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technology.md

@@ -8,6 +8,8 @@ Technology (from Greek tekhnologia, "systematic treatment of [art](art.md)", als
 
 **Knowledge of [older](old.md) technology gets lost extremely quickly in society** -- this is a crucial realization that follows a naive idea of the young man who by his inexperience believes that we somehow pertain knowledge of all technology that's been invented from dawn of man until today. In [history](history.md) our society has always only held knowledge of technology it was CURRENTLY ACTIVELY USING; knowledge of decades old technology no longer in use only stays in hands and heads of extremely few individuals and perhaps in some obscure [books](book.md) that ARE UNREADABLE to most, sometimes to none; yet older technology oftentimes gets forgotten for good. For instance renaissance had to largely reinvent many arts and sciences of making building and statues of antiquity because middle ages have simply forgotten them. A more recent, very absurd example is provided by [NASA](nasa.md)'s efforts to recreate THEIR OWN old rocket engines: you would think that since they literally have detailed documentation of those engines, they'd be able to simple make them again, but that's not the case because the small undocumented (yet crucial) [know-how](know_how.md) of the people who built the engines decades ago was lost with those individuals who in the meantime died or retired; NASA had to start a ginormous project to reinvent its own relatively recent technology. The same is happening in the field of [programming](programming.md): [modern](modern.md) [soydevs](soydev.md) just CANNOT create as efficient software as hackers back then as due to normalization of wasting computing resources they threw away the knowledge of [optimization](optimization.md) technique and [wisdom](unix_philosophy.md) in favor of bullshit such as "soft skills" and memorizing one billion genders and personal pronouns. One might naively think that e.g. since our agriculture is highly efficient and advanced due to all the immense complexity of our current machines, simple farming without machines would be a child's play for us, however the opposite is true: we no longer know how to farm without machines. If a [collapse](collpase.md) comes, we are quite simply fucked.
 
+*Amara's law* states that people tend to overestimate short-term effects of new technology while underestimating its long-term effects. Any new, emerging groundbreaking technology is followed by hype and we universally like to predict we're about to see the world turned on its head in the span of one to two years, to witness immediate solutions to our most pressing problems and/or a [swift doom](collapse.md) to the entire civilization. Quick changes on global scale, however, occur rarely, if ever -- the initial excitement over a breakthrough in laboratories falls off and then bringing new technology from laboratories to practice (and subsequently spreading it over the whole world) takes decades to centuries. It is said the [future](future.md) is already here, just not distributed uniformly: we already have autonomously driving electric cars with human-like [artificial intelligence](ai.md), but the most common means of personal transport in most of the world is probably still a bicycle. With the discovery of nuclear energy we thought all the world's energy problems would soon be gone, or that a swift nuclear war would take us back to the stone age, and with moonlanding we predicted establishment of Moon cities in a few years and holidays on Mars soon after. Indeed that did not happen, but space technology, such as satellites, now power instantaneous world communication and the one essential part of our everyday lives that not even the sci-fi authors back then predicted: the [Internet](internet.md), that which now affects our mental health, politics and world wide [culture](culture.md) ([memes](meme.md), social networks, ...). We must remember this pattern as it will most likely repeat with currently emerging technology too, such as the general [AI](ai.md), nuclear fusion or [quantum](quantum.md) computing.
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 ## See Also
 
 - [science](science.md)