Smartglasses TL

[Tom Mazanec]

Would AR glasses (as are in R&D now) be late TL8 or early TL9?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

Would AR glasses (as are in R&D now) be late TL8 or early TL9?

Mid-to-late. They've been available commercially for many years now.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

Would AR glasses (as are in R&D now) be late TL8 or early TL9?

Late TL8 and early TL9 are the same thing for almost all purposes. Truly revolutionary advancements in technology are extremely rare and smartglasses are not that revolutionary.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Late TL8 and early TL9 are the same thing for almost all purposes. Truly revolutionary advancements in technology are extremely rare and smartglasses are not that revolutionary.

I think your basic principle is misconceived. If you can't identify a revolutionary new technology you shouldn't be talking about a new TL.

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. Francis Bacon cited black powder, navigation (the compass and full-rigged ships), and the printing press as new advances, effectively calling out TL4. Steam power, finding the longitude, and the electric battery and telegraph give you TL5. Motors and generators, internal combustion, synthetic organic chemistry, radio, and powered flight are TL6. Nuclear reactions, radar, transistors, and computers are TL7, and integrated circuits, the Internet, and gene sequencing are TL8. If you can't point at anything equally transformative coming into general use, I don't think it's time to talk about TL9.

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

So what could be TL9? Fusion reactions with positive net energy yield? A basic change in computer design that gets us past the limits of Moore's Law? New materials that let us build an orbital elevator? Human cloning? Routine brain/computer interfacing? None of those seems necessarily to be "physically impossible" in the sense of requiring us to discover new natural laws (they wouldn't be ^, in GURPS terms), but I think any of them would result in transformative changes in technology and society if it were adopted.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by whswhs

So what could be TL9? Fusion reactions with positive net energy yield? A basic change in computer design that gets us past the limits of Moore's Law? New materials that let us build an orbital elevator? Human cloning? Routine brain/computer interfacing? None of those seems necessarily to be "physically impossible" in the sense of requiring us to discover new natural laws (they wouldn't be ^, in GURPS terms), but I think any of them would result in transformative changes in technology and society if it were adopted.

Agreed, I also think a TL increase is the result not of something that is just a revolutionary development but requires something that is truly society transforming.

[PTTG]

If I was going to pick upcoming technologies that would be the kind of revolution that suggests a new TL (and therefore skill penalties when working with one skill instead of the other), here's a few that come to mind:

Fully Reusable Rocketry: We are only really beginning with this. Once we have several separate organizations using reusable upper stages, it would be fully locked down.

Quantum Computing: Not really out of the lab yet. It's got a long way to go until every computer has at least a few q-bits for specialized encryption (or something).

Fusion Power: Pretty close! It's safe to say that D-T fusion (extremely easy) is the first step. That has a lot of drawbacks, and it might be hard to make it economically attractive for a while. It might not be truly 'revolutionary' until pure Deuterium, or ideally, Proton-Boron fusion becomes possible. So we may have fusion power for years before the fusion revolution actually happens.

Learning algorithms: We have really good ones and enough processing power to make it work. They're all over the place and are fundamental for a lot of commercial programs. I would even go so far as to say that someone who didn't understand at least the basics of neural networks would have a lot of trouble reproducing many functions in modern programming. I think it's already mature, at least in an "early TL-9" sense.

RNA Vaccines: The transformation of vaccine research in the past few years is huge. Looking forward to advanced uses of this technology, but the basic principle is outstanding.

So if we take those as marking the dividing line between 8 and 9, and acknowledging that 1: those lines are very, very blurry, and 2: Only some of those are used in the RAW... We are presently very, very late TL8, as a few TL9 inventions are being developed just as how late TL5 sees the beginning of TL6 innovations.

As for Smartglasses, they are very much based entirely on TL8 principles. I agree that there's nothing revolutionary about them. If they rely on advanced vision systems to highlight objects, make it a late-TL8 product.

[warellis]

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

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I think your basic principle is misconceived. If you can't identify a revolutionary new technology you shouldn't be talking about a new TL..

Consider the transition between TL6 and TL7. On midnight at the end of 1939 did was all the old stuff obsolete and we were suddenly churning out jet planes, automatic transmissions, colour tvs and nuclear reactors? The line between the TLs isn't a sharp hard edged thing. The point to the TL mechanic is put a barrier of comprehension between people of a certain technological background and technology that is more than 20 years more advanced than anything they've seen.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Consider the transition between TL6 and TL7. On midnight at the end of 1939 did was all the old stuff obsolete and we were suddenly churning out jet planes, automatic transmissions, colour tvs and nuclear reactors? The line between the TLs isn't a sharp hard edged thing. The point to the TL mechanic is put a barrier of comprehension between people of a certain technological background and technology that is more than 20 years more advanced than anything they've seen.

That obviously isn't true, because prior to 1940, TLs lasted much longer than 40 years. An ancient Athenian could surely understand the technology of the Roman Empire under Augustus or Marcus Aurelius, and quite possibly that of the realms of Charlemagne or William the Conqueror.

The sharp boundary you refer to is a straw man. For one thing, it's standard GURPS doctrine that many of the technologies of earlier TLs remain in use at later TLs. Suturing wounds goes back at least to Roman military medicine, and perhaps much further, but it's still a surgical technique.

But more broadly, to say that the use of steam engines as a source of mechanical power was a substantial innovation does not require us to say that the adoption of steam took place suddenly, in an instant, with all other power sources vanishing. Factories were still using water power for a long time after James Watt. But steam engines were a new option for doing things that had already been done such as spinning cloth, and were also an option for doing new things such as powering a boat or a locomotive.

[Farmer]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Consider the transition between TL6 and TL7. On midnight at the end of 1939 did was all the old stuff obsolete and we were suddenly churning out jet planes, automatic transmissions, colour tvs and nuclear reactors? The line between the TLs isn't a sharp hard edged thing. The point to the TL mechanic is put a barrier of comprehension between people of a certain technological background and technology that is more than 20 years more advanced than anything they've seen.

Right. The TLs represent an average level of technology for the period. The edges are mostly very fuzzy, with odd, individual items introducing hard lines or large gaps.

In the field of smart glasses, there's significant gap between consumer and industrial usage and intent. As part of an industrial or scientific/medical IoT environment, they have much more impact and further potential than in the consumer or entertainment space.

I would say they are late TL8, but as uses and environments are built from scratch to integrate with them, rather than trying to squeeze them into existing spaces, you'll see some further realisation of potential that could genuinely move them into the TL9 range, distinctly advanced over what is available now. Right now, TL8.