Thinking a bit more of this, I think the basic pattern I’m matching here is that each era there’s some grand technocratic narrative where an overarching first-principles design from the current Impressive Technology, industrial production, rocket engines, internetworked computers, or artificial intelligence, will produce a clean and ordered new world order. This won’t happen, and instead something a lot more organic, diffuse, confusing, low-key and wildly unexpected will show up.
On the other hand, we don’t currently seem to be having the sort of unified present-day tech paradigm like there was during the space age. My guess for the next big tech paradigm thing would be radical biotechnology and biotech-based cognitive engineering, but we don’t really have either of those yet. Instead, we’ve got Planetary Resources and Elon Musk doing the stuff of the space age folk, Bitcoin and whatnot that’s something like the 90s cypherpunks thought up, IBM Watson and Google cars are something that AI was supposed to deliver in the 80s before the AI Winter set in, and we might be seeing a bit of a return to 80s style diverse playing field in computing with stuff like Raspberry PI, 3D printing and everybody being able to put their apps online and for sale without paying for brick & mortar shelf space.
So it’s kinda like all the stuff that was supposed to happen any time now at various points of the late 20th century was starting to happen at once. But that could be just the present looking like it has a lot more stuff than the past, since I’m seeing a lot less of the past than the present.
Thinking a bit more of this, I think the basic pattern I’m matching here is that each era there’s some grand technocratic narrative where an overarching first-principles design from the current Impressive Technology, industrial production, rocket engines, internetworked computers, or artificial intelligence, will produce a clean and ordered new world order. This won’t happen, and instead something a lot more organic, diffuse, confusing, low-key and wildly unexpected will show up.
On the other hand, we don’t currently seem to be having the sort of unified present-day tech paradigm like there was during the space age. My guess for the next big tech paradigm thing would be radical biotechnology and biotech-based cognitive engineering, but we don’t really have either of those yet. Instead, we’ve got Planetary Resources and Elon Musk doing the stuff of the space age folk, Bitcoin and whatnot that’s something like the 90s cypherpunks thought up, IBM Watson and Google cars are something that AI was supposed to deliver in the 80s before the AI Winter set in, and we might be seeing a bit of a return to 80s style diverse playing field in computing with stuff like Raspberry PI, 3D printing and everybody being able to put their apps online and for sale without paying for brick & mortar shelf space.
So it’s kinda like all the stuff that was supposed to happen any time now at various points of the late 20th century was starting to happen at once. But that could be just the present looking like it has a lot more stuff than the past, since I’m seeing a lot less of the past than the present.