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What We Get Wrong About Technology (timharford.com)
Tim Harford, a columnist for the Financial Times, uses the example of Rachael and Rick Deckard from Blade Runner to explain how we humans, when asked about how new inventions might shape the future, often tend to leap to technologies that are sophisticated beyond comprehension. Also spoiler of the Blade Runner plot is ahead. He writes: So sophisticated is Rachael that she is impossible to distinguish from a human without specialised equipment; she even believes herself to be human. Los Angeles police detective Rick Deckard knows otherwise; in Rachael, Deckard is faced with an artificial intelligence so beguiling, he finds himself falling in love. Yet when he wants to invite Rachael out for a drink, what does he do? He calls her up from a payphone. There is something revealing about the contrast between the two technologies -- the biotech miracle that is Rachael, and the graffiti-scrawled videophone that Deckard uses to talk to her. It's not simply that Blade Runner fumbled its futurism by failing to anticipate the smartphone. That's a forgivable slip, and Blade Runner is hardly the only film to make it. It's that, when asked to think about how new inventions might shape the future, our imaginations tend to leap to technologies that are sophisticated beyond comprehension. We readily imagine cracking the secrets of artificial life, and downloading and uploading a human mind. Yet when asked to picture how everyday life might look in a society sophisticated enough to build such biological androids, our imaginations falter. Blade Runner audiences found it perfectly plausible that LA would look much the same, beyond the acquisition of some hovercars and a touch of noir.
The perfect woman has a "restore to factory settings" button.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The crux of the matter is that the payphone isn't the important part of the story. Rachel's unnatural nature is. While the payphone is becoming less common they're not entirely gone either.
Also, one can imagine a scenario where a police detective knows how the technology works, and actually makes a point of avoiding technology that's personally tied to him where actions he takes could arguably be used to demonstrate that he's compromised in some fashion. If you will, he uses the payphone because it's not his phone, so it's harder for a cursory investigation to identify that he made that call in the first place. Admittedly this would be something of a retcon since I doubt that it was even a consideration when the film was made. On the other hand we don't have flying cars, a postapocalyptic landscape, or extraterrestrial colonies either.
Enjoy the story, don't focus on the inane details, they're not important in this case.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Things that get replaced more often will be more advanced.
#DeleteFacebook
Mr Harford, like myself, is British. Britain is an old country, and we live in cities built in some cases several hundred years ago - in same cases with the same buildings still there. Not unique to Britain obviously, am simply using this as an example he should be familiar with.
We still use roads built with gauges governed by ancient carriages. London streets still wend and wind because many were simply not designed for motorised traffic, yet we still use them.
It's not at all a stretch of the imagination to consider that cities a hundred years from now will be built on the recognisable and still in use bits that we see today.
Blade Runner is artistically styled specifically to be a false future that blends 1940s noir and high tech, which means you end up with a lot of paradoxical technology elements.
If it was meant to be a coherent high-tech universe, it wouldn't be able to pull off the noir styling it's famous for.
The author really should have tried to make his point with a pure science fiction story that didn't intentionally try to map older styles into the future. I wonder how his analysis would hold up with Star Trek.
Science fiction stories, if they're good, sacrifice versimilitude for the sake of being understandable by the audience. Blade Runner had the option of using something like these science fiction tropes: the "Dick Tracy" wrist radio, portrayed in the police comic since 1952, or the Star Trek communicator, used in 1965. But instead they might have chosen to portray a community in which down-trodden people would still be limited to pay phones, or it simply wasn't important to the story and would have been a distraction from the main story thread.
People gave me a hard time because Pixar's A Bugs Life (on which I am credited) had the wrong number of legs on the impossible talking anthropomorphic ants and Antz had the right number of legs on its impossible talking anthromorphic ants. But it wasn't important to telling the story, and we just did not care.
The LA portrayed was vastly different from what viewers knew at the time, in that video wall mega-advertising was everywhere. Although this is taken for granted today, it was a stunning departure from the reality of the day when the film was produced.
Also, the weather of LA was overturned. In the movie it always rains in California.
Bruce Perens.
OP assumes in Blade Runner that all things progress linearly. That because we have smart phones today, we will still have it tomorrow. Perhaps the "sharing economy" takes off and pay phones give you what you need wherever and whenever you need it easier.
> I read one science fiction novel written in the 1980's where a computer document was searchable via a MS-DOS filenames (eight-character name, dot, three-character extension) on a different planet in 500+ years into the future.
That was an outdated idea even in the 80s.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That was an outdated idea even in the 80s.
When I took Introduction to Computers at college in 1992, MS-DOS and 8.3 filenames was alive and well.
SF doesn't always predict future trends either. The last time it rained, I didn't see dozens of people carrying light-up umbrellas, talking crosswalks only just now made it into my city, and I have searched high and low, but have yet to find any establishment with a giant neon sign that reads "ATARI".
Much of Science Fiction takes one or a small number of technological advances and examines how it will impact society, humanity. In Blade Runner it's looking at how the addition of manufactured "humans" will impact people. We examine it through Deckard and how he comes to view them as fully human.
The payphone isn't important to the story and is simply part of the visual style of the film.
Blade Runner is a poor example to use for the topic of the article, we don't have replicants so we can't compare how they "got it wrong". If you want to look at how science fiction gets technology wrong, look at something from 50 years ago about how computers are going to change society, then compare it to how computers have actually changed society.
But even then you're wasting your time because science fiction is not about making accurate predictions, it's about examining current reality by contrasting it with a potential/imagined future.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
[...] a giant neon sign that reads "ATARI".
It's called a product placement. Warner Brothers owned Atari and distributed Blade Runner at the time. Even though Warner Brothers no longer owns Atari, the Atari logo does appear in the new movie.
https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/08/blade-runner-2049-official-film-trailer-features-the-atari-logo/
Science FICTION!
It isn't supposed to be future reality. It is a mutual day dream to amuse us.
People also imagine inconceivably-complex technology when they think not just about machines that can automatically flip burgers, but machines that can automatically do all the mining, run the refineries, handle the orders, run the farms, slaughter the cows, manufacture the fry cartons and burger wrappers, maintain itself, and maintain all the infrastructure to run the entire economy without a shred of human input. They imagine this is just five years away--they've imagined it was feasible already and just not taken up yet since the 1800s--and so conclude that jobs are going away forever.
That's not a blind extension of peoples's ignorance, either.
I've repeatedly brought up that the cost of products is the wage-labor cost, and technology reduces the amount of time (labor) and thus the cost. Market forces set the price as cost plus profit, and those same forces will push it down toward the new cost insofar that further reduction in prices won't increase profits even if all your competitors do it because they won't draw enough of your customers away. Thus people end up working the same hours, getting paid wages, with prices set by those wages (payrolls, really--wage, benefits, tax), and necessarily get an increase in purchasing power. They buy more stuff, which requires more labor to produce, ship, and retail, thus jobs to replace those lost.
The usual answer?
People just claim that won't happen anymore because no human labor will be involved at any stage in the entire production process of anything. Very soon. Like, as soon as self-driving cars hit the streets.
Magical machines of inconceivable design, but they must exist because we can fantasize about them.
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No shit, Sherlock!
And outdated at the same time.
For an even more extreme version of this, look at Heinlein's novel Starman Jones. Published in 1953 and set in a future when humanity has spread out into the stars, the Astrogator's Guild has its 'secret books' that are essentially nothing but tables of conversions between decimal and binary, and the astrogators' job is to manually take star sights, translate the data from them into binary, then toggle the binary values into a computer that is hardwired to perform only the computation of integrating the previous sights with the current sight against the position of a wormhole to return values for maneuvering corrections, which are then converted back from binary and applied manually to the engine controls. No concept of the computer being tied into sensors and engines, with the crew able to enter a desired course through an interface that doesn't require conversion into binary and have the computer perform the feedback loop to guide the ship to the wormhole without requiring the navigators to overwork themselves acting as the computer's interfaces.
Another example is the Traveller RPG; published in 1977, and set in a future where human and alien civilizations spanned a significant part of the galaxy, ship's computers take up a minimum of 14 cubic meters of volume in the ship -- a starship of 400 tons displacement with a medium-size computer system would have it taking up 56 cubic meters of volume -- four 'tons' in the design process -- and this computer can only run eight programs simultaneously. It's like having ENIAC on your ship.
To a degree, a dystopian future implies that at least SOME technologies would actually backslide. We see evidence in movies like Star Wars when lightsabers become unknown. Or books like Frank Herbert's 'Dune' with computers. The technology existed at some point in the past, but reverted due to significant societal stresses. It may be that payphones make a comeback when some global threat manages to take out all the cell phone towers.
"Just as there is nothing so unreal as reality TV, there is nothing as unsocial as social media." - Alistair Dabbs
The whole idea that SF predicts the future is just marketing speak for SF books and movies. It succeeds occasionally, but so does religious prophecy: make enough predictions, and you score some hits, but at the cost of many more misses.
As far as Blade Runner (and most SF) goes, the writers seldom sit down to prognosticate. Most of them think of an interesting premise and see where it goes.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Seriously,
If I talk about the Wizard of Oz - do I have to say Spoiler alert still? Does this apply to books as well? Spoiler alert - Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep has androids in it - and not modern phones either
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
(This post has nothing to do with the thrust of the article: that people's minds leap quickly to obvious-but-nigh-impossible things rather than possible-but-subtly. But they made the mistake of putting forth an example (Blade Runner) which is more interesting to talk about than the premise itself, so here's some comments on sci-fi storytelling.)
If the past is another country, the future is an alien planet. We can conjecture on a number of technologies that may become available, or even practical and common, and others which will fail or die off -- though our track record on all of these is pretty shoddy -- but if pursued rigorously and thoroughly, along every human pursuit, what you'll get is a slice of life that's utterly incomprehensible to your audience.
For example, we could (and did) predict a network like the internet, but no one really understood what it would be like to be connected to everything all the time. It's just as foreign for people growing up today that something as trivial as an address, driving directions, a phone number to be known to someone, even many people, but not to you. (Something as ridiculous as a 31-month FBI investigation to determine the true lyrics and possible obscenity of the song Louie Louie seems utterly impossible now, even for the Federal government.) Looking back, you can understand it, if not really appreciate it. Looking forward, it's incomprehensible.
We don't aim to predict the future because 1) we are very likely to fail, and 2) succeeding would make a bad setting for a story to be understood by any modern audience. This is why most movies either go "five minutes into the future" (where very little fundamentally changes, but you focus deeply on those changes) or else hundreds of years in the future where anything and everything could have plausibly changed. In either case, you can believably put forth a setting that is mostly familiar to an audience, where you can be sure that any difference you see is actually relevant to the story.
If you don't inherit land the option you present isn't possible.
"...we humans...often tend to leap to technologies that are sophisticated beyond comprehension."
An iPad can be easily operated by a 3-year old. You call that sophisticated?
What has grown beyond comprehension here is the fact that we are now forced to make technical devices idiot-proof in order for the masses to use them.
Put down the sci-fi bong and quit taking hits off fiction and fantasy.
And yet it's not uncommon at my house to see a stack of phones and tablets on a table. I resolve it in my mind as an acknowledgement that we'll never be rid of UI gaffes or incompatibilities.
That word - I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yes there were other systems besides MS-DOS in the 80s. Yes they used other file name structures. MS-DOS was still alive and well, and that's what most computer users knew. Windows 3 came out in 1992, and it was the first version of Windows to get any sort of traction in the market. Even it still used 8.3. Windows 95 was the first to use "long" filenames.
Yes, MS-DOS was the best known OS, and most people used its 8.3 filesystem until 95, and even then it took time for people to get used to long filenames.
It was still outdated in the 80s. :p
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I had an idea a while ago about the the failings of retro-futurism.
StarWars, StarTrek, The Expanse, Firefly, and pretty much any space opera are all based around the idea of spaceships with people flying in them. Like space is just an extension of the oceans and seas. But that's pretty silly. Robots do a hell of a lot better job with fewer requirements and no need to bring them back. The more and more autonomous they get the less we even need to be in contact with them.
We won't have people handling drills on Mars getting core samples. We won't have gunners tracking tie-fighters like AA flak cannons. We won't have navigators plotting courses on a bench with calipers and charts. These are all visions of the future which are simply wrong. As wrong as Decker using a payphone. We need to let go of the sci-fi tropes born 50 years ago in the 70's.
And then it came to me: Make a show where EVERYTHING on the spaceship has to be done by hand. Valves need to be opened, there's a switchboard operator for the intercom, there's a guy that turns the big steering wheel, pilots in the fighters need to manually target the guns. And you never tell the audience (But you drop plenty of hints) that the entire crew are all programs and computers. The main characters are some sort of AGI or bullshit awakened programs. The background characters are more like cron jobs and scripts. There's some mystical god-like creature in cryostatis which must be preserved, an actual human. The bots operate on a genetic algorithm system of judging fitness to see who lives and who is selected to procreate. They're all military conscripts and expendable second-class citizens. On the ship there's exactly 2 rooms people do things because that's the main processor and the backup. Quick-clones are a thing as copying programs is trivial. A fighter pilot dies and a copy shows up wondering how his last clone screwed up. This sort of computer-metaphor list goes on and on. I think it'd make a good show.
Even non-entertainment predictions are often made to entertain -- and the ones that come to widespread public attention are almost always made to entertain because, well, they're more entertaining. An actual realistic projection of future tech not made to entertain would be a dry, boring read that got tossed a trash can.
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I'd sat the author is basically right. While it is the 'big ideas' that inspire us, make us dare to dream, it's the 'little things' that conspire to change the world we live in while our attention is focused elsewhere.
While practically everyone posting so far has fixated on the Blade Runner part of his article (sci fi is... , film noir... , technological regression... , etc) in doing so you're essentially ignoring his point. It's not the big new things that change the world, it's a combination of little old things, things we no longer consider 'important' or earth shattering that, because of synergies (please excuse the buzzwords), suddenly come into their own, with unforeseen and potentially shocking consequences - well shocking in the sense of a radical social upheaval or, at least, a change in the social order.
Of course with eagle eye hindsight it's easy to see how all those threads have come together to create our existing social fabric, it's another thing entirely to predict the next big little thing.
My money (if I had any) is on floating farms, and a second wind for the gm 'revolution' alongside the already transitioning energy supply and nature of transportation. Oh, and more robotics - no great insight there - but to a certain degree that ship has already sailed. I can't imagine modern day manufacturing without robots, so I'm not sure how much influence 'more' is really going to have. Then again, if I had any gift at prognostication I'd probably have money, so you should take anything I say about the future with a large pinch of salt. ;-)
And what is to say we will have smart phones in 20 years?
I hate futurists because they come up with crap which nobody is ever going to pay for and which will never happen due to the cost ... but I loathe idiots like this who think now is the future and there will be no further changes and that failure to describe things exactly as they are now is some kind of failing.
A possible future is not all possible futures. And Blade runner was never attempting to capture everything which could exist int he future.
Maybe in 20 years internet terminals will be like light switches, and carrying one around would be like walking around with your own fucking lamp?
This is an idiotic article, precisely because the author makes the unforgivable slip of assuming that because we have smart phones now we always will have cell phones, and any speculative future must be wrong for failing to include something which may itself be transient.
All this hand wringing is just pointless BS intended to drive traffic to some idiot's tech blog ... who fucking cares if Blade Runner didn't capture everything in it? And who is to say that in 20 years a smart phone won't be a quaint idea like a pet rock that nobody takes seriously any more?
To a certain degree, this is the ineffable nature of invention. You do not know what twists and turns it will take until it happens. You can try to logically extend the consequences of an invention that you think up (like video phones or humanoid robots in the 1980s) but until it happens, real world inventions are by definition un-knowable. (If you knew what real world inventions would be created, you could make a killing running a business or trading in the stock market.)
Part of what made Blade Runner such a good movie was that unlike Star Trek and that ilk, it portrayed a dystopian future fraught with massive inequality, where the haves lived in massive wealth, while the have nots lived in relative poverty. The method used to portray those differences were more important to the story than the Scifi backdrop.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
As John W. Campbell, Jr. once said, if a story tries to predict all the advances that are likely, it will be unintelligible. Even if you could correctly predict how everything would change, to do so would be a horrendous mistake for an author, because nobody (including the editor) would understand the story.
I've got to admit that I don't remember blade-runner, it didn't really impress me. The pictures were nice, but the projected future was trite. (OTOH, I've been reading Science Fiction since the 1950's, and so am not the target audience.) So this is a criticism of the point made in the summary.
That said, if you want to understand how poorly we can predict things, look at "A Logic Named Joe" https://www.google.com/search?... for an early guess as what the internet might be like if it were ever invented. There the internet is an important background element that's reasonably well developed, not just something incidental, but also not the central story element. If you want to understand why, read Ray Kurtzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines". (That was written long enough ago that you can judge how valid you think his arguments are.)
But the real thing is, when making predictions we tend to predict things that we currently feel are important, whether good or bad, but a lot of the decisions are made by other people who see other possibilities. Henry Ford never set out to revise the sexual mores of the world, but that's one of the things he did.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Much of Science Fiction takes one or a small number of technological advances and examines how it will impact society, humanity.
But Harford's point (I read the article when it was published a couple of months ago) is that the approach doesn't work. You cannot say "This story explores the relationships between humans and androids" and then only make it about them.
The reason is that the development of androids does not happen in isolation, without a load of supporting technological developments. Ones that would have knock-on effects on everything else.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Yeah, I was thinking about that the other day too. Apple DOS was written several years before MSDOS, and has more sophisticated filenames. (Oh, I just realized, the later ProDOS has "only" 15 character filenames.) I realize other personal computers probably have similar features, I just don't recall the specifics about them.
from https://fjkraan.home.xs4all.nl...
4.1: DOS 3.x file names and types
DOS 3.x filenames can from 1-30 characters in length, and must start
with an uppercase letter. They cannot contain commas, colons, but can
contain control characters.
Right now people ignore serious issues as they assume science and technology will save them. For example we have a world food shortage and a quickly growing population. The public assume that some sort of magical farm science will enable the massive increase in food production that is already needed and increases every day. Science is not a savior. It is foolish to simply assume that many problems will be solved or controlled. The reverse psychology needs to be in play. For example we probably can not feed 14 billion souls and therefore must limit reproduction until such time that we can feed and house that many people. So yes, fund science big time, encourage science, teach science. But make the public very aware that many goals may never be reached. Problems that occur with technology are rarely noticed. For example most people feel some concern about self driving cars crashing. But how many of those same people take into account that traffic driving offenses would cease to exist. The police departments live over the fines they collect. In essence self driving cars might mean the loss of police departments. Or it may mean that a new tax must be placed upon the people to replace the traffic fine income. The punishment we used to apply to guilty drivers would then be paid by innocent people as well.
The city in Blade Runner is populated by those who could not afford "a chance to begin again, in a golden land of opportunity and adventure". It is a depiction of urban decay, with rotting half-abandoned buildings such as The Bradbury, where J. F. Sebastian lived. Why would an old-fashioned phone booth be out of place?
I find the payphone dig unfair criticism. For one, it was hard to know then if airwaves could carry all the signals needed for consumer cell-phones. It took a while to perfect signal compression and other issues.
Second, it was hard to know if miniaturization of electronics (Moores' law) would continue. In fact, by many accounts it's stopping now. It's not really a law, just a recent pattern, with no guarantee of continuing.
You may then argue that if one assumes miniaturization slows, how come they have androids (strong AI) in the flick? But that assumes miniaturization is/was needed to get decent AI. There's no inherent law of the universe that says AI has to come from miniaturization. Perhaps a new algorithm or computing substance could be discovered to get AI without relying on shrinking parts. For example, if most the android's entire body is a "brain", then it's merely a big computer to get big computations. Or maybe an organic substance that's good for artificial brains but NOT for cell-phone miniaturization.
The accusers are biased by actual history where our AI advances HAPPENED TO come from mostly the same advances that our phones used. That wasn't an obvious or required assumption back then.
On a different aspect, the article made an interesting point in that the first electric motors didn't help factories much because the factories simply replaced the centralized steam systems with electric motors. It wasn't until factories decentralized power distribution that the real advantage of electricity played out. The environment around the gizmo has to change to fit the new technology before its benefits show.
Jet planes were similar: early attempts mostly just slapped a jet engine on a propeller-intended design, meaning performance often wasn't good enough to justify the extra cost and maintenance it required. It's only when planes were reworked around jet engines and the new speed that real results came. Most wind tunnels of the time didn't even have enough power to simulate jet speeds. They had to build new ones.
Table-ized A.I.
Blade Runner is not a prediction of the future, it's science fiction adapted for the big screen.
And as such, it's not about portrayal of future based on attempts of getting it accurate or right, but rather using what serves the plot best.
Still, this is a kind of naive approach to analysis of futurism in general. Anyone could pick a future prediction and say we do it wrong because of this or that. One could just as well pick another example to say we center too much on mundane everyday life stuff and don't focus enough on sophisticated technologies beyond comprehension.
Truth of the matter is: we don't know because there are just too many variables.
Often, the select few that "gets it right" is mostly by chance, or by some insider look that enables them to tell that the chances of certain types of technologies progressing have good chances of becoming a new paradigm. And the press and general media makes good work of selecting those who got it right to say they were visionaires or some such.
Here's the thing: we're all producing some level of futurism ourselves. The ones that gets attention are those who can present it to a major public with strong enough ideas that drives peoples' imaginations. By design, the brand of popular futurism will mostly get it wrong because it needs to be far fetched to get peoples' attention.
Boring, down to earth predictions usually gets burried, no one cares.
Blade Runner was a movie that relied a lot on the "ambience". The gritty feel of the city and how relate-able some of it is to what you might encounter every day helps set the tone.
A lot of current sci-fi I've watched seems to do a pretty good job of trying to guess what the "little things" will be like in future daily life, though. TV series like Humans or Extant, for example? Lots of predictions about the style and functionality of self-driving vehicles, home automation with hand gesture controls, etc.
In other shows like the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, the old technology on board was very purposeful - to prevent Cylons from infecting and hijacking it.
What you'll find is that the bounds of technology and the line over which lies "miraculous" territory get pushed back simultaneously, because they're inextricably linked.
To me the single biggest everyday miracle is that I can put a string of text into Google and get hundreds of thousands of hits back spanning the sum of human ... well let's say data rather than knowledge; and that it comes back in what for practical purposes is instantaneously while at the same time millions of other people are doing exactly the same thing.
When I stop to think of it, which is fairly often, it strikes me as the very next thing to magic, even though as an engineer with a degree in computer science I have at least some idea of the things that make this possible. Yet it is the most ordinary and unremarkable thing to my children, who have never known a time without it, it's the most unremarkable thing imaginable.
Earlier generations of engineers probably felt the same way about radio.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's because Westerns were based on horses with people riding them.
Rockets are just mechanical horses.
You can tell hard science fiction by a simple test: no one goes anywhere. You get a transmission. Decoding it might lead to a set of events that end your civilization, but only if your transmission doesn't end theirs first.
In the movie Contact, Earth goes ahead and builds a machine it doesn't comprehend, then stupidly switches it on.
Maybe you luck into a constructive alliance. Maybe you don't.
SETI is not a toy.
Even better: In some Isaac Asimov Novel (forgot which) starships became way to complicated to be operated by humans. They had to be steered and navigated by "AI" (or cybernetic or positronic or electronic brains.)
But was something like a computer connected to the controls? No. Not electronic or even mechanically using servo motors: Each ship had to have a robot, as only a robot could operate all the required buttons, rudders and levers.
How can someone capable of imagining an artificial brain operating the most complex machinery not even have the faintest idea that mechanical controls could be obsolete by a time we have starships and AI
bickerdyke
... who cares about such details? all sci-fi space movies from before 2000 have crt screens in their space ships, which is ridiculous if you think about it now, but does it ruin the expirience of watching Alien? Not at all...
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
So follow the "hello moto" model and introduce a projector screen into a portable videophone, use a blank section of wall to stare at.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Blade Runner AKA Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is set in a dystopian future where the ultra wealthy corporate types have amazing resources and the masses have next to nothing.
Did he even see the movie or read Phil Dick's book? We are already headed towards a future where corporations have AI and the masses would be lucky to find a phone of any kind.
Greed is the root of all evil.
To be a little more kind to GDW (who produced Traveller), a lot of that was supposed to be computer stations and the like. To be a little less kind, they'd released the game Triplanetary somewhat earlier, which had its warships using guns because beam or energy weapons were basically impossible.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Another example is the Traveller RPG; published in 1977, and set in a future where human and alien civilizations spanned a significant part of the galaxy, ship's computers take up a minimum of 14 cubic meters of volume in the ship -- a starship of 400 tons displacement with a medium-size computer system would have it taking up 56 cubic meters of volume -- four 'tons' in the design process -- and this computer can only run eight programs simultaneously. It's like having ENIAC on your ship.
Which is fairly realistic for mature server setup running mission critical programs needed to keep you from dying. Once you include racks, redundant systems, cooling, the actual computers, data storage, and routers, and depending on the ship floorplan, space to access them, 14 cubic meters is a modest server room. The programs are all things controlling the vast systems of a space ship including calculating various jump space coordiantes needed to travel lightyears in normal space in a week, probably with reduntdant systems because if something goes wrong, ship is destroyed and everybody dies (which is a risk even then if things are done sloppily). The tech is mature so even with increase of tech level, you don't get much more efficiency out of newer models.