Read Online The Half-Life of Facts by Samuel Arbesman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Samuel Arbesman
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its first victory in 1990. Chess and Othello were the next ones people lost to computers, both in 1997, and since 2011 even
Jeopardy!
has become the domain of computer mastery.
Computers can now checkmate better than people, and phrase a correct answer in the form of a question, provinces long thought to be exclusively those of the human mind.
Technology has had a large impact on many other realms of knowledge as well. One that jumps immediately to mind is medicine. Just as our medical knowledge undergoes wholesale changes, so do our medical advances in terms of what is possible. Forexample, Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist of the seventeenth century, observed firsthand the pain of outdated medical knowledge.
Pepys suffered from a massive bladder stone, a mineral formation similar to a kidney stone. At the time, one of the main medical options for such a urinary tract stone too large to be passed was a terrible surgery that involved cutting through the area near the anus (in the vicinity of the scrotum) up into the bladder while the patient was conscious. Performed without anesthesia, the surgery often killed those who chose it, though Pepys survived to chronicle the procedure. But medical advances since the Scientific Revolution have progressed such that these urinary tract stones now can be broken up by sound waves, dissolved, surgically removed under anesthesia, or treated otherwise—with high survival rates.
Similarly, medical advances have progressed so rapidly that travelers from previous centuries, if not decades, would scarcely recognize what we have available to us. Not only does a vaccine exist for smallpox, but the disease has been entirely eradicated from the planet. Childbirth has gone from life threatening to a routine procedure. Bubonic plague, far from capable of generating a modern wave of the Black Death, is easily treatable with antibiotics. In fact, when I spent a summer in Santa Fe, we were told that bubonic plague exists in that region not because we should be scared, but just to make our doctors aware of this possibility when we went back to our homes, so they could administer the readily available drugs to treat this scourge of the Middle Ages.
Polio has gone from a menace of childhood summers to a distant memory. A few years ago I was fortunate to attend an exhibit on polio at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. The disease was presented as something from the history books, and was certainly nothing I had ever experienced, and yet I had a great uncle who walked with a limp due to the disease, and my wife’s aunt had it as a child. Reading of people’s experiences with the disease, the fear, and the iron lungs was astounding. But through medical advances, polio is now generally regarded in the developed world as a curious artifact of the past.
Technology can even affect economic facts. Computer chips, in addition to becoming more powerful, have gone from prohibitively expensive to disposable. Similarly, while aluminum used to be the most valuable metal on Earth, it plummeted in price due to technological advances that allowed it to be extracted cheaply. We now wrap our leftovers in it.
But occasionally, changes in medical or technological advances don’t just alter our lifestyles dramatically, such as in the case of the advent of the Internet. Sometimes they have the potential for fundamentally changing the very nature of humanity. We can see the true extremes of the possibilities of change in the facts of technology by focusing on our life spans.
There has been a rapid increase in the average life span of an individual in the developed world over the past hundred years. This has occurred through a combination of lowered infant mortality and better hygiene, among other beneficial medical and public health practices. These advances have added about 0.4 years to Americans’ total expected life spans in each year since 1960. But this increase in life span is itself increasing;
Jeopardy!
has become the domain of computer mastery.
Computers can now checkmate better than people, and phrase a correct answer in the form of a question, provinces long thought to be exclusively those of the human mind.
Technology has had a large impact on many other realms of knowledge as well. One that jumps immediately to mind is medicine. Just as our medical knowledge undergoes wholesale changes, so do our medical advances in terms of what is possible. Forexample, Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist of the seventeenth century, observed firsthand the pain of outdated medical knowledge.
Pepys suffered from a massive bladder stone, a mineral formation similar to a kidney stone. At the time, one of the main medical options for such a urinary tract stone too large to be passed was a terrible surgery that involved cutting through the area near the anus (in the vicinity of the scrotum) up into the bladder while the patient was conscious. Performed without anesthesia, the surgery often killed those who chose it, though Pepys survived to chronicle the procedure. But medical advances since the Scientific Revolution have progressed such that these urinary tract stones now can be broken up by sound waves, dissolved, surgically removed under anesthesia, or treated otherwise—with high survival rates.
Similarly, medical advances have progressed so rapidly that travelers from previous centuries, if not decades, would scarcely recognize what we have available to us. Not only does a vaccine exist for smallpox, but the disease has been entirely eradicated from the planet. Childbirth has gone from life threatening to a routine procedure. Bubonic plague, far from capable of generating a modern wave of the Black Death, is easily treatable with antibiotics. In fact, when I spent a summer in Santa Fe, we were told that bubonic plague exists in that region not because we should be scared, but just to make our doctors aware of this possibility when we went back to our homes, so they could administer the readily available drugs to treat this scourge of the Middle Ages.
Polio has gone from a menace of childhood summers to a distant memory. A few years ago I was fortunate to attend an exhibit on polio at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. The disease was presented as something from the history books, and was certainly nothing I had ever experienced, and yet I had a great uncle who walked with a limp due to the disease, and my wife’s aunt had it as a child. Reading of people’s experiences with the disease, the fear, and the iron lungs was astounding. But through medical advances, polio is now generally regarded in the developed world as a curious artifact of the past.
Technology can even affect economic facts. Computer chips, in addition to becoming more powerful, have gone from prohibitively expensive to disposable. Similarly, while aluminum used to be the most valuable metal on Earth, it plummeted in price due to technological advances that allowed it to be extracted cheaply. We now wrap our leftovers in it.
But occasionally, changes in medical or technological advances don’t just alter our lifestyles dramatically, such as in the case of the advent of the Internet. Sometimes they have the potential for fundamentally changing the very nature of humanity. We can see the true extremes of the possibilities of change in the facts of technology by focusing on our life spans.
There has been a rapid increase in the average life span of an individual in the developed world over the past hundred years. This has occurred through a combination of lowered infant mortality and better hygiene, among other beneficial medical and public health practices. These advances have added about 0.4 years to Americans’ total expected life spans in each year since 1960. But this increase in life span is itself increasing;
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