TL 9 prototypes

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by weby

And a general comment on the projected TL 9: some of the technologies listed there are not really likely to be that way due to different tech development than guessed in 2006.

Even more than historical tech levels, future tech levels are best understood as tools for answering questions about "what stuff can I get?" which match particular types of story. If you want a solid model, go to academic books. Most games set in the future are based around technology which we know won't happen, such as faster-than-life travel or ray guns. For games and other stories, "is it cool?" is a better question than "is it the most likely future?"

If there is ever a GURPS 5th edition, I suspect it will say that the world in 2022 was in a different Tech Level than the world in 1980 (ubiqutous networked computers make for different kinds of stories than desktops and servers), and its picture of the first future tech level will be different than GURPS 4th edition's.

[weby]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Even more than historical tech levels, future tech levels are best understood as tools for answering questions about "what stuff can I get?" which match particular types of story. If you want a solid model, go to academic books. Most games set in the future are based around technology which we know won't happen, such as faster-than-life travel or ray guns. For games and other stories, "is it cool?" is a better question than "is it the most likely future?"

Indeed, but I meant more the non superscience stuff. Like the thing where electric cars are TL 10 tech, not TL 9 and the lack of computers everywhere, like all communicators are indicated to be only that and not computers with a communicator that seems to be the norm already in most new tech today.

If there is ever a GURPS 5th edition, I suspect it will say that the world in 2022 was in a different Tech Level than the world in 1980 (ubiqutous networked computers make for different kinds of stories than desktops and servers), and its picture of the first future tech level will be different than GURPS 4th edition's.

Indeed. And even more than being networked, but the fact that they are also mobile devices that you carry with you everywhere and can access all the worlds information and communicate with a large part of all people in the world from middle of wilderness.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Willy

Nope, definitely no. Because if you look into the past and see where the industrial revoloution really starts, it goes nearly hand in hand with big medical progress, namely vaccination.

Small pox alone killed or incapacitated so many persons in the midst of their years there was always a lack of skilled workers, not to mention that taking care for crippled family members took a lot of resources. Many jobs needs years of study and learning especially jobs who bring the society forward, now that persons had a good chance to finish learning and more medics, scientists and engineers brought further progress.

There were some studies about the effect, and all say it was a driver of industrial revolution.

They happened at (roughly) the same time, but vaccination did not cause the Industrial Revolution. A number of factors came together in Britain to trigger it, but cheap energy and expensive labor were key factors. The development of materials strong enough to contain steam under pressure was an important development, as was the realization that England had huge reserves of coal which represented a vast energy source. That combination made industrialization as we know it possible, and the cost of labor made it profitable (among other reasons). Other secondary factors included the fact that England/Scotland are island nations, with ready access to the sea to export their products and import necessary feedstocks.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't agree with that. Certainly energy was the key to the technological revolutions from around 1700 to 1950, say. But information has been the key to many technological changes since 1900 and certainly since 1975 or so.

But those technological changes haven't actually changed all that much, not compared to the real change-tech from two generations ago.

We keep hearing predictions about the Big Stuff that the information tech 'revolution' is going to bring about, but it keeps turning out to be mostly hype. The IT revolution hasn't increased productivity all that much, and to the degree it has the result has mostly been job losses. The Industrial Revolution wiped out jobs too, but it rapidly created vastly more jobs, often more remunerative, and of whole new types. The so-called information revolution, so far, just hasn't done that.

I cited the enormous changes that happened between 1882 and 1932, a period of 50 years, upthread. Daily life changed radically in that period, at least in the urban areas of the West, and even the backward areas were aware of the changes. The speed and ease of travel, communication, warfare, manufacturing, all changed in transformative ways between 1882 and 1932.

For an interesting indicative comparison, I recently had occasion to watch some old episodes of a TV show from 50 years ago, Emergency. Those episodes first aired in 1972, half a century ago, the same time gap as from 1882 and 1932.

What was interesting about it was how familiar the world of 1972 would be to a young person of today, technologically and economically. Yeah, it would look a little quaint. Yeah, the phones had spiral cords and were attached to the base set. Some of the equipment was a little cruder and less fancy, but it mostly did familiar things in familiar ways. Transportation? Pretty much identical to today. Weaponry? Not much change. Daily life? People doing pretty much familiar work in familiar ways with mostly familiar tools.

Yeah, clerical work was done on a typewriter instead of a PC. So what? It's still the same basic work. Communication was less convenient, since people didn't carry a phone around with them all the time, but not all that much slower if you were in an office or a hospital. Yeah, if you wanted to take a picture you used a Polaroid rather than a compact little electronic device...but again, so what? Not life changing or world changing or revolutionary in any serious sense.

A fictional story set in 1882, though, would be a different world to a young urban reader in 1932.

The IT 'revolution', and the related microelectronic developments, just haven't produced the kind of changes steam and coal and petroleum and uranium did, not so far.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

But those technological changes haven't actually changed all that much, not compared to the real change-tech from two generations ago.

We keep hearing predictions about the Big Stuff that the information tech 'revolution' is going to bring about, but it keeps turning out to be mostly hype. The IT revolution hasn't increased productivity all that much, and to the degree it has the result has mostly been job losses. The Industrial Revolution wiped out jobs too, but it rapidly created vastly more jobs, often more remunerative, and of whole new types. The so-called information revolution, so far, just hasn't done that.

You are asking the wrong questions. Characters in the 2010s are almost never isolated from one another. They can be expected to have and use portable networked computers (whereas in the 1990s those were for geeks and techies). They can do most research from anywhere with wifi and cell service rather than having to visit libraries, newspaper morgues, and other places where scenes may happen. A basic video surveillance system can eg. trace the entire path of a missing product through a department store several days ago in the middle of a shift in glorious detail (not provide a few seconds of grainy image if someone is willing to spend a lot of time in a back room with a table full of video tapes). Guns in the 2010s are more likely to have fancy optics and electronics than guns in the 1980s, and the fad for concealed carry in the USA has made compact handguns lighter and deadlier and cheaper than ever. Cars essentially do not break down on ashpalt roads (unlike cars in the mid 20th century) and have many other improvements. World-walkers and time travellers and Highlanders would be thankful that high-quality replicas of a wide variety of low-tech kit are commercially available (whereas in the 1990s you had to know a guy and have it custom made for more money and less quality). Those all make for different stories with different character capabilities and constraints than a story set in the 1980s.

Tech levels are about answering "what stuff can I get?" and "is this the same kind of story?"

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

For an interesting indicative comparison, I recently had occasion to watch some old episodes of a TV show from 50 years ago, Emergency. Those episodes first aired in 1972, half a century ago, the same time gap as from 1882 and 1932.

.

I don't have to watch that today. I watched it when it was new. I find the world of 1972 to be so different socially that it might as well have been another palnet.

In 1972 the people I knew and interacted with lived in the same town I did. It was possible to call people on the telephone who lived farther away but it was literally too expensive for middle class people to do as much as they probably wanted.

Come the late 90s and I get a computer and hook it up to the internet with a dial-up modem and and all of a sudden I'm interacting with people all over the face of the Earth.

I hit a link once on facebook that showed me a map of where all my Facebook "Friends" lived and it was pretty thin in Africa but covered all the other continents and major islands too.

Then there's access to information and if I can't find out literally anything I want to know I can probably do research on it.

Commerce has been revolutionized too. In 1972 if you wanted soemthing your choices were moslty go to town and buy what they had there or do without. You could order things by mail but that only worked if you could find a catalog and it usually took weeks.

No, the past is a foreign country and the "country" of 1972 was small and quaint.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

BI cited the enormous changes that happened between 1882 and 1932, a period of 50 years, upthread. Daily life changed radically in that period, at least in the urban areas of the West, and even the backward areas were aware of the changes. The speed and ease of travel, communication, warfare, manufacturing, all changed in transformative ways between 1882 and 1932.

For an interesting indicative comparison, I recently had occasion to watch some old episodes of a TV show from 50 years ago, Emergency. Those episodes first aired in 1972, half a century ago, the same time gap as from 1882 and 1932.

If we go by years (a very bad idea) that entire period (1882 and 1932) is TL6. And yet there is a very high variance. The real world Europe of 1000 and 1300 may be largely TL3 (1000 likely has Medicine — TL1) but there were things known and built in 1300 that didn't exist in 1000.

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

What was interesting about it was how familiar the world of 1972 would be to a young person of today, technologically and economically.

It all depends on what 50 year period you are looking at. The Europe of 1320 was way different economically from that of 1360. The world in general was different in 1770 from what it would be in 1820.

The 50 year period between 1900 and 1950 is effectively a sea change in both technology and economics. The there are places where time seemed to stand still — like so many of those small towns that seem to be stuck in time.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Commerce has been revolutionized too. In 1972 if you wanted soemthing your choices were moslty go to town and buy what they had there or do without. You could order things by mail but that only worked if you could find a catalog and it usually took weeks.

No, the past is a foreign country and the "country" of 1972 was small and quaint.

Ubiquitous online shopping is another good point. "Find and meet the eccentric dealer in obscure goods" is a common way for characters to show off their skills and then have a scene. In the 2010s characters sometimes have to visit the ornery gunsmith or very gay rare book dealer, but its not necessary as often as it once was (and the gunsmith almost certainly has a Facebook page advertising his skills, or at least lots of endorsements from strangers on the Internet).

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I don't have to watch that today. I watched it when it was new. I find the world of 1972 to be so different socially that it might as well have been another palnet.

In 1972 the people I knew and interacted with lived in the same town I did. It was possible to call people on the telephone who lived farther away but it was literally too expensive for middle class people to do as much as they probably wanted.

Come the late 90s and I get a computer and hook it up to the internet with a dial-up modem and and all of a sudden I'm interacting with people all over the face of the Earth.

I hit a link once on facebook that showed me a map of where all my Facebook "Friends" lived and it was pretty thin in Africa but covered all the other continents and major islands too.

Then there's access to information and if I can't find out literally anything I want to know I can probably do research on it.

Commerce has been revolutionized too. In 1972 if you wanted soemthing your choices were moslty go to town and buy what they had there or do without. You could order things by mail but that only worked if you could find a catalog and it usually took weeks.

No, the past is a foreign country and the "country" of 1972 was small and quaint.

None of which amounts to any radical change.

Yes, communications are more convenient and cheaper. You can order online and get stuff delivered to your house more conveniently (but note that this does nothing much to increase overall productivity, and wipes out retail jobs, to it's a doubtful overall economic benefit).

But we still live our daily lives pretty much the way we did fifty years ago. It really doesn't matter very much, most of the time, if you have Facebook 'friends' scattered all over the planet.

But if Facebook vanished this afternoon, most people's daily life would go on unimpeded. It would be an inconvenience, not a major loss.

Now compare the changes from 1882 and 1932. In 1882 the speed of transportation was set, for most people, by the horse. Refrigeration sort of existed, and was just starting to be used for commercial transport at scale. Trains certainly existed and were a wonder of the age, but wagons were the main mode of settlement westward still.

Over the course of the next 50 years, the individual world expanded in space and time radically, and in ways that mattered. It became possible to store perishable food conveniently and cheaply for days and weeks at home. The health hazard of horse droppings in the streets in the major cities, which was a major problem throughout most of history, essentially vanished because of the i.c. engine, and the train/truck/refrigeration combo permitted fresh food to be shipped across the continent in days or less.

The car revolutionized individual freedom and convenience in ways that make the Internet and cell phones pale. Suddenly it was possible for an individual to travel at will at distances and speeds inconceivable just a few decades before. The car increased individual personal freedom in ways that are almost incomprehensible to us today.

The emergence of the new industries associated with cars, mass manufacturing, air travel, and the interconnectivity those technologies in turn permitted created huge numbers of new, high paying jobs, transformed the national culture and national politics, and moved vast numbers of people off the farm and into towns and cities, transforming their daily lives in the process.

Radio brought an intimacy and immediacy of communication without precedent in human history. It and the telephone together were the biggest development in communication since the invention of the printing press. Suddenly you could hear from, and speak with, other people around the world in real time with an immediacy formerly possible on in face-to-face conversation. The convenience of the communications improvements since then are only a shadow of the impact of that!

Radio revolutionized politics almost overnight, in a way the Internet hasn't equaled yet. Voters could actually hear the voice of the politician running or the official who governed, directly and immediately, across the entire nation at once, without leaving their homes. Even the advent of TV was a lesser impact than the initial effect of radio.

The impact of the suddenness of the changes then, and its scale, is all but impossible for us to grasp emotionally today, because nothing in our experience compares to it. It's difficult for us to put ourselves into the mindset of a person in 1882, precisely because those huge changes happened in the subsequent fifty years.

Putting ourselves in the mindset of 1972 is easy, and it causes us to overestimate the significance of the changes since then. A 20 year old in 2022, teleported back to 1972, would find it socially weird, but he could function just fine in it. He could drive the cars, work the phones (he might need a few minutes to get used to the dialing, and the phone book would feel clunky and strange, but he could use them fine after a few minutes practice), refrigerators, TVs, radios, all work about the same way (no satellite radio, no Internet, but what was there he could use easily), if he needed to travel cross country he could get a ticket and fly there the same then as now (assuming he has the money, of course), and about as fast. The yellow pages are less convenient than looking up providers on the Internet, but they were there and they worked. He'd need a TV Guide subscription, which would again feel weird and clumsy but be no issue to use. No Facebook pages for business, but he could telephone them and probably no robotic call waiting (which he might even consider an improvement on 2022, actually).

Most of the same jobs exist then as now, and he would even find that some jobs existed then that he could do that are gone in 2022. Supermarkets work the same, gas stations work the same, movie theatres work the same, etc.

(Yes, there are trivial detail differences: no credit card readers at gas stations, the cars get worse mileage, coffee mostly just means coffee, not hazelnut frapuchino-banana liquid candy, etc. But nothing that would keep him from being able to function just fine.)

Some medical procedures are unavailable (or only to the very rich) in 1972, but for most practical purposes he can get the same care in 1972 and 2022, for most ordinary needs. His dentist might have to give him a bridge instead of an implant if he has a tooth pulled, but he can get his teeth cared for reasonably well. Most wounds are treatable. Antibiotics are available and in some cases actually work more reliably in 1972 than in 2022. There have been some modest medical changes in everyday life since 1972, but most of what he can get now he could get then.

Now we teleport a 20 year old urban dweller in 1932 to 1882.

He quite possibly has never ridden a horse in his life. He'll have to learn how. Many of the jobs he's familiar with in 1932 just don't exist in 1882 (and unlike the comparable case from 2022 to 1972, these are not jobs done by a small group of the population). He'll likely need to learn to function in a farm environment of some sort if he leaves the major cities. His personal world just shrank enormously, even after he learns to ride a horse, or manage a wagon (two different skills!), he's still going to find that travel is much more limited. Places he could have reached in hours now need days. Places he could have reached in days now need weeks or months.

If it's winter, no fresh produce or vegetables, most likely (unless he's very wealthy, then maybe, or maybe not). If it's summer, he's going to have to learn to cope with substantial quantities of horse manure in the streets, even in the cities, and with it the associated disease issues. Every summer comes waves of infectious diseases, without much in the way of treatment. If he needs surgery, anesthesia sort of exists in 1882, but it's dangerous and tricky.

Dentistry in 1882...well, let's not dwell on that.

If he wants to know what's going on in the world, he has the local newspaper. Telegraphs exist, so current events are fairly current, but he's still restricted to print only, or world of mouth. It might not make much difference, life is local so the mayor's race, or the county commissioner, probably matters more to him now th than the governor or president, who rarely affect his life much.

Of course his free time to read is likely to be less. Exceptions existed, but as a general thing, work was harder, hours were longer, you had to do more stuff yourself in 1882 as compared to 1932, a much bigger ratio than from 1972 to 2022.

General stores exist, and actually stock a wider variety of kinds of things than modern supermarkets, but the food is less variable. No frozen foods, just canned goods. Fresh produce in season at farmers' markets. But you can't store it at home for long. There's a butcher shop in town, and you can get meat there, though again the time of year affects what is available and what it costs. But you have to get the meat and use it immediately, you might or might not have a literal ice box, but it only holds so much.

Fresh milk? Sometimes available, sometimes not, in town. On a farm you can get it, but you gotta milk that cow yourself. Even if he lives in town, it wouldn't hurt him to learn to milk a cow anyway, it's the sort of general life skill you might well need at some point.

I could go on, but the thing is that the actual, lived life of a young person teleported from 1932 to 1882 would be much, more more different than the same case from 2022 to 1972.

(Yes, that assumes an urban dweller in a major city or town, the gap would be smaller for a rural kid going from 1932 to 1882, but the principle remains.)

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by maximara

It all depends on what 50 year period you are looking at. The Europe of 1320 was way different economically from that of 1360. The world in general was different in 1770 from what it would be in 1820.

The 50 year period between 1900 and 1950 is effectively a sea change in both technology and economics. The there are places where time seemed to stand still — like so many of those small towns that seem to be stuck in time.

Yes. For that matter, in small towns the changes in that period lagged by decades. My father could remember, as a small boy, when the electricity was turned off for the night in the little town where he grew up, and that was in the 1940s. Animal power was still being used on some small working farms at least into the 1950s. The technology existed but it took a while (and required some political and social changes) to penetrate generally.

You can measure a TL by when a technology is theoretically available or by when it's in general use.