Smartglasses TL

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by whswhs

For example, bronze metallurgy, large scale agriculture, animal traction, shipbuilding, and writing all go with TL1. Iron metallurgy, coinage, mathematical proofs, catapults, and polyremes go with TL2. TL3 isn't as well marked (and I could make a case that it shouldn't be treated as a new TL), but it has water mills and eventually develops heavy horses.

Wind mills. A fair bit of agricultural technology like better crop rotations. In Europe, etc. more seaworthy sailing ships. Paper and the printing press (non-moving type).

Motors and generators, internal combustion, synthetic organic chemistry, radio, and powered flight are TL6.

Also single-use electromechanical computers, though they were horribly expensive and historically used pretty much only for fire control calculations.

[Willy]

Originally Posted by warellis

Weren't AR glasses, like Google's, considered annoying for essentially this?

Exactly the term gl***hole wasn´t coined for nothing. Any device which could makes spying / recording people easily will and IS violating several privacy protection laws, in the US less than europe, but where I live using a dashcam which is recording nonstop is de facto illegal. Only the last short time before crash is allowed to be stored automatically. Now imagine a true AR device.

I guess like smartphones they will be forced by law either to nake a sound when recording and / or a LED is blinking, recording in public without consent would be considered rude at least.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That obviously isn't true, because prior to 1940, TLs lasted much longer than 40 years..

Longer than 20 years covers a lot of territory. The point is when living through it you can't distinguish between late tech x and early tech x+1. It's only once there has been a time gap and the new tech level has had time to mature that it becomes clear.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't think AR glasses are sufficiently basic or sufficiently transformative, technologically or socially.

They could be pretty transformative. Not to say that they will be, but if you look at fictional depictions I think you'll find takes where they are. Basically if you're optimistic about the uptake and performance (usually a requisite for tech being transformative) you have possibilities for the virtual content infiltrating and supplanting the material in ways that mobile devices that aren't perpetually overlaying your FoV don't support.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

They could be pretty transformative. Not to say that they will be, but if you look at fictional depictions I think you'll find takes where they are. Basically if you're optimistic about the uptake and performance (usually a requisite for tech being transformative) you have possibilities for the virtual content infiltrating and supplanting the material in ways that mobile devices that aren't perpetually overlaying your FoV don't support.

I don't think great optimism is necessary. Consider, for example, black powder, which started out with relatively poor efficiency and reliability, but which changed the nature of warfare and fortification; or the early steam engines, which were nowhere near to full efficiency (look into the power yields of compound engines in the later 19th century for comparison), but which still transformed the economy and transportation.

I won't necessarily rule out a transformative effect of AR glasses. But it rather seems to me that they're a further step in a transformation that began with the Internet, especially when it went from an esoteric domain of scientists and engineers to a public realm. It's rather like saying that television was transformative, as contrasted with seeing it as an outgrown of radio.

I think what I mean by "transformative" is that it becomes possible, not simply to do the same kind of thing with greater scale or intensity, but that it becomes possible to do a new kind of thing.

[warellis]

Truth be told our smartphones are superior to AR glasses.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by Willy

I guess like smartphones they will be forced by law either to nake a sound when recording and / or a LED is blinking, recording in public without consent would be considered rude at least.

IIRC Googleglasses had LEDs for that, but there were ways to turn it off/disable it (and when on, it could be annoying enough that someone described it as 'like talking to Locutus of Borg').

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't think great optimism is necessary. Consider, for example, black powder, which started out with relatively poor efficiency and reliability, but which changed the nature of warfare and fortification; or the early steam engines, which were nowhere near to full efficiency (look into the power yields of compound engines in the later 19th century for comparison), but which still transformed the economy and transportation.

Prototype gunpowder didn't transform fortifications, prototype steam engines were only useful in very narrow circumstances. Getting from firecrackers to bombards, from weak coal-devouring mine pump engines to locomotives and practical steamships? That's a progression a lot better than anyone could have been justifiably certain of at the beginning.

Originally Posted by whswhs

I won't necessarily rule out a transformative effect of AR glasses. But it rather seems to me that they're a further step in a transformation that began with the Internet, especially when it went from an esoteric domain of scientists and engineers to a public realm. It's rather like saying that television was transformative, as contrasted with seeing it as an outgrown of radio.

I think what I mean by "transformative" is that it becomes possible, not simply to do the same kind of thing with greater scale or intensity, but that it becomes possible to do a new kind of thing.

I don't think that I recognize where you draw the lines between a new kind of thing and not, but it seems like you're clearly identifying smartphones as not transformative and I think very few people who use the word would agree with that.

[Tom Mazanec]

Would AR contact lenses be TL9?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Prototype gunpowder didn't transform fortifications, prototype steam engines were only useful in very narrow circumstances. Getting from firecrackers to bombards, from weak coal-devouring mine pump engines to locomotives and practical steamships? That's a progression a lot better than anyone could have been justifiably certain of at the beginning.

Prototypes as such aren't relevant. Standard procedure in GURPS is to assign an invention, not to the TL or historical period where prototypes first appear, but to the one where it's on the market, which implies a greater technological maturity.

I'd also say that the very first stages in the development of a new technology, where it has limited and specialized uses, may well be stages at which it's not possible to say, "Okay, this is taking us to a higher TL." I think that expecting it to be otherwise is setting too demanding a standard; I'm not sure that any technologies mature so rapidly that they could be used to define a new TL that was visible as such at the outset. But I think it's clear that the steam engine did have a transformative effect on manufacturing and transportation.

I might myself have put the boundary of TL5 a bit later, not back at the very first steam powered mine pumps, but at Watt's version of the steam engine. That gets you closer to Franklin's theory of electricity, Lavoisier's theory of chemistry, the Voltaic pile, and the movement from putting out to factories.

I don't think that I recognize where you draw the lines between a new kind of thing and not, but it seems like you're clearly identifying smartphones as not transformative and I think very few people who use the word would agree with that.

I don't see how you get to that conclusion. I have not in fact said anything about smart phones one way or the other. There are a lot of inventions—more than I wanted to list for any TL, and often more than I'm knowledgeable enough to name—and my lists were illustrative rather than exhaustive.

TL boundaries are unavoidably approximate; there are just too many inventions that change things. TL6 is characterized by the steam turbine, the electric generator, the internal combustion engine, the automobile, the telephone, radio, the airplane, electric light, motion pictures, and the vacuum tube; those didn't all emerge at the same time.

And then there are combinations of technologies. The smartphone was a combination of the personal computer (enabled by the integrated circuit), the very small UHF radio, and the Internet; but in the same way, the initial inventions of radio transmission (using spark gaps and coherers) and vacuum tube amplification led to the emergence of precisely tuned oscillators, which led around 1920 to the international banning of spark gap radios in the interest of having many different transmitters operating on different legally claimed frequencies. Certainly that was transformative; it created an entire new legal standard, a new form of communication, and a new form of entertainment. But looked at from another angle, it was a refinement of an earlier transformative technology.