There are a bunch of medical advances that I would call technology and have been big changes. Two easy ones come to mind. Each year there are 210,000 pacemakers installed in the USA. Each one of those is significant. Cataract surgery has gotten a lot better and the number of case is in the millions. All of those people would have lost their vision previously.
In the last 30 - 40 years look at how many people survive various cancers (breast, tumors, blood, etc) that would have absolutely ruined their quality of life or led to an early death as well.
I often think of this in the context of my grandparents, who came to America shortly after the Civil War, and lived long enough to see a man land on the moon. THAT was a profound change.
As the oldest of the baby boomers and with a career in the computer industry (what a quaint term now), I rode the wave of the integrated circuit. Perhaps productivity measures don't really capture the pervasive impact of that technology. The impact on medicine alone is staggering.
I take one exception to your comments. "Wisdom and know-how were profoundly valuable personal attributes. Now they’re much less of a reason for distinction." Wisdom is not acquired from technology or access to information. It is acquired by applying knowledge to living and experiencing life. Making mistakes leads to wisdom. No amount of information, AI agents, or tools will result in wisdom without that. Wisdom is even more valuable today to guide us down the right path.
My grandad was born the year of the Wright brothers first powered flight and started to draw his state pension in the year man landed on the moon. But the prize for most change seen in a lifetime has to go to this guy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4
nice.. I used to chat with my great grandfather when Zi was a kid.. He'd tell me all about the Plsins Indian Wars, Invrntions of telephones, wireless radios, airplanes, and all the rest.. born in 1860, he passed away not long after seeing Elvis on TV.. but he missed the Beatles.. sad..
> Wisdom is not acquired from technology or access to information.
You're right, but most people in "symbolic analytic" work (to use Robert Reich's term) aren't really paid for wisdom, but rather "superior powers of articulation combined with deep stores of knowledge" (Bret Stephens) -- knowing all the details about some subject and how they play out in all the ordinary situations. That skill may be substantially devalued.
Interesting perspective. Thanks for your comment. My response to Noah was more in line with the overall theme of his post, which focused on the impact of technology on humanity rather than any subset of "knowledge workers."
What’s remarkable is the surveillance state and ability to contact people is so much easier nowadays, but kids are generally not allowed to do half of what they once were when monitoring was much more difficult.
Noah, your catalog of technological change is comprehensive and thought-provoking. But I think there's a deeper pattern beneath the "future shock" and "weirdness" you're describing.
The real story isn't that technology has changed our world—it's that technology has revealed our identities.
You document how the same technological shifts produce radically different responses in your comment section. Lee remembers the 60s-70s as peaceful and feels today's world is Orwellian. Susan, who grew up in the same era, remembers constant vulnerability and now feels grateful for the ability to locate loved ones. Earl sees flying, food, and healthcare all getting worse. Pittsburgh Mike systematically shows they're measurably better by every objective metric.
Same technology. Same timeframe. Opposite experiences.
This isn't about the technology—it's about something deeper. Here's what I think is actually happening:
Humans require opposition to generate meaning. When we've largely solved survival-level tensions (food, shelter, basic safety), we don't rest. We fill the newly available space with new tensions, because tension itself is the substrate of meaning-making and growth. Ray Kurzweil is right that change is accelerating—but the question isn't whether we can handle the pace. It's what kind of tensions do we select for when survival pressures ease?
Your data on 6+ hours daily screen time with a third of people online "constantly" reveals this perfectly. The screen is neutral. But people use it to fill the tension void with radically different selections:
Some fill the void with manufactured tensions: social media comparison, tribal sorting, apocalyptic narratives, performative outrage. These generate psychological friction and moral drama without any actual capability development. It's tension theater—the appearance of meaningful struggle without real stakes or growth.
Others fill the same void with generative tensions: YouTube tutorials to develop skills, coordination tools for real-world community building, learning platforms for curiosity satisfaction. Same device, but used to amplify real-world capability rather than replace it.
The difference isn't the technology. It's identity.
You write that "wisdom and know-how were profoundly valuable personal attributes. Now they're much less of a reason for distinction." I'd argue you have this backwards. The abundance of accessible information hasn't reduced the value of wisdom—it's increased the importance of identity in determining what you do with that information.
When knowledge was scarce, simply accumulating it was the achievement. Now that knowledge is abundant, wisdom through application is the achievement. The tension shifted from "Can I find it?" to "Can I make meaning from it and build something with it?"
Your commenters prove this. Dan Ross appreciates medical advances like pacemakers and cataract surgery. Robert Wilbourn points to 210,000 pacemakers annually as massive welfare improvement. Jason responds by identifying real medical frontiers he wants solved—arthritis, chronic pain, insomnia. These are people engaging generative tensions with skin in the game.
Meanwhile, others focus on degradation narratives, surveillance anxiety, and nostalgic retreat despite overwhelming evidence of objective improvement.
The pattern you're observing—"technology weirds the world"—is actually technology creating new selection pressures that reveal whether someone fills abundance-created slack with manufactured drama or frontier challenges.
This explains why productivity metrics don't capture the change you're describing. The shift isn't primarily economic—it's psychological and developmental. Technology hasn't just changed what we can do; it's changed what tensions are available to struggle against. And struggle is what makes us human.
The question for the AI age isn't "Can we handle more change?" It's "Will we use AI-created abundance to manufacture new tribal dramas, or will we use it to pursue genuine frontiers that develop capability?"
Your article is a mirror. How people react to it—whether they see progress or decline, opportunity or threat, capability expansion or control expansion—reveals far more about their identity than about the technology itself.
Interesting repost. I grew up in the 60's and early 70's and I would concluded that the decline in our feeling of well being is the most profound. The angst and dread of the future that we have now just was not there. We felt far more in control of our lives. Yes some people got "lost" without gps but most didn't and we didn't have the ominous feeling of always being watched. I miss the peace of mind that is absent from our Orwellian present.
I always find these comments interesting. I grew up in the sixties and seventies, too, but my experience is so different. I remember the seventies, in particular, to be very ominous. It might just be my personal anxiety kicking in, but I remember feeling very vulnerable when walking home from classes at night - heck, even during the day sometimes. It was eerie driving at night with no one knowing where you were.
People would go on vacation and not be heard from for weeks. I was always so relieved when people would return home.
One of the things I like about the present is the fact that you can be located fairly quickly.
Hi, I'm the original poster. I wonder if your anxiety can be that you were urban. I lived in rural northwestern Minnesota so the fear for personal safety was almost none. As far as leaving and having no contact for weeks that was the norm, more a feature than a bug, the freedom of choosing not to be located. As to the nuclear fear we lived 75 miles from Grand Forks AFB, the home of the B-52's with nuclear weapons, also close to the missile silos of North Dakota. Its interesting that in this proximity to nuclear weapons it was rare to encounter anyone openly fearful of nuclear war. In fact the duck and cover practice was something we only saw on tv, never in the school I attended. Perhaps this attitude was one of why worry about something over which you have no control.
I lived in a suburb - probably more of an exurb at the time - of Detroit. In my childhood we had a riot in the city that resulted in both the National Guard and regular army being called in to quell it, not one, but two famous serial killers operating not far from where I lived, an oil crisis, a mass exodus of people from our area due to a severe economic downturn, a molesting priest at the local parish, two spousal murders in my neighborhood, at least a half dozen girls who left my high school to go off and deliver their babies, and several adult and teenage members of the community who died in drunk driving accidents. My own parents were stable but the outside world was not.
I feel much more at peace during our interesting times of today than I did then.
I remember watching the riots on tv and I think in general the people around me were more fearful of a trip to Detroit than the prospect of nuclear war because the troubles in Detroit were happening in real time, not just a hypothetical like nuclear war. Think of this, how our localized experience affects our memories and our world view. A shift of 800 miles from a metro area to rural creates two different realities within the same time frame shaping who we are half a century later.
I think there’s a lot to the autonomy we had as kids that made us happier and more independent in other spheres of life. Not to mention that getting out into nature was so much easier. You didn’t have to drive to a dedicated park. You just took a ten minute bike ride to the woods that went on and on.
I can remember fallout shelter sales lots dotted along the highway between the car lots. And in elementary school, we did the useless "hide under your desk" nuclear attack drill. I didn't worry about nuclear war all the time, but it was always a possibility. Read "Nuclear War: A Scenario" by Annie Jacobsen to feed your nightmares.
I was raised in Los Angeles before LAX became a four runway LAX, before Marina del Rey, before Dodgers arrived, before most freeways came to be.. I see my Dad's rifle to hunt rabbits, built crab traps, had ice and vegetables delivered on horse-drawn carts.. Hell, we still wrung wet clothes by hand and hung them up.. We raised chickens, rabbits, pigeons, fruit/vegetables.. There was TV, of course, but it was mostly parents watching stuff.. They'd grown up before it..
But kids worry? sure.. but not about nuclear war..
we mostly worried if we would be able to find enough guys to play some baseball..
What, no mention of having your newspaper delivered digitally at 06:00 when you wake up, able to check your bank and credit card accounts, and see all pending transactions. Life is much more under control. About 1990 some technology expert said that the personal computer would come of age when it was as useful as a phone. Then along came Steve Jobs, the son of a Syrian immigrant, with the iPad and the iPhone. Soon FaceTime and Zoom had created environments that only SciFi had imagined before. I am aware that AI has its dangers, especially to those starting their careers, who spend years before they become useful. So what if we move to three or four day weeks, so long as we have sufficient income to survive. This was forecast by a management consultant in the 1960’s in his book “The Empty Raincoat”.
I feel this acutely and was talking with friends about this recently. Growing up wandering without a phone wasn’t only an escape but also shaped my brain.
And I find calling people somehow feels more intrusive than texting when in reality most of friends welcome it.
Social media has become a simulation of our social lives, stealing our time reel by reel so we don’t notice…
Stopping this wave is futile and cheats us out of good progress. My worry is we haven’t even learned how to control the negative externalities of the previous wave yet and AI will probably be even greater!
Communications has seen the biggest changes in my lifetime. It started with beepers and ended with cell phones. The Fax machine was a huge productivity gain. Voice mail, I was less thrilled with LOL
The computer has less impact on my life, and medical science is only interesting if you need it.
There have been technological improvements. However, those improvements may benefit the company, not the consumer.
Take airplanes, I don’t care what anyone says, flying sucks, and it sucks worse now than it did 40 years ago.
Food seems to have gotten worse and more expensive, more fattening.
Health care is becoming a privilege for the rich. Is that a consequence of improvements in the science of healthcare? Overutilization or chronic diseases are sapping up healthcare dollars.
Cars? More confusing do dads that may thrill many, but I find them to be a distraction. I do like the heated seats and steering wheel, esp when we get a cold spell that has lasted over a month now in the Northeast.
AI may well be the biggest invention since the computer in terms of productivity. We’ll see.
No, flying doesn't suck more than 40 years ago. I'll go back to 1960, where flying NY to London round trip cost about $5200 in today's dollars. Today, that trip in *business class* is $3200, and that's a lot better experience than flying in 1960. And your likelihood of dying in a plane crash measured in deaths/passenger mile, is about 1/40th of what it was then.
Fixing health care is straightforward, and has been done by almost every developed country (and many others) except the US. And even in the US, you can get subsidized health insurance if you make less than 4X Federal Poverty Level. And we could have that again if Democrats win in 2028 -- we had it under Biden; it isn't that expensive to provide ACA subsidies to everyone.
I was present in 1959 when first commercial jetliner (707) departed LA.. I was home on leave from Army before 'Nam and was invited on VIP tour of first 747 to arrive for service at LAX (Pan Am)..
1970s thru early-mid 1980s (before airline deregulation and 'frequent flyer miles), every seat was a wide recliner (think La-Z-Boys), there were at least twice as many restrooms and 25%-30% fewer passengers per flight..
I crossed Pacific Ocean from 'Nam to LAX 7 times and once to Seattle.. of course, they didn't have the range yet and we had to refuel in Tokyo, Guam or Wake Island.. stand-by to Honolulu was under $50.. Tickets were traded as legal tender.. If I bought ticket, I owned seat.. No one was interested in who used the ticket until names were checked at boarding.. If someone other than me used my ticket, it was penciled in.. or you could call airport in advance..
In 1972-73, my brother and I would fly from LAX to SFO for $12.75 standby on any airline's midnight flyer and slum around town all weekend.. Thrre was always plenty of unused seats.. Maitre Di at Fairmont always let us eat in kitchen because upscale folks barely touched their food..
every time an airline wanted to add a new destination, they had to also add an underserved community.. ((ie: Redding, CA had a population around 50,000 in early '80s, yet had three major airlines stop multiple times daily)..
1960 is 66 years ago, I was suggesting 1886. It is a hassle to fly today vs 1986. TSA, seat size, all the extras we now pay for. Most of the world does no fly “business class”. Most planes in American have economy, premium economy or first class.
I’m not saying business class doesn’t exist, it just doesn’t exist in Domestic flights.
I am talking about the experience. We obviously don’t have a similar airport.
OK, I was being lazy. I'm seeing from Google that in the 1980s, one way between NY and London was between 260-500, or $1500-$3000 in today's dollars, so a round trip was probably in the range of $3000-$6000 in today's dollars. An economy flight today is more like $1000 round trip, with premium economy about $2500 - $3,000.
Flying was still less safe back then, but perhaps only 8-10X safer per passenger mile, not the 40X comparing against the 60s.
I guess my point is you can fly cheaper now, or you can get a comparable experience by paying more, but still less than the inflation adjusted price.
But you're right that economy seats have gotten much worse since the 80s, and keep getting worse. I'm 6'2" and the seat-to-seat distance is painfully small in economy.
Technology Weirds the World. Jonathan Haidt would agree. So would Franklin Foer who wrote World Without Mind. We do live in weird times for which we are not totally prepared. Actually, not even remotely ready.
Future Shock was probably the first "serious" book I read. My father had a copy; I was 16.
Some time in the '90s I stumbled into it again and skimmed it. Pretty much everything he predicted had come about, except that he thought that everybody would still have lifetime jobs at big corporations.
Always a fascinating read Noah. As an original boomer, I find most of the technology changes since my childhood in the 50’s to be beneficial, especially the increased access to information, including getting to read the the thoughts of someone like you. I have zero sense of direction and gladly let an app direct me to my destination. The biggest damage I see is the ubiquity of social media. It brings out the worst in us humans. I quit years ago, don’t miss it at all and see zero benefit to humanity in having a space in which you can blurt out, without reflection, the first thing that pops into your mind.
I do wonder though what changes, for better or worse, technology will bring to the world my grandkids will see when they reach their 40’s let alone their 80’s.
To be fair to Krugman, even though you quote him as saying that in 2011, he says “going back another 39 years” from 1957, which suggests he originally wrote that passage in 1996. I think you could probably go a bit wider and say that from 1950 to 2000 there wasn’t all that much technological change in daily life. Suburbanization and televisions weren’t quite established in 1950 the way they were in 1957, but they were known. By 2000 you could google something, but you weren’t necessarily likely to get an image, and Wikipedia didn’t exist yet.
Almost all of the change you mention in this article is post 2000, and a lot is post-smartphone.
Between 1950 and 2000 technologies like refrigeration and air conditioning went from being expensive to ubiquitous. My father grew up in that time in a house with a gravity coal furnace, which has been phased out for safer, less polluting, and better options with fans.
In the 70s, my aunt and uncle had phone and electricity pulled to their farm and then eventually could get satellite TV.
The cell phone was invented and became common, which was a remarkable improvement in communication.
The 24/7 news cycle developed with cable news.
Air travel when from a luxury to commonplace.
That’s just off the top of my head. The world (and the USA) changed a lot between 1950 and 2000.
Interesting points, and I do think that the Internet as Library is probably the biggest modern cultural feature. I was able to diagnose and fix my refrigerator's faulty ice maker, and later its faulty processor board, based on youtube videos. I can indeed learn the basics of any topic, and can get multiple approaches to teaching that topic, until I find one that matches my initial understanding of the topic.
And LLMs do make this easier. I can ask it for more details on any part of an explanation that I don't understand, and usually get good information. The main concern going down this road is that the LLMs are not infrequently confused or flat out wrong, so I often end up reading the links associated with a topic.
Google translate is also a bigger deal than one would think. I recently was in Japan, and between google maps' train schedule information and google's translations (and of course lots of signs that are also in English), my wife and I really had no problem navigating Japan while speaking essentially no Japanese, interacting with people who spoke nearly no English.
It's not all a bed of roses. One issue with the LLMs is pretty straightforward -- they're hopeless violators of at least the spirit of intellectual property law. They'll quote significant sections of copyrighted works, reworded to match your query. And this doesn't only apply to textbooks -- when I encounter a paywalled article say in The Economist, I can ask "What does author X in the economist think about topic Y" and get a good summary of the article I can't access. If you prevent people from monetizing their work, that work will stop.
What's weird to me is that for all the significant changes in learning, navigation, information retrieval, translation, etc, these changes have almost no visible impact on the physical world. Aside from automobile and clothing styles, and giant TVs, the main thing that someone from 1975 might notice in the physical world is all these cell phone antennas hanging off of building roofs. But a visitor from 1975 would be totally bewildered by what they see people actually doing.
Interestingly, Claude and ChatGPT have very different attitudes to intellectual property! I was asking Claude about famous lyricists working in American musical theater who were known for their clever rhymes (I gave the example “he made his home in that fish’s abdomen”). It described a lot of clever lyricists like Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim, but it refused to quote any lines, even when I told it that this is surely fair use. When I asked ChatGPT, it just came right out with lines from each of them (but ironically, it often quoted them in ways that lost the rhyme, like its quote of Cole Porter:
Your essay reads to me not merely as a history of technological change, but as an account of how the habits of attention themselves have been quietly re-engineered. The devices we carry have not only altered what we know, but the pace at which we expect to know it, and perhaps even the manner in which we expect society to respond to our desires for clarity and speed.
What interests me most is the civic implication beneath your observations. A culture formed by instantaneous answers and frictionless navigation may begin to interpret deliberation as delay and institutional resistance as failure. When the rhythms of digital life become the measure of all things, the slower architecture of republican government risks appearing obsolete — not because it has ceased to function, but because its virtues are no longer easily felt.
It may be that the true transformation you describe is neither economic nor technological, but psychological: a reorientation of expectation. If citizens grow accustomed to seamless coordination in the digital sphere, they may come to desire the same seamlessness from political authority, even when such unity carries hidden costs for self-government.
I am curious whether you see this shift as ultimately expanding individual autonomy, or whether it unintentionally prepares the public imagination for more centralized forms of managerial coordination.
heck.. in mid 1960s, if I wanted to see the MATTERHORN, I drove by DISNEYLAND..
I was fortunate enough to have survived Vietnam & get a 7% mortgage in 1984 (rates were 14%-17% not much earlier) and use my GI Bill to return to college and retool.. I'd been laboring in retail and - though my wages were the equivalent of $33/hr today - I saw BOTH najor political parties in America pushing to shut-down extraction & direct fabrication segments of America's economy; albeit for different reasons... That would - of course - lead to the RISE OF RETAIL..
Well, that wouldn't do.. There'd be so many displaced workers arising from outsourced direct labor and importation on lumber and minerals, millions of people would enter the retail workforce and suppress wages for a long, long time.. Unfortunately for millions, that's pretty much what happened after mid to late 1980s.. I obtained another degree (BS BA -Accounting), and it's made all the difference in my family's ability to advance, buy homes, have great careers and start their families on solid footing..
What no one is addressing in Congress is that time is compressing and AI/robotics will - very soon I'm afraid - displace tens or hundreds of millions of jobs not specifically necessary to the expansion of these two entwines inevitabilities.. Government is trying to squeeze blood from turnips and collect unpaid educational loans, when - in fact - we should be doing everything possible to train people NIW to work in a world where their current skill sets will no longer be needed.. The educational lians should bypass banks and government can expect to recoup far more taxes than interest forgone.. Additionally, working adults require far less government assistance than the un/underemployed..
If we don't act NOW, it will be too late.. I believe I recently read of an order for 40,000 robots to work in fast food kitchens/drive-thrus.. then there will be the online order-fulfillment automation, the AG sector automation, the robot-repair robots, the AI-design, policing, military robots.. NO INCOME- BASED TAXES means no SS/Medicare, no trickle-down to Sales & Use Taxes, no no property taxes (how would you buy/own property?)
it's a vicious world rushing our was and people aren't paying attention.. We have a government asleep at the wheel.. Thus isn't a time to be worrying about halftime shows at Super Bowls.. But has anyone serious heard great things for employment/business success except from those trying to prop up optimism about stock markets and a whole big beautiful world for all?
Advances in medicine miracles? For who?
More leisure time? Yeah.. I bet (except for the 50% of society engaged in dumpster diving)..
There are a bunch of medical advances that I would call technology and have been big changes. Two easy ones come to mind. Each year there are 210,000 pacemakers installed in the USA. Each one of those is significant. Cataract surgery has gotten a lot better and the number of case is in the millions. All of those people would have lost their vision previously.
I’d love to see a bunch more. Cures for the arthritides, chronic pain syndromes, back pain, insomnia, Peyronie’s disease, Dupuytren’s…
And then there’s all the ones I don’t have.
In the last 30 - 40 years look at how many people survive various cancers (breast, tumors, blood, etc) that would have absolutely ruined their quality of life or led to an early death as well.
I often think of this in the context of my grandparents, who came to America shortly after the Civil War, and lived long enough to see a man land on the moon. THAT was a profound change.
As the oldest of the baby boomers and with a career in the computer industry (what a quaint term now), I rode the wave of the integrated circuit. Perhaps productivity measures don't really capture the pervasive impact of that technology. The impact on medicine alone is staggering.
I take one exception to your comments. "Wisdom and know-how were profoundly valuable personal attributes. Now they’re much less of a reason for distinction." Wisdom is not acquired from technology or access to information. It is acquired by applying knowledge to living and experiencing life. Making mistakes leads to wisdom. No amount of information, AI agents, or tools will result in wisdom without that. Wisdom is even more valuable today to guide us down the right path.
My grandad was born the year of the Wright brothers first powered flight and started to draw his state pension in the year man landed on the moon. But the prize for most change seen in a lifetime has to go to this guy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4
nice.. I used to chat with my great grandfather when Zi was a kid.. He'd tell me all about the Plsins Indian Wars, Invrntions of telephones, wireless radios, airplanes, and all the rest.. born in 1860, he passed away not long after seeing Elvis on TV.. but he missed the Beatles.. sad..
> Wisdom is not acquired from technology or access to information.
You're right, but most people in "symbolic analytic" work (to use Robert Reich's term) aren't really paid for wisdom, but rather "superior powers of articulation combined with deep stores of knowledge" (Bret Stephens) -- knowing all the details about some subject and how they play out in all the ordinary situations. That skill may be substantially devalued.
Interesting perspective. Thanks for your comment. My response to Noah was more in line with the overall theme of his post, which focused on the impact of technology on humanity rather than any subset of "knowledge workers."
What’s remarkable is the surveillance state and ability to contact people is so much easier nowadays, but kids are generally not allowed to do half of what they once were when monitoring was much more difficult.
Noah, your catalog of technological change is comprehensive and thought-provoking. But I think there's a deeper pattern beneath the "future shock" and "weirdness" you're describing.
The real story isn't that technology has changed our world—it's that technology has revealed our identities.
You document how the same technological shifts produce radically different responses in your comment section. Lee remembers the 60s-70s as peaceful and feels today's world is Orwellian. Susan, who grew up in the same era, remembers constant vulnerability and now feels grateful for the ability to locate loved ones. Earl sees flying, food, and healthcare all getting worse. Pittsburgh Mike systematically shows they're measurably better by every objective metric.
Same technology. Same timeframe. Opposite experiences.
This isn't about the technology—it's about something deeper. Here's what I think is actually happening:
Humans require opposition to generate meaning. When we've largely solved survival-level tensions (food, shelter, basic safety), we don't rest. We fill the newly available space with new tensions, because tension itself is the substrate of meaning-making and growth. Ray Kurzweil is right that change is accelerating—but the question isn't whether we can handle the pace. It's what kind of tensions do we select for when survival pressures ease?
Your data on 6+ hours daily screen time with a third of people online "constantly" reveals this perfectly. The screen is neutral. But people use it to fill the tension void with radically different selections:
Some fill the void with manufactured tensions: social media comparison, tribal sorting, apocalyptic narratives, performative outrage. These generate psychological friction and moral drama without any actual capability development. It's tension theater—the appearance of meaningful struggle without real stakes or growth.
Others fill the same void with generative tensions: YouTube tutorials to develop skills, coordination tools for real-world community building, learning platforms for curiosity satisfaction. Same device, but used to amplify real-world capability rather than replace it.
The difference isn't the technology. It's identity.
You write that "wisdom and know-how were profoundly valuable personal attributes. Now they're much less of a reason for distinction." I'd argue you have this backwards. The abundance of accessible information hasn't reduced the value of wisdom—it's increased the importance of identity in determining what you do with that information.
When knowledge was scarce, simply accumulating it was the achievement. Now that knowledge is abundant, wisdom through application is the achievement. The tension shifted from "Can I find it?" to "Can I make meaning from it and build something with it?"
Your commenters prove this. Dan Ross appreciates medical advances like pacemakers and cataract surgery. Robert Wilbourn points to 210,000 pacemakers annually as massive welfare improvement. Jason responds by identifying real medical frontiers he wants solved—arthritis, chronic pain, insomnia. These are people engaging generative tensions with skin in the game.
Meanwhile, others focus on degradation narratives, surveillance anxiety, and nostalgic retreat despite overwhelming evidence of objective improvement.
The pattern you're observing—"technology weirds the world"—is actually technology creating new selection pressures that reveal whether someone fills abundance-created slack with manufactured drama or frontier challenges.
This explains why productivity metrics don't capture the change you're describing. The shift isn't primarily economic—it's psychological and developmental. Technology hasn't just changed what we can do; it's changed what tensions are available to struggle against. And struggle is what makes us human.
The question for the AI age isn't "Can we handle more change?" It's "Will we use AI-created abundance to manufacture new tribal dramas, or will we use it to pursue genuine frontiers that develop capability?"
Your article is a mirror. How people react to it—whether they see progress or decline, opportunity or threat, capability expansion or control expansion—reveals far more about their identity than about the technology itself.
—Chris Wasden, EdD
Interesting repost. I grew up in the 60's and early 70's and I would concluded that the decline in our feeling of well being is the most profound. The angst and dread of the future that we have now just was not there. We felt far more in control of our lives. Yes some people got "lost" without gps but most didn't and we didn't have the ominous feeling of always being watched. I miss the peace of mind that is absent from our Orwellian present.
I always find these comments interesting. I grew up in the sixties and seventies, too, but my experience is so different. I remember the seventies, in particular, to be very ominous. It might just be my personal anxiety kicking in, but I remember feeling very vulnerable when walking home from classes at night - heck, even during the day sometimes. It was eerie driving at night with no one knowing where you were.
People would go on vacation and not be heard from for weeks. I was always so relieved when people would return home.
One of the things I like about the present is the fact that you can be located fairly quickly.
Hi, I'm the original poster. I wonder if your anxiety can be that you were urban. I lived in rural northwestern Minnesota so the fear for personal safety was almost none. As far as leaving and having no contact for weeks that was the norm, more a feature than a bug, the freedom of choosing not to be located. As to the nuclear fear we lived 75 miles from Grand Forks AFB, the home of the B-52's with nuclear weapons, also close to the missile silos of North Dakota. Its interesting that in this proximity to nuclear weapons it was rare to encounter anyone openly fearful of nuclear war. In fact the duck and cover practice was something we only saw on tv, never in the school I attended. Perhaps this attitude was one of why worry about something over which you have no control.
I lived in a suburb - probably more of an exurb at the time - of Detroit. In my childhood we had a riot in the city that resulted in both the National Guard and regular army being called in to quell it, not one, but two famous serial killers operating not far from where I lived, an oil crisis, a mass exodus of people from our area due to a severe economic downturn, a molesting priest at the local parish, two spousal murders in my neighborhood, at least a half dozen girls who left my high school to go off and deliver their babies, and several adult and teenage members of the community who died in drunk driving accidents. My own parents were stable but the outside world was not.
I feel much more at peace during our interesting times of today than I did then.
I remember watching the riots on tv and I think in general the people around me were more fearful of a trip to Detroit than the prospect of nuclear war because the troubles in Detroit were happening in real time, not just a hypothetical like nuclear war. Think of this, how our localized experience affects our memories and our world view. A shift of 800 miles from a metro area to rural creates two different realities within the same time frame shaping who we are half a century later.
I think there’s a lot to the autonomy we had as kids that made us happier and more independent in other spheres of life. Not to mention that getting out into nature was so much easier. You didn’t have to drive to a dedicated park. You just took a ten minute bike ride to the woods that went on and on.
Weren’t people in the 50s and 60s (if not the 70s) constantly worried about a nuclear holocaust?
I can remember fallout shelter sales lots dotted along the highway between the car lots. And in elementary school, we did the useless "hide under your desk" nuclear attack drill. I didn't worry about nuclear war all the time, but it was always a possibility. Read "Nuclear War: A Scenario" by Annie Jacobsen to feed your nightmares.
maybe adults..
I was raised in Los Angeles before LAX became a four runway LAX, before Marina del Rey, before Dodgers arrived, before most freeways came to be.. I see my Dad's rifle to hunt rabbits, built crab traps, had ice and vegetables delivered on horse-drawn carts.. Hell, we still wrung wet clothes by hand and hung them up.. We raised chickens, rabbits, pigeons, fruit/vegetables.. There was TV, of course, but it was mostly parents watching stuff.. They'd grown up before it..
But kids worry? sure.. but not about nuclear war..
we mostly worried if we would be able to find enough guys to play some baseball..
What, no mention of having your newspaper delivered digitally at 06:00 when you wake up, able to check your bank and credit card accounts, and see all pending transactions. Life is much more under control. About 1990 some technology expert said that the personal computer would come of age when it was as useful as a phone. Then along came Steve Jobs, the son of a Syrian immigrant, with the iPad and the iPhone. Soon FaceTime and Zoom had created environments that only SciFi had imagined before. I am aware that AI has its dangers, especially to those starting their careers, who spend years before they become useful. So what if we move to three or four day weeks, so long as we have sufficient income to survive. This was forecast by a management consultant in the 1960’s in his book “The Empty Raincoat”.
I wouldn't say life is more under control.. Sure, there were fraudsters and someone could get away with stealing your identity/cashing some checks..
but you could always put a restrictive endorsements back of check "FOR DEPOSIT ONLY"
Bank was then on hook if they gave $$$ to someone with stolen, modified checks..
today? 300,000,000 people's IDs can be compromised in the blink of an eye..
I feel this acutely and was talking with friends about this recently. Growing up wandering without a phone wasn’t only an escape but also shaped my brain.
And I find calling people somehow feels more intrusive than texting when in reality most of friends welcome it.
Social media has become a simulation of our social lives, stealing our time reel by reel so we don’t notice…
Stopping this wave is futile and cheats us out of good progress. My worry is we haven’t even learned how to control the negative externalities of the previous wave yet and AI will probably be even greater!
Communications has seen the biggest changes in my lifetime. It started with beepers and ended with cell phones. The Fax machine was a huge productivity gain. Voice mail, I was less thrilled with LOL
The computer has less impact on my life, and medical science is only interesting if you need it.
There have been technological improvements. However, those improvements may benefit the company, not the consumer.
Take airplanes, I don’t care what anyone says, flying sucks, and it sucks worse now than it did 40 years ago.
Food seems to have gotten worse and more expensive, more fattening.
Health care is becoming a privilege for the rich. Is that a consequence of improvements in the science of healthcare? Overutilization or chronic diseases are sapping up healthcare dollars.
Cars? More confusing do dads that may thrill many, but I find them to be a distraction. I do like the heated seats and steering wheel, esp when we get a cold spell that has lasted over a month now in the Northeast.
AI may well be the biggest invention since the computer in terms of productivity. We’ll see.
No, flying doesn't suck more than 40 years ago. I'll go back to 1960, where flying NY to London round trip cost about $5200 in today's dollars. Today, that trip in *business class* is $3200, and that's a lot better experience than flying in 1960. And your likelihood of dying in a plane crash measured in deaths/passenger mile, is about 1/40th of what it was then.
Fixing health care is straightforward, and has been done by almost every developed country (and many others) except the US. And even in the US, you can get subsidized health insurance if you make less than 4X Federal Poverty Level. And we could have that again if Democrats win in 2028 -- we had it under Biden; it isn't that expensive to provide ACA subsidies to everyone.
I was present in 1959 when first commercial jetliner (707) departed LA.. I was home on leave from Army before 'Nam and was invited on VIP tour of first 747 to arrive for service at LAX (Pan Am)..
1970s thru early-mid 1980s (before airline deregulation and 'frequent flyer miles), every seat was a wide recliner (think La-Z-Boys), there were at least twice as many restrooms and 25%-30% fewer passengers per flight..
I crossed Pacific Ocean from 'Nam to LAX 7 times and once to Seattle.. of course, they didn't have the range yet and we had to refuel in Tokyo, Guam or Wake Island.. stand-by to Honolulu was under $50.. Tickets were traded as legal tender.. If I bought ticket, I owned seat.. No one was interested in who used the ticket until names were checked at boarding.. If someone other than me used my ticket, it was penciled in.. or you could call airport in advance..
In 1972-73, my brother and I would fly from LAX to SFO for $12.75 standby on any airline's midnight flyer and slum around town all weekend.. Thrre was always plenty of unused seats.. Maitre Di at Fairmont always let us eat in kitchen because upscale folks barely touched their food..
every time an airline wanted to add a new destination, they had to also add an underserved community.. ((ie: Redding, CA had a population around 50,000 in early '80s, yet had three major airlines stop multiple times daily)..
1960 is 66 years ago, I was suggesting 1886. It is a hassle to fly today vs 1986. TSA, seat size, all the extras we now pay for. Most of the world does no fly “business class”. Most planes in American have economy, premium economy or first class.
I’m not saying business class doesn’t exist, it just doesn’t exist in Domestic flights.
I am talking about the experience. We obviously don’t have a similar airport.
OK, I was being lazy. I'm seeing from Google that in the 1980s, one way between NY and London was between 260-500, or $1500-$3000 in today's dollars, so a round trip was probably in the range of $3000-$6000 in today's dollars. An economy flight today is more like $1000 round trip, with premium economy about $2500 - $3,000.
Flying was still less safe back then, but perhaps only 8-10X safer per passenger mile, not the 40X comparing against the 60s.
I guess my point is you can fly cheaper now, or you can get a comparable experience by paying more, but still less than the inflation adjusted price.
But you're right that economy seats have gotten much worse since the 80s, and keep getting worse. I'm 6'2" and the seat-to-seat distance is painfully small in economy.
Technology Weirds the World. Jonathan Haidt would agree. So would Franklin Foer who wrote World Without Mind. We do live in weird times for which we are not totally prepared. Actually, not even remotely ready.
Future Shock was probably the first "serious" book I read. My father had a copy; I was 16.
Some time in the '90s I stumbled into it again and skimmed it. Pretty much everything he predicted had come about, except that he thought that everybody would still have lifetime jobs at big corporations.
I remember my grandmother marveling at how much technology had changed in her lifetime.
When she was a little girl, she marveled at music coming out of a box (radio). Horses were still used for transport.
By the end of her life, she would fly all over the country and was playing Bridge on the Internet with people from all over the world.
Technology has slowed down compared to that, but it’s still changing at a remarkable pace.
Always a fascinating read Noah. As an original boomer, I find most of the technology changes since my childhood in the 50’s to be beneficial, especially the increased access to information, including getting to read the the thoughts of someone like you. I have zero sense of direction and gladly let an app direct me to my destination. The biggest damage I see is the ubiquity of social media. It brings out the worst in us humans. I quit years ago, don’t miss it at all and see zero benefit to humanity in having a space in which you can blurt out, without reflection, the first thing that pops into your mind.
I do wonder though what changes, for better or worse, technology will bring to the world my grandkids will see when they reach their 40’s let alone their 80’s.
To be fair to Krugman, even though you quote him as saying that in 2011, he says “going back another 39 years” from 1957, which suggests he originally wrote that passage in 1996. I think you could probably go a bit wider and say that from 1950 to 2000 there wasn’t all that much technological change in daily life. Suburbanization and televisions weren’t quite established in 1950 the way they were in 1957, but they were known. By 2000 you could google something, but you weren’t necessarily likely to get an image, and Wikipedia didn’t exist yet.
Almost all of the change you mention in this article is post 2000, and a lot is post-smartphone.
Between 1950 and 2000 technologies like refrigeration and air conditioning went from being expensive to ubiquitous. My father grew up in that time in a house with a gravity coal furnace, which has been phased out for safer, less polluting, and better options with fans.
In the 70s, my aunt and uncle had phone and electricity pulled to their farm and then eventually could get satellite TV.
The cell phone was invented and became common, which was a remarkable improvement in communication.
The 24/7 news cycle developed with cable news.
Air travel when from a luxury to commonplace.
That’s just off the top of my head. The world (and the USA) changed a lot between 1950 and 2000.
Interesting points, and I do think that the Internet as Library is probably the biggest modern cultural feature. I was able to diagnose and fix my refrigerator's faulty ice maker, and later its faulty processor board, based on youtube videos. I can indeed learn the basics of any topic, and can get multiple approaches to teaching that topic, until I find one that matches my initial understanding of the topic.
And LLMs do make this easier. I can ask it for more details on any part of an explanation that I don't understand, and usually get good information. The main concern going down this road is that the LLMs are not infrequently confused or flat out wrong, so I often end up reading the links associated with a topic.
Google translate is also a bigger deal than one would think. I recently was in Japan, and between google maps' train schedule information and google's translations (and of course lots of signs that are also in English), my wife and I really had no problem navigating Japan while speaking essentially no Japanese, interacting with people who spoke nearly no English.
It's not all a bed of roses. One issue with the LLMs is pretty straightforward -- they're hopeless violators of at least the spirit of intellectual property law. They'll quote significant sections of copyrighted works, reworded to match your query. And this doesn't only apply to textbooks -- when I encounter a paywalled article say in The Economist, I can ask "What does author X in the economist think about topic Y" and get a good summary of the article I can't access. If you prevent people from monetizing their work, that work will stop.
What's weird to me is that for all the significant changes in learning, navigation, information retrieval, translation, etc, these changes have almost no visible impact on the physical world. Aside from automobile and clothing styles, and giant TVs, the main thing that someone from 1975 might notice in the physical world is all these cell phone antennas hanging off of building roofs. But a visitor from 1975 would be totally bewildered by what they see people actually doing.
Interestingly, Claude and ChatGPT have very different attitudes to intellectual property! I was asking Claude about famous lyricists working in American musical theater who were known for their clever rhymes (I gave the example “he made his home in that fish’s abdomen”). It described a lot of clever lyricists like Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim, but it refused to quote any lines, even when I told it that this is surely fair use. When I asked ChatGPT, it just came right out with lines from each of them (but ironically, it often quoted them in ways that lost the rhyme, like its quote of Cole Porter:
“You’re the top!
You’re the Louvre Museum.
You’re a melody from a symphony by Strauss”
Which would have been much better if it quoted:
“You’re the top!
You’re the Coliseum
You’re the top!
You’re the Louvre Museum”)
Sir,
Your essay reads to me not merely as a history of technological change, but as an account of how the habits of attention themselves have been quietly re-engineered. The devices we carry have not only altered what we know, but the pace at which we expect to know it, and perhaps even the manner in which we expect society to respond to our desires for clarity and speed.
What interests me most is the civic implication beneath your observations. A culture formed by instantaneous answers and frictionless navigation may begin to interpret deliberation as delay and institutional resistance as failure. When the rhythms of digital life become the measure of all things, the slower architecture of republican government risks appearing obsolete — not because it has ceased to function, but because its virtues are no longer easily felt.
It may be that the true transformation you describe is neither economic nor technological, but psychological: a reorientation of expectation. If citizens grow accustomed to seamless coordination in the digital sphere, they may come to desire the same seamlessness from political authority, even when such unity carries hidden costs for self-government.
I am curious whether you see this shift as ultimately expanding individual autonomy, or whether it unintentionally prepares the public imagination for more centralized forms of managerial coordination.
— CIVIS AMERICANUS
heck.. in mid 1960s, if I wanted to see the MATTERHORN, I drove by DISNEYLAND..
I was fortunate enough to have survived Vietnam & get a 7% mortgage in 1984 (rates were 14%-17% not much earlier) and use my GI Bill to return to college and retool.. I'd been laboring in retail and - though my wages were the equivalent of $33/hr today - I saw BOTH najor political parties in America pushing to shut-down extraction & direct fabrication segments of America's economy; albeit for different reasons... That would - of course - lead to the RISE OF RETAIL..
Well, that wouldn't do.. There'd be so many displaced workers arising from outsourced direct labor and importation on lumber and minerals, millions of people would enter the retail workforce and suppress wages for a long, long time.. Unfortunately for millions, that's pretty much what happened after mid to late 1980s.. I obtained another degree (BS BA -Accounting), and it's made all the difference in my family's ability to advance, buy homes, have great careers and start their families on solid footing..
What no one is addressing in Congress is that time is compressing and AI/robotics will - very soon I'm afraid - displace tens or hundreds of millions of jobs not specifically necessary to the expansion of these two entwines inevitabilities.. Government is trying to squeeze blood from turnips and collect unpaid educational loans, when - in fact - we should be doing everything possible to train people NIW to work in a world where their current skill sets will no longer be needed.. The educational lians should bypass banks and government can expect to recoup far more taxes than interest forgone.. Additionally, working adults require far less government assistance than the un/underemployed..
If we don't act NOW, it will be too late.. I believe I recently read of an order for 40,000 robots to work in fast food kitchens/drive-thrus.. then there will be the online order-fulfillment automation, the AG sector automation, the robot-repair robots, the AI-design, policing, military robots.. NO INCOME- BASED TAXES means no SS/Medicare, no trickle-down to Sales & Use Taxes, no no property taxes (how would you buy/own property?)
it's a vicious world rushing our was and people aren't paying attention.. We have a government asleep at the wheel.. Thus isn't a time to be worrying about halftime shows at Super Bowls.. But has anyone serious heard great things for employment/business success except from those trying to prop up optimism about stock markets and a whole big beautiful world for all?
Advances in medicine miracles? For who?
More leisure time? Yeah.. I bet (except for the 50% of society engaged in dumpster diving)..
Just some things to think about..