Not sure if anyone made a review of this, but it seems to me that if you compare the past visions of the future, such as science fiction stories, we have less of everything except for computers. We do not have teleports or cheap transport to other planets, we have not colonized the other planets, we do not have the flying cars, we cannot magically cure all diseases and make people younger.
But we have smartphones = internet and phone and camera in your pocket. Even better that the communicators in Star Trek. Especially the internet part; imagine how different some stories could be if everything that a hero sees could be photographed and immediately uploaded to social networks.
The artificial intelligence is probably the only computer-related sci-fi thing that we do not have yet.
So it is not obvious in my opinion in which direction to update. I am tempted to say that computers evolve faster than everything else, so we should expect AI soon. On the other hand, maybe the fact that AI is currently an exception in this trend means that it will continue to be the exception. No strong opinion on this; just saying that “we are behind the predictions” does not in general apply to computer-related things.
Not sure if anyone made a review of this, but it seems to me that if you compare the past visions of the future, such as science fiction stories, we have less of everything except for computers.
Yes! J Storrs Hall did an (admittedly subjective) study of this, and argues that the probability of a futurist prediction from the 1960s being right decreases logarithmically with the energy intensity required to achieve it. This is from Appendix A in “Where’s my Flying Car?”
So it is not obvious in my opinion in which direction to update. I am tempted to say that computers evolve faster than everything else, so we should expect AI soon. On the other hand, maybe the fact that AI is currently an exception in this trend means that it will continue to be the exception. No strong opinion on this; just saying that “we are behind the predictions” does not in general apply to computer-related things.
I think this is a good point. At some point, I should put together a reference class of computer-specific futurist predictions from the past for comparison to the overall corpus.
Not sure if anyone made a review of this, but it seems to me that if you compare the past visions of the future, such as science fiction stories, we have less of everything except for computers. We do not have teleports or cheap transport to other planets, we have not colonized the other planets, we do not have the flying cars, we cannot magically cure all diseases and make people younger.
But we have smartphones = internet and phone and camera in your pocket. Even better that the communicators in Star Trek. Especially the internet part; imagine how different some stories could be if everything that a hero sees could be photographed and immediately uploaded to social networks.
The artificial intelligence is probably the only computer-related sci-fi thing that we do not have yet.
So it is not obvious in my opinion in which direction to update. I am tempted to say that computers evolve faster than everything else, so we should expect AI soon. On the other hand, maybe the fact that AI is currently an exception in this trend means that it will continue to be the exception. No strong opinion on this; just saying that “we are behind the predictions” does not in general apply to computer-related things.
Yes! J Storrs Hall did an (admittedly subjective) study of this, and argues that the probability of a futurist prediction from the 1960s being right decreases logarithmically with the energy intensity required to achieve it. This is from Appendix A in “Where’s my Flying Car?”
I think this is a good point. At some point, I should put together a reference class of computer-specific futurist predictions from the past for comparison to the overall corpus.