Progress In The World Continues: A Juggling Example

Penn Jillette talks about the tech revolution in his Reason Magazine interview:

I was one of the people talking at [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] in the early '90s about how computers were going to change things….

I couldn't predict that juggling would get better. Juggling took the biggest jump ever because of the internet, and only because people could see videos of other people doing stuff. That's all it did. A brother and sister in Russia, when they were 12 years old, got the internet and became the best jugglers in the world. And they would never have juggled other than that.

That's something you can't predict. You can predict pizza delivery. You can predict drones. You can predict all that shit. You can't predict stuff that has nothing to fucking do with computers getting better.

This is an amazing insight. We often think that the world is divided in two: high tech and low tech. It’s a convenient mental image, but totally wrong. Farmers use satellite imagery to evaluate their crops, trucking companies use GPS to help their drivers be more efficient and the UPS guy spends more time with his handheld computer than he does with his wife.

But juggling?

To see the expertise of the two Russians that Penn Jillette (the taller half of Penn and Teller) mentioned, take a look at this video narrated by Jillette.