenario like this is a way to gawk at the progress of technology— "look how far we've come; our ancestors would be gobsmacked!" But "gobsmackingness" is not a good way to look at technology. A toddler can figure out how to use that smartphone in a couple of years. And a developing country can develop smartphone technology if it wants— e.g. Rwanda was able to do it in 2019.
I see it in a slightly different way - that is, it's based on the idea that people in the past, given a bit of foresight, could have leapfrogged ahead technologically far further and faster than they did in reality. Take for instance steampunk - there is the idea that the digital age could have started almost a hundred years earlier had the Victorians had the foresight to realize what the analytic engine really could do.
I know we did - and I was not speaking of whether the digital age would have begun in the Victorian age, just the idea in the minds of steampunk types. One can very easily argue that the digital age did begin in the Victorian era, with the advent of telegraphy.
