Does anybody here remember the Industrial Revolution?

It was a time of massive change. The natural order of things, which had 
stood of test of time for many centuries, was suddenly swept away. 
Bizarre, futuristic new machines made become possible to mass produce 
goods in hitherto-unimaginable quantities. Steam locomotives made and 
broke the fortunes of entire communities. Suddenly distant towns were 
just a few minutes away. Engineering feat such as massive bridges and 
towering buildings became a common sight. Impassible ravines could now 
be tamed by them. The sky itself seemed almost within human reach.

Even today, people still romanticise about the steam engines. The 
locomotives, the massive winding engines, even steam-powered computers.

But, you know, we actually *have* locomotives today! And in a sense, 
they're much *better* than what we had before. They're faster, quieter, 
more reliable, and require far fewer people to operate. And yet, nobody 
really gets excited about electric trains. It's just "too easy". 
Likewise, we have electric motors that output far more torque or have a 
much higher top-speed than any steam engine, and take up a fraction of 
the space. Some of them are remotely operated, so you don't need 
technicians at all. And yet... nobody finds this impressive. I guess for 
shock and awe, bigger really *is* better...



I think I myself may have lived through a different revolution. When I 
was a kid, computers were small plastic boxy things that you hook up to 
your TV and play computer games on. Graphics were blurry, blocky and 
garishly colourful. The 8-bit era of computer graphics is well documented.

Most people spent the next ten years looking at 8- or 16-colour 
graphics. But I had access to an Amiga; my mind was blown by 
4,096-colour images and stereophonic digital audio. With enough 
simplification, trickery and down-right hacking-the-metal, you could 
find games that generate those "oh my god, it looks like a real 
photograph!" moments.

Today, my *actual photographs* are digital images!

Flashback may have been limited to 32 colours, but the fluidity of the 
main character's motion was astonishingly life-like.

We had had little digital music disks for years, of course. But 
everybody dreamed dizzily of the day when a digital *video* disk might 
exist, allowing perfect pausing, instant chapter access, and all the 
other trippy stuff that CDs already do. But the technology of the time 
just couldn't quite handle it. As Amiga Format described it, "the 
difficulty is to come up with a compression algorithm sophisticated to 
squeeze all the data onto the disk, yet simple enough to decompress in 
real-time".

The solution? Well, Moore's law. Computers got faster. Today you can buy 
a $15 computer that can decode HD video in realtime without issue.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are all living in the future! We have cheap 
audio and video digitising hardware. We have digital films and TV. We 
have computer games that render a fully-interactive 3D world of stunning 
realism in real-time. We have 3D TV. And nobody really cares any more.

That's the thing. Ten years ago, the idea of being able to actually 
*edit* video on a mere *home computer* was... shocking. Sensational. 
Stunning. Only people with expensive TV studios can actually *edit* 
video. Hell, a camera to merely *shoot* video costs thousands of pounds, 
so only the very richest people can afford one.

Yet today, a bunch of bored college students can make a 
blockbuster-style full length feature film in their spare time! Complete 
with (what appear to be) big-budget special effects, such as lengthy 
space battles in full CGI.

You would *think* people would be shouting from the rooftops in awe of 
how utterly epic all of this is... But that's the thing. The revolution 
has happened. It's over. We're here now. If I could show my teenage self 
a guy watching TV live over the Internet, I think my little head would 
have exploded. But today, it's a case of "been there, done that". Now it 
isn't *hard* any more, it just doesn't seem *impressive*. What was once 
futuristic science fiction and become mundane familiar reality.

All this technology, and we use it to make viral cat videos. (Which are 
all seemingly copies of each other, I might add...)



Even the prodigious march of CPU power no longer seems to impress 
anyone. For one thing, we seem to have hit some kind of a wall with how 
fast you can make a CPU run before it requires an active refrigeration 
system. So now they want to just add more cores instead. I'm sure they 
*could* quite easily gives us not two cores or four cores, but twenty 
cores if there was a market for it. But most workloads simply aren't 
very parallel.

And you know what? I'm not sure it matters. I think if you could take 
the average computer user and somehow make their processor suddenly able 
to execute single-threaded code 10x faster, THEY WOULDN'T EVEN NOTICE! 
Because it seems to me that today, your PC is almost always waiting for 
disk or network access. The CPU is hardly ever the thing you're waiting 
for. (Hardcore gaming aside... and even then, most of the hard work is 
GPU-limited. GPUs, BTW, have a bazillion cores and it's trivial to add 
more...)

The party is over, my friends. We have all this sensational technology, 
and nobody even seems to notice any more.

It's as if technology that can just barely manage to perform a given 
task is somehow "more impressive" than technology that can trivially 
perform it with ease. Even though, logically, the latter is obviously 
far superior...

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