I have heard one definition of “a sudden change that makes something once niche and seldom-seen become ubiquitous”, such as the sudden reduction in price of consumer computing in the 1990s
It’s both! Marketing blabber and general public usage have obliterated any meaning, let alone its original one.
But in the philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn was onto something…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions
He noted that scientific progress tends to be incremental, building and evolving what came before it. But there comes a time where what we thought we knew becomes incompatible with what we are now learning, forcing a paragigm shift.
E.g. Relativity replacing newtonian physics, or copernican heliocentrism replacing ptolemaic cosmology.
Edit: Very real. Impossible to predict. You only know after you had it.
Yeah—Kuhn describes reading Aristotle’s Physics and being shocked at how nonsensical it was. Then he spent months going through it term by term, until everything finally clicked: Aristotle’s world has a fundamentally different ontology and causal structure that’s perfectly internally consistent, and in that world post-Galilean physics is wrong—as nonsensical as Aristotle’s physics initially seemed to Kuhn. And there’s no way to get from that world to this one without abandoning the former in toto.
In Kuhn’s view, paradigms are like parallel, mutually-incompatible worlds that happen to share the same surface-level phenomena.
This to me made it fully click
They are real but rare. Situations that change society as a whole. For example creation of printing press which spread both religion and literacy. Or creation of the combustion engine which lead to cars and trains resulting in the society spawl we now live in. Or the discovery of germ theory which revolutionized medicine. Or the the west India shipping company started selling rights to some of the profits of a shop if people gave them money early so they could afford the ship and the trip, effectively creating stock markets(especially the futures market). Or creation of the transistor instead of vacuum tubes.
People claim things are paradigm shifts so others will give them money but most typically aren’t. Like 3d tvs were supposed to be a paradigm shift about 15 years ago, now when did you last even see a 3d movie or see a 3d TV for sale in a store? Vr was supposed to be a paradigm shift for games but it’s still incredibly niche due to price, downsides of current tech and lack of software (software isn’t developed because there’s not a consumer base and there’s not a consumer base because there’s no software)
Yes, that’s more or less marketer-ese and a bullshit phrase at this point. In everyday usage it pretty much means “any change that we’d like to present as a major one”, and there are ways of phrasing that so you don’t sound like an advertising executive
It’s a change in how people think about problems or their relationship to the world. For example right now if you wanted 8 circles of different colors with words in them you’d grab a drawing program and be done in 15 minutes, but if you think about things only in terms of how an AI can do it it will take an hour and a half of explainations and corrections and the resources necessary to maintain a small garden habitat for months or years.
