It’s become cliché to talk about inventions that can ‘change the world’, but when it comes to transversal technologies – cross-cutting tools with the potential to transform multiple industries – the moniker feels like an understatement, writes Andrew Chakhoyan.
  • lichtmetzger@feddit.deEnglish
    317·
    1 year ago

    What do you expect from an aging population that still secretly hopes the internet will just go away? Here in Germany, we basically have a Gerontocracy. Until all of the old farts in high places finally move off this planet, the fax machine will be one of the most important technologies in this country.

    We outcompete the world in […] work-life balance.

    Not because of good reasons. The younger population is extremely underpaid and a lot of them have shifted their priorities to work less, because of their original dreams becoming too difficult or even outright impossible to follow.

    • exi@feddit.deEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      Dealing with the Ausländerbehörde lately was absolutely abysmal. You have two options, paper mail or fax. But faxes arrive in the post office and need to be sorted first so it can take 2-3 days for the fax to arrive at the right person in the same fucking building.

      It’s horrendous.

  • tal@kbin.social
    161·
    1 year ago

    It’s the same story for quantum computing

    Unless I’ve missed some developments, quantum computing’s applications are somewhat-niche. Yeah, it’s a new field, but I am not sure that it’s something that I’d be incredibly worried about (at least from an economic standpoint; from a military communications standpoint, maybe it matters, as there are some important applications there).

    googles

    Yeah:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing

    Quantum algorithms provide speedup over conventional algorithms only for some tasks, and matching these tasks with practical applications proved challenging. Some promising tasks and applications require resources far beyond those available today.[121][122] In particular, processing large amounts of non-quantum data is a challenge for quantum computers.[85]

    I mean, it’s cool in that in involves interesting physics and engineering stuff maybe, but I’m not sure that it’s that interesting economically.

    Like…I think that blockchain stuff is technically interesting too. But…there are only so many realistic applications, and people have tried to use it in a lot of cases where I don’t think that it’s all that useful.

  • Yewb@kbin.social
    14·
    1 year ago

    Some of the highest tech most proprietary equipment to make semiconductors among others things are only produced in Europe…

  • Throwaway@lemm.eeEnglish
    554·
    1 year ago

    What was the last big thing from Europe? Alan Turing and the computer?

    Yall are already irrelevant.

    • Square Singer@feddit.deEnglish
      601·
      1 year ago

      Ever heard of ASML? Literally the only company worldwide that can build the machines that make modern high-performance chips.

      Without ASML the device you posted your comment from wouldn’t exist.

      But yeah, irrelevant.

    • MrMakabar@slrpnk.netEnglish
      41·
      1 year ago

      The World Wide Web comes to mind. Also mRNA vaccines from Biontech were a big thing. Pfizer ended up getting a lot of credit for producing them, but the tech is very much German.

    • bAZtARd@feddit.deEnglish
      222·
      1 year ago

      Oh honey… Facebook & twitter are not the big things that you think they are.

      • Throwaway@lemm.eeEnglish
        319·
        1 year ago

        I was thinking more IBM, AMD, Intel, Apple, Cisco, TI, and Amazon. And a bunch more Im forgetting.

        • TheAgeOfSuperboredomEnglish
          21·
          1 year ago

          If you consider that England used to be in the EU, the world runs on ARM (even your fancy new Apple M1 or M2 chips). STMicro and Nordic semi are huge players in the embedded space. There’s even Spotify!