When people in the 1940s looked into the future they saw flying cars, spaceships and cities in the clouds. When we look into the future today we see AI, a post-labor economy and the end of death itself. I'm not sure if technological progress has increased, but we're definitely dreaming bigger.
I think that predictions from the past can be instructive in two ways. First, most of it didn't come to pass. We still don't have flying cars or cloud cities, and common commercial space travel is still decades away. The second thing that might be of note is how positive the past vision of the future was compared to our current ideas about the future. We're so dystopian and negative in 2015. We'll have self aware supercomputers, but we're worried that they'll kill us. Robots will be able to do anything a human can do, but we're worried that we'll all be unemployed while a few get rich. We'll have the ability to live forever, but we're worried that will only be a privilege for the rich people who control the robots, and then only if the robots don't decide to kill us all.
Putting these two things together, I can only think to quote Packer's QB Aaron Rogers: "R-E-L-A-X" [0]. Odds are that most of these revolutionary technologies are far away, and won't turn out to be as evil as we imagine. The beginning of the 20th century was a time of tumultuous change. The automobile, household electricity, recorded music and movies, communism and the end of aristocracies. Everything was changing and people were optimistic about the future. Now we're on the other end of the pendulum. Outside of communications and the internet, there haven't been a lot of big technological or political changes and people are feeling generally negative about everything. Hopefully the early 21st century will produce big ideas that will have us all feeling inspired again. I wish I had some grand conclusion or takeaway from all of this, but I think the key is that this too shall pass and we should all try to enjoy the journey.
[0] This is a references from sports news that might be out of place here. If you didn't get it, it's ok. Move along, nothing to see here.
People in the 1940s were riding the top of an energy revolution, an enormously rapid upward trend in energy production that, had it continued unabated, would today see us with the output of a nuclear powerplant generated by threads in our clothing for a dollar or two. They didn't foresee information technology, for the most part. They foresaw solar system-wide travel and simple mechanical computing devices like slide rules coexisting.
Of course it proved harder than expected to keep that curve going, and we got the infotech future rather than the high power future. We're probably better off for that, given that medicine is driven by infotech, not power.
It's also possible that had energy generation capability continued to increase forever at that rate it would have led to self-destruction in any number of forms.
I think that predictions from the past can be instructive in two ways. First, most of it didn't come to pass. We still don't have flying cars or cloud cities, and common commercial space travel is still decades away. The second thing that might be of note is how positive the past vision of the future was compared to our current ideas about the future. We're so dystopian and negative in 2015. We'll have self aware supercomputers, but we're worried that they'll kill us. Robots will be able to do anything a human can do, but we're worried that we'll all be unemployed while a few get rich. We'll have the ability to live forever, but we're worried that will only be a privilege for the rich people who control the robots, and then only if the robots don't decide to kill us all.
Putting these two things together, I can only think to quote Packer's QB Aaron Rogers: "R-E-L-A-X" [0]. Odds are that most of these revolutionary technologies are far away, and won't turn out to be as evil as we imagine. The beginning of the 20th century was a time of tumultuous change. The automobile, household electricity, recorded music and movies, communism and the end of aristocracies. Everything was changing and people were optimistic about the future. Now we're on the other end of the pendulum. Outside of communications and the internet, there haven't been a lot of big technological or political changes and people are feeling generally negative about everything. Hopefully the early 21st century will produce big ideas that will have us all feeling inspired again. I wish I had some grand conclusion or takeaway from all of this, but I think the key is that this too shall pass and we should all try to enjoy the journey.
[0] This is a references from sports news that might be out of place here. If you didn't get it, it's ok. Move along, nothing to see here.