I think that this article does discredit how much smartphones have accomplished. Now anybody with a modern smartphone has a decent camera. Anybody has access to full Google search results in their pocket. It's possible that soon your smartphone will be your laptop (see Ubuntu Edge, and augmented reality setups that are being developed). Smartphones may one day be able to form their own meshnet using bluetooth.
Not to say that we shouldn't move forward with hyperloop, or at least build a proof-of-concept somewhere. At the proposed price for hyperloop, you could replace all existing Amtrak transportation in America with a hyperloop and still pay about the same amount for a ticket.
>I think that this article does discredit how much smartphones have accomplished. Now anybody with a modern smartphone has a decent camera. Anybody has access to full Google search results in their pocket. It's possible that soon your smartphone will be your laptop (see Ubuntu Edge, and augmented reality setups that are being developed). Smartphones may one day be able to form their own meshnet using bluetooth.
I think the article and even you underestimate the impact of smart phones and mobile devices. There has been an incredible windfall of technologies, financed by the exponential growth of the smart phone market:
* Power saving microprocessors
* Ultra high resolution display technology
* MEMS sensors
* High power density batteries
* Many layer PCBs
* Size reduction of passive SMD components (0402 and smaller)
* High rate wireless transmission
* High fracture strengths glass
And many more I am probably forgetting.
All these technologies enable innovation in smaller markets that would otherwise not have been able to finance this incredible development.
For example Quadrocopters, cheap drones sold as toys but stuffed with incredible technology, would be multi-million secret military projects without the smart phone industry.
I enjoy having a search engine in my pocket (though I'd prefer if it weren't Google), and the ability to haul a stack of 600 and counting articles, and a few score books, while nary putting a crease in my chinos.
But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable.
If you were to look at the inventions and advances of the last quarter of the 19th and first quart of the 20th centuries, I suspect you'd find a few more significant items than smartphones: electric light, telephones, phonographs, radio, television (just under the wire), indoor plumbing (made possible by central heating, so your pipes wouldn't freeze), air conditioning, and even the first practical computers. Oh, and airplanes.
If you had the choice of technology since 1925 or before, I think you'd go with the latter choice.
> But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable.
Convenience is a big deal. There were books before the printing press (and if you want to argue that they weren't like printed books, then you're invalidating the premise of your argument that the books, telephones of a century ago are like the smartphone ones we have today), and all the printing press did was add a certain degree of convenience in their production, dissemination - and this was a big deal.
"But we had books and encyclopedias and telegraphs and telephones and phonographs a century ago. Just ... not as distributed, or portable."
Or as fast, or as comprehensive, or as cheap per unit of accessible data, or as connected, or as quick to improve and update, or as multi-functional, or as useful, and so on.
It's the difference between having "food" as a barbarian in 10,000 BC and having an integrated and highly advanced system of feeding an entire civilization of 300 million people. That is to say, the difference between night and day.
What had a bigger impact on the availability of information? The laptop / tablet and Google, or Gutenberg's press?
Prior to Gutenberg, if you wanted a copy of something, it had to be copied out by hand (often with errors introduced). Copies of a great book might be numbered in the double digits. Newspapers didn't exist. Few people were literate, let alone possessed a library. By the 19th century you had penny dreadfuls, mass-market novels, and literacy rates in some countries approaching 100% (Sweden, Finland, and Estonia in particular -- England as late as 1843 had a literacy rate of 67% among men and around 55% for women).
The marginal benefit of additional technology, as with all marginal returns with stunningly few exceptions (Moore's law chief among them) is increasingly low, while the costs of its discovery increases in real energy terms.
You might be able to replace some of the long-distance Amtrak lines with such a system, but over half of Amtrak's ridership is on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington. Those trains make stops at all the major cities (and some minor ones) along the way. This is why the "Acela Express" is high speed in theory only. In order to keep the same ridership, any new train would have to do the same thing.
Yeah, replacing all trains is impractical in densely-populated areas that are already well-suited to classic railways, but Hyperloop would make it possible to see similar numbers riding to and from central states.
Also, I bet NYC-Washington or NYC-Boston hyperloops would pay for themselves in two weeks.
You don't seem to be taking into account that a much faster and cheaper train would vastly increase the ridership between any two points. If it was $30 and half an hour to downtown LA, I would visit my brother down there every other week. As it is, we see each other every few months.
Not to say that we shouldn't move forward with hyperloop, or at least build a proof-of-concept somewhere. At the proposed price for hyperloop, you could replace all existing Amtrak transportation in America with a hyperloop and still pay about the same amount for a ticket.
To me, that's worth investing in.