Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is Today's Technology As Cool As You'd Predicted When You Were Young?
"How does the actual, purchaseable consumer technology available in 2019 compare to what you -- back in the 1960s, '70s, '80s or '90s -- thought consumer technology might look like around the year 2020?" asks Slashdot reader dryriver.
Is today's consumer technology as advanced, inventive, groundbreaking and empowering as you imagined it would be 30, 40, 50 years ago? Or is the "technological future that has now actually arrived" different, in various ways, from how you'd hoped/imagined it might be a few decades back?
If so, what was different in your "future technologies imagination" than what is available to buy today?
Each generation received different dreams from the pop culture of their time. Back in 1969 an 18-year-old Kurt Russell starred in a Disney movie with a malfunctioning mainframe. By 1984 one TV series showed David Hasselhoff with his own talking self-driving car. But how close did your own personal predictions come, asks the original submission.
"Do today's technological gadgets manage to live up to how you imagined tech around the year 2020 would be, or do they fall short of what you hoped/imagined might exist by today?
If so, what was different in your "future technologies imagination" than what is available to buy today?
Each generation received different dreams from the pop culture of their time. Back in 1969 an 18-year-old Kurt Russell starred in a Disney movie with a malfunctioning mainframe. By 1984 one TV series showed David Hasselhoff with his own talking self-driving car. But how close did your own personal predictions come, asks the original submission.
"Do today's technological gadgets manage to live up to how you imagined tech around the year 2020 would be, or do they fall short of what you hoped/imagined might exist by today?
Heinlein had them in "Space cadet" in the late 40s. Clarke had them in "Imperial Earth" in 1976.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
But regarding computers, the books I had back then were predicting that my computer in the year 2000 would be a 100 MHz GaAs machine running Occam, so that turned out to be quite a bit better.
Ezekiel 23:20
I assumed that we'd have a nudie button on our TVs by now, where one could press the nudie button and see all the TV personalities in their birthday suits. Well that is what I thought back in the 70's. I'm sort of glad it didn't come to pass yet.
I have to disagree. Many of us swim in more bandwidth than we ever expected to be as cheaply available. Especially those of us who thought 3kbps V.42bis brought us was the cats meow!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I thought we would have had much better computer voice recognition by now but the web and mobile devices are far more capable than I ever imagined they would be. The biggest disappointment is space technology which is far behind where I thought it would be by now although SpaceX is helping it get there.
for the paperless office.
Seriously, on more than one occasion back in the 1970s I heard how companies like Weyerhauser and Georgia Pacific were worried about how the advent of computers was going to destroy their business within a few years. But whenever I've looked around the various offices and labs I've worked in, and all I see is paper and more paper.
#DeleteChrome
Some of the leading tech like computers and TVs are pretty cool actually - and that we can have all we have on a small USB stick in our pocket.
The bad parts - well, that was predicted by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and by the TV show "Max Headroom".
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
When I was a kid in the early 1980's, the only programming books that the library had was about COBOL and payroll. Thank God that kids today don't have to learn about either one.
I grew up in the 90s.
I remember visiting actual computer stores, which had isles and isles packed with the latest greatest gadgets, games, peripherals, and other random accessories. I remember the GPU revolution that started in the late 90s and gave birth to the Voodoo 2 PCI, GeForce 2 MX, ATI 9800 series, etc. I remember seeing sound cards going from ISA to PCI and some truly revolutionary tech like A3D (Aureal 3D) come and go. I remember buying numerous joysticks and gamepads, because a lot of games could make use of them, and some of that stuff was really neat as well (like the Microsoft Force Feedback 2 units- the FF on those things could break a small child's wrist when it was cranked up to max, and it was fucking awesome with Mechwarrior).
I remember buying and using a Palm, then later upgrading to a Pocket PC (specifically an iPaq). Yeah, the software was a bit glitchy but I didn't care. It let me take notes on the foldable keyboard and play SimCity 2000 on the go (plus DOOM and some emulated Sega games), which was awesome enough. I had the latter in my pocket for well over a decade before it became unusable with modern day software.
I remember buying printers- some were expensive, some weren't. The best printer I ever owned was a Canon BJC-6000. It had a removable print head (and came with a spare holder for one) that you could swap if you had the photo head instead (which took more cartridges), and even a scanner unit that would let you scan stuff instead of printing it (granted, it was a bit slow since the head still had to go back and forth to scan the entire sheet). The cartridges were just cheap plastic tanks that you could refill super easily because they were transparent, Canon used an optical level sensor on those units which consisted of a tiny prism at the bottom that either refracted light or didn't based on how much ink was left.
The internet was pretty chill too. I loved chatting to people over IRC using my Seanix Pentium 75mhz computer with 16mb of RAM and a 2mb Trident SVGA graphics card. This was over dial-up, but it didn't matter much because most websites were optimized for that sort of thing. Nobody was trying to track me, things like Facebook didn't exist, and for the large part it was just a massive online community of knowledge and information.
I got to see things evolve and refine themselves, and the future seemed like it was going to be so fucking wonderful- and then it all came crashing down.
I guess it happened when the corporations got interested in things- or maybe it happened when people started demanding exponential increases in profits, who knows.
What I do know is this:
- Everything I use is encrypted in some bullshit way that removes control from me, the owner and user
- The last printer I owned tried to tell me that my perfectly good ink cartridges were "expired" and refused to use them
- Everyone is trying to track me on the internet or advertise to me somehow
- Simple things like IRC somehow turned into Discord, a bloated abomination built on Electron that sucks up 32x more RAM than my original IRC computer had to do the same fucking thing
- Computers no longer listen to my wishes in general- ie, don't fucking update yourself because I have actual work to do and everything works fine as-is
- Ditto for most consumer electronic devices that think they know better than me
- Mostly everything is built to break down after the warranty expires and/or be as unrepairable as possible (my Palm and PPC had user replaceable batteries)
- Software has turned into a big old black box that nobody really understands, including the vendor, since the answer to most things is "reinstall/reformat and try again"
Maybe I'm lucky... Maybe I only have fond memories of things because it was truly a time of user innovation. But it just seemed like everyone wanted to produce a good solid product back then, and making money was just a side effect of having something consumers WANTED to buy- not something that they NEEDED to buy
Graphics are better. Security is worse. Understanding is worse. RAM is cheaper but software just wastes more of it to compensate. Same goes for CPU speed; CPUs are much faster but software is just slower to compensate. Bandwidth is overpriced as fuck. Dishonesty runs rampant in the industry, causing permanent erosion of the public trust.
What we're missing that I imagined we'd have:
flying cars that could hover
holographic tv
rotating space stations
moon and mars colonies
undersea cities
fusion power
cure for cancers and viral diseases
cures for genetic diseases
mind/computer interface
robot to do all house chores
no poverty
Computers are pretty damned fast and cheap compared to the days of the 1 MIPS $3000 IBM PC with 3 360k floppy disks and a monochrome monitor. The rise of Arduino and Raspberry Pi make it possible to stick computing in almost anything for less than $20, and in some cases under a buck!
Bandwidth is far MORE expensive than I predicted... I expected full duplex gigabit for $50/month by now... it amazes me that cable TV is still a dominant way of delivering data to the masses. I predicted that you'd be able to have a full duplex video feed (Facetime anyone) between any 2 points in the world for $50/month.... we never made it.
Operating Systems are now far LESS reliable and secure than the days of MS-DOS. You could always write protect your OS disk, and easily make copies of it. You could trust copies to work years later, and everyone understood how to make them. You didn't have to worry about your hardware getting bricked.
Video and Cameras are amazing, I had no idea how cool things could get.
Wireless / Cellular networks are way better than I expected, but again the monopoly pricing structures are weird.
There are lots of cool surprises, Wikis, Blogging, Video Sharing, Podcasts, Ebay, Amazon, 3d printers and milling machines for cheap. Open source software and hardware,
I have a 65" 4k TV that is as close to 1970's sci-fi as I could imagine. My LG K8 (bottom of the barrel) smartphone can let me have two way conversations with people that speak languages that I don't, using Microsoft Translate. Space X lands stage one rockets, and reuses them. I stream TV without commercials. I could go on and on, but won't. Man, the future is great!
Exactly. Back in the 80s, I envisioned 2000 and beyond to be a high tech utopia (or possibly dystopia). All houses and buildings would be updated to "space age" materials instead of wood or rock and to be more arcology-like. Flying cars, robots, cyborgs and cloning would be commonplace in every day life. Computers would be at the point where even the oldest, cheapest ones would be fast enough to process anything instantly. We'd have a colony on Mars and robots on the moons of the outer planets.
The future turned out to be an almost complete let-down.
It's a relative question isn't it? If you are in your 20's then you probably aren't that impressed or not as much as I am.
Strange to think a CD is antiquated now.
As a teenager a Walkman was hi-tech.
Now I can stream music wirelessly from my watch to little buds in my ear.
My phone knows my face and I can ask it to turn on music in any room in my house.
I can video chat with my mother on the other side of the planet in high definition video and audio.
Yet with the car industry we're still driving the same shitty combustion engined machines we did as a kid.
The electronics and safety are better.
What happened to the big dreams of space exploration?
Oh yeah, that's right, we decided it was more important to turn our tech on deep sea exploration for hydro carbons to power those shitty combustion engines.
In the 90s I thought that the internet was a cool new frontier, opening up endless opportunities for the betterment of mankind. Nowadays I mostly think that it's a means of mass espionage that turns people into assholes.
I'm an Air Force brat. In 1969.I watched with my family as Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon. That was an OMG moment, which set unfulfilled expectations for years to come. Instead of OMG moments, we've had a steady advance in tech, better every year, but never with an OMG moment like that.
So, I'm disappointed that I cannot vacation on Mars. At the same time, the steady tech revolution has changed the world far more than most of us would have thought possible.
In 1982, I took a philosophy class at UC Berkeley. For my final project, I predicted when the AI singularity would occur. My hypothesis was that we sim[y lacked the compute power, and when we had enough such that for $1M in 1982 dollars, any mainstream university could afford a neural network with the same capacity as a human brain, then some a-hole would come along and program it to actually be intelligent.
I predicted, based on Moore's Law, 2025....
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
In the late-1990s when I joined Slashdot, I would never have imagined that in 2019 we wouldn't have Unicode / UTF-8 support. I didn't discover UTF-8 until 2002, but still...
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
Today's world is fabulous technologically speaking. I remember MIT's first attempts at self-driving cars in the 80s. I worked on one of the first telephone with voice recognition (it sort of recognized 10 digits after hours of training). I dreamed of a portable computer I could take with me everywhere, and being forever-connected to the rest of the world.
Now all these things are a reality, and so ubiquitous people feel the need to wonder if they're cool on Slashdot!
What I didn't expect is the reasons why these technologies came about: as I kid, I thought research was done to better humanity, and give more people access to education. Wrong! It's done to squeeze money out of people and put them under surveillance. It's also used by religious crazies, conspiracy theorists, and to post videos of cats.
In short, all these mavellous things have been invented for nefarious purposes, and used mostly by an ever-dumber population. That's a letdown...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Man! I just realized that I have been on Slashdot longer than several of my team members have been alive!
Fuck :O 20 years!
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't say that it is.
The free and open internet was great while it lasted.
Did not expect the virtue signalling, SJW, censorship, shadow banning, reporting, account removal, payment processor problems the internet would have.
That side of political control for speech on the internet was something out of Communist nations.
I didn't see that people would actually be getting killed by swatting, that doxing would be a thing, that people would make an avocation out of hounding others to suicide ... and yet others would get un-self-consciously self-righteous about virtue signalling and the terrible problem of the scary SJW.
[I mean, seriously, you're virtue signalling by complaining about virtue signalling? No shit?]
Speak for yourself about same roads and houses. The standard of living in Western countries where I live has consistently gone downhill since the 1980s. Personally I can't even imagine owning the kind of houses my parents could afford back then. That kind of good living is out of reach for me.
In some ways, it is cooler in ways that I couldn't have imagined. By 1990 when I was 23, I knew at some point music and movie media would move beyond the optical disc, but I believed it would be in the form of cheap high capacity ROM chipped cartridges the size of a matchbook that would be bought in a store. I didn't think of data compression or high speed online distribution or streaming. I knew computer hardware and software would continue to get faster, cheaper, and better but I didn't envision tablets and smartphones arriving so soon.When I was caught up in the excitement of our digital utopia envisioned by magazines such as Mondo 2000 and the new Wired mag, I looked forward to our bright and glorious digital future.
But now, 25 years later, the digital age looks far more like Brazil/1984 than anything found in Disney's Tomorrowland. Privacy is practically dead, free speech is practically dead as one has to practice self-censorship to avoid wrathful social media mobs, hardware and software are rife with vulnerabilities, toxic mountains of obsolete hardware, ubiquitous surveillance thanks to better cameras and cheaper/greater storage capacity, identity theft via hacks of centralized financial and business databases, and a myriad of nuisances one could never have imagined (pop-up ads, spam, click bait, fake news, bots, phishing, etc.). It all makes me yearn for the days of 8- or 16-bit computing and BBSs. Things may have been slower and less convenient then, but it was also safer and saner.
Computers have evolved beyond I think anyones wildest expectations. We have seriously star trek level machines in the palms of our hands. And holy shit the internet.
Space travel has been a *major* disapointment. Hopefully this push to mars gets us back on track, but its like we hit the moon, got some space station action happening aaaaand then had 30-40 years of lost years.
Cars kind of feel boring, but if we're honest the modern car is miles ahead of anything we knew in the 1970s. No flying cars however. No hover cars. And the monorails are terrible.
We still haven't cured cancer yet!
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
The shear level of computation power and memory that we have access to is mind blowing.
The dystopian aspects regarding technology are also way higher than expected. People may see this as a negative but I see it as an opportunity for knowledgeable programmers and hackers. Yes, it is true that our collective commercial technology is "a massive flaming pile of trash that I really don't want to deal with" but nobody is forcing you to use it. Nobody is forcing you on social media, nobody is forcing you to have a "smart" phone/tv/house/etc and yet so many do. For those of us who recognize how awful these things are and have the discipline to avoid them, it's a great opportunity to have fun.
But OMFG, how is it that Cisco still makes routers that have shit security? I mean, you had one job and it's a serious train wreck. I honestly thought their stuff would be impenetrable by now. Also, I'm still baffled as to how everyone thought Systemd was a great idea. I think either Red Hat bought off a bunch of people or they are way dumber then I give them credit for.
TL;RD: the cyberpunk present does not disappoint in that everything is entirely hackable.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The Pluses:
My particular interest is Radio, and a good SDR (NetSDR+ with SDRConsole) is vastly more capable than the best radio (even military grade) of even thirty years ago.
Computers are much faster and cheaper than was expected, although our operating systems are stil very poor.
(Windows and Linux have been way out-paced by the developments in hardware).
The Internet has brought an astounding improvement in the access to information for most people.
Cars are much better (and cheaper) than we expected, and the coming EVs will result in an even greater step forward.
The Minuses:
It shocks me how badly our standard of living has deteriorated:
Economic Equality is utterly broken:
Employment conditions and rewards have greatly deteriorated.
The decline of Consumer Rights, Public Transport, Education, and Medical Insurance are an outrage.
And the cost (and quality) of housing is now shameful.
My biggest miss was replacement organs - especially teeth. In about 1958 I expected implanted replacement adult tooth buds, far better than drilling-and-filling, to be available by about 1978 (when I might start to want them myself).
Now it's a half century after the prediction. Fillings have drastically improved and I have a couple titanium implants. But serious work on replacement organs is just getting under way.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yes. Back when I was in college, I would have literally KILLED for the kind of computer, phone, and wireless 24/7/365 connectivity I now take for granted & have anxiety attacks without. And I say that as someone who HAD a 1200-baud modem in 1986, and spent the summer after 10th grade staying up all night using PC-Pursuit to connect to bulletin board systems around the world for free at a point in time when a long-distance call to a BBS a hundred miles away cost approximately $15-20/hour, and even fsck'ing QuantumLink cost around $2.50/hour.
The past 10-15 years have been kind of a disappointment in the PC realm, but even circa 2002 when I was playing with my shiny new PalmOS phone, I wouldn't have dared to fantasize about being able to use a service like Youtube as a free music streaming service (ignoring the videos) while driving across the Florida Everglades, let alone play 3D videogames and use it as a 2160x1440 display host for virtual reality software. On the other hand, if you'd told me in 2001 that circa 2010, the display market would be totally stagnated around 1920x1080 monitors and it would take literally YEARS to get back up above the kind of resolution available on a $4,000 2002-era Thinkpad (1920x1600), I would have thought you were kidding.
Ditto, for storage. If you'd told me in 1990 that someday, a MOUSE DRIVER would have approximately 200 megabytes worth of files... and that I wouldn't care, because my computer had a 2-terabyte hard drive, a 1-terabyte removable hard drive in the optical bay, and another 512gb that was like a persistent ramdisk performance-wise, I would have thought you were utterly and completely insane.
CPU-wise, I'd have to say yes and no. In 1988, a 1-GHz 2002 CPU would have seemed like science fiction. In 2002, a 4GHz CPU would have seemed like a sick joke, even when you account for cores, cache, and overall performance.
In terms of keyboards, computers have totally gone to shit. Even Thinkpad keyboards suck compared to the keyboards they USED to have 20 years ago, and suck even MORE compared to the literal low-profile clicky keyboards early-90s high-end laptops used to have. Modern mice are a billion times better than the mice we had in 1990, but I'd take a thumb trackball (with modern optical sensor instead of rollers) over a flat touchpad any day, unhesitatingly. I LIKED thumb trackballs like the one on the DEC HiNote Ultra, and didn't mind first-generation touchpads that emulated thumb trackballs. I absolutely DESPISE modern touchpads (which are designed for people who can't type, and who use them with their index fingers, as opposed to people who keep their hands over the keyboard and try using the touchpad with their thumb).
I miss resistive touchscreens. Capacitive touchscreens are handy for detecting blunt touches, but resistive touchscreens with real DSPs were a thousand times better for things like Graffiti. To this day, I have yet to use a non-rooted Android phone whose CPU governor isn't disabled that's capable of doing Graffiti as accurately as a 16MHz Palm Pilot III.
IMHO, the industry abandoned IrDA long before it had a good replacement... and waited WAY too long to replace 1.44mb floppies with just about anything that was better (Zip drives and LS-120 were too little, too late... but LS-120 would have totally rocked back in 1992, even if they'd only been 25-50mb/disk).
Space exploration? Meh... and yeah. Elementary-school me (late 70s, pre-shuttle) would have been thoroughly unimpressed by today's space program. The entire shuttle era just seemed lame and anticlimactic. My first sentient thoughts regarding space travel involved watching men walking on the moon... and thinking it was a totally normal daily occurrence (because for someone who was born after the first Apollo mission, but was old enough TO remember seeing the final ones live on TV, it WAS a totally normal daily occurrence)... and it seemed like everything NASA did after I finally got to kindergarten was just a step down.
On the other hand, the past
Serial processing speeding up so much that no-one thought easy parallel programs were worth the bother?
No. We have plenty of parallelism in modern computing, with threading, multiple cores, GPGPU, and clusters. The problem is that Occam used the wrong model: Private memory and slow interconnects based on message passing. What happened in the actual future timeline was symmetric multiprocessing with shared memory, and even shared L3 cache.
Back around 1979-1980, I was talking with my mother about the various minicomputers that were available; I was using a PR1ME at the college, and she had some kind of HP equipment (HP3500 ?) at work. Some of the early home computers running BASIC were available, but it was already obvious that these things were like toys compared with the multi-processing and multi-user big iron. Considering how much larger and complicated programs could be made in FORTRAN, compared with the line-number BASIC of the time, I speculated, that some day, we would have small home computers that could run the same kind of FORTRAN programs.
She said she thought that was unlikely.
As few years later PCs became powerful enough to actually be able to do this (PC/AT, with the 80286 running Xenix). And these days, there are the pocket-sized Raspberry Pi, Rock 64, and others, that are more powerful than all that large hardware from the 1970s.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Nobody predicted the modern smart phone.
Mark Weiser predicted the smart phone (and the tablet) in 1988, and also predicted much of the technology that would make them work. He coined the term Ubiquitous computing.
He was a visionary (and a coding wizard). Unfortunately he died in 1999, so never got to see his complete vision fulfilled. RIP Mark.
No. Hardware evolved at an insane pace, with every new generation exponentially faster and more capable. Software was exciting too. You could download some warez and open up a whole new realm of possibility. Data could be stored and converted into various common file formats and exchanged using open protocols.
Now if it's not mobile crapware it's infested with trackers and trojans, and software compatibility is so poor that the most common way of sharing something is to turn it into a noisy JPEG. Everything still superficially speaks the same protocol, but it's just used to wrap ad-hoc formats and ill-defined APIs that can change without notice. If you can even get at the raw data at all.
Instead of tricorders we got shitty selfie-tablets that can't last a day without a recharge. Instead of empowerment and distributed networking, we got nanny admins and centralization. Instead of a rich medium for computation, we got a kitchen sink of broken ideas, so convoluted it requires a monopolisti company to farm the collective attention of the world in order to pay for its upkeep.
Cyberpunk dystopia is here, and it wants you to like and subscribe.
Dijkstra was ahead of his time, mostly because he was preaching about concerns that were mostly anal-retentive academic non-issues on the computers computer science majors in the 80s and 90s were familiar with.
On a computer like the Commodore 64, or even an Amiga 500, a program that hijacks the interrupts and takes control is lord and god of its environment. "Works for me" IS good enough, because there aren't many ways it MIGHT work differently on anybody else's identical hardware.
When you fast forward to computers where SMP is the norm, weak memory models are common, and concurrent programming is required... Dijkstra was downright visionary and totally right.
Simply put, you can get away with a lot of shit on a computer where your code is the only thing running and the hardware is mostly identical to everyone else's that you CAN NOT get away with in a multithreaded program that attempts to use a GPU to do realtime calculations in a preemptively-multitasking operating system on a platform with a weak memory model.
Put another way... stuff like this seemingly-innocent Java example generally works fine on a PC with a single-core CPU running Windows 9x (despite having always been officially taboo), but REALLY goes down in flames if you leave it as-is, but run it on a computer with a dual/quad-core CPU, because there's no guarantee that a second thread won't arrive, see that myFoo is no longer null & return and attempt to use it before the first thread finishes CREATING the new Foo object: (google: "double-checked locking")
public static Foo getFoo() {
if (myFoo == null) {
myFoo = new Foo();
}
return myFoo;
}
...in the fields of battery and medical technology. Yeah, modern smartphones can do some amazing stuff, but playing Pokemon Go still chews up your battery like nobody's business. Consumer UAS technology in DJI's drones is way more advanced than anything I could've imagined when I was a kid, but they're still hindered by incredibly short battery life. On the medical side, I'd have assumed we'd have a cure for HIV/AIDS by now, along with most other major diseases.
As for the negative repercussions of today's technology, I didn't anticipate the retail apocalypse. I kind of miss being able to go to RadioShack and poke around through the parts drawers. As others have already mentioned, there's also social media making it ever-so-easy for misinformation/superstition/idiocy to spread like a plague. Even Disney's Spaceship Earth designers didn't see that one coming. If they did, the ride would end with "Putting the power of the computer in everyone's hands in hindsight, wasn't such a great idea."
Honorable mention also goes to flying cars. I don't know why it never dawned on sci-fi writers how impractical flying cars would actually be, but they sure managed to convince quite a few of my generation that we would've had them by now. When I show people my DJI Spark, I just tell them "This is the flying car I was promised as a kid. I expected something a little larger."
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Mark Weiser [wikipedia.org] predicted the smart phone (and the tablet) in 1988
Alan Kay predicted it in 1968 and a few years later he was already in the process of implementing it.
Ezekiel 23:20
It is complexity that you are reacting to, a complexity that is growing by leaps and bounds. I believe your discontent represents the growing disgust with the time and effort and loss of control that people are feeling in every area of their lives today. I believe there must eventually be a "complexity collapse," where people shed complexity and embrace simplicity. This may be a major part of the movement away from cable and to the internet: more control over the level of complexity in their lives. Think about what cable has become and the hoops that must be jumped through to deal with it. It isn't only about cost.
E Proelio Veritas.
Anything space related is hugely disappointing. Most things involving society are disappointing. Software in general and Windows in particular tends to be disappointing. But I can make phone calls on my watch just like Dick Tracy. I can crank my car from my watch. I can adjust the thermostat in my house from another country. I can pay for things with my watch or phone. Voice recognition and chess programs are further along than I expected. So there are certain things that now appear mundane that my younger self would find cool.
I was born in 1968, so I saw the future through Star Trek and other science fiction that showed a world where technology was a gateway to a better world. It was a way to make life better and give people a purpose. Instead, every new "innovation" is about extracting more data, or slapping people with advertising, all in an effort to make some Silicon Valley douche a billionaire. I used to dream about the future. I thought the 21st century would be this amazing time where we had tech that improved our lives, reduced human greed, and opened up a world where we could pursue the betterment of ourselves and the lives of others. I couldn't wait to see what the future would bring. Now at 50 years old, I just want to buy a cabin in the mountain and get as far from this dystopian madness as I can and try to live a simple life while people destroy the planet in a bid to make assbags like Jeff Bezos as rich as he can possibly be. The 21st Century is a crushing disappointment.
I was looking back at some photos of New York City in the 30's - the Chrysler building. It struck me just how modern it still looks today. Photo's of gleaming cars in the show room lobby, the art deco style - it still inspires modernity. And lest we forget, the USA from the 20's saw an unprecedented rapidity of invention and innovation.
The future had already started, long before I was born and a ton of cool stuff was being produced and would be produced in the following decades.
I was born in the UK in 1968 and when I was a kid, it struck me just how advanced the USA was when compared to our very troubled country. There was the future, that was where all the cool stuff came from. But the UK was catching up and we got our first home brewed mass produced personal computer - the ZX80. The library up the road from me switched from paper cards to swipe cards in 1978. I had sci-fi comics and TV shows that promised an amazing future.
Sadly, the arms race seemed to be overtaking the space race and all thoughts of a cool technological future were put abruptly on hold, as we contemplated a 3rd world war.
But back then, I expected we'd see flying cars, jet packs, a moon base and androids. Maybe even world peace.
The reality is, incredible marvels of technology have been produced, but they have become mostly invisible and ubiquitous.
A great deal of it is just a series of continued improvements on existing technology.
The single most amazing thing that was somewhat predicted in science fiction, has been the internet.
In the grand scheme of things, 50 years is a very short time and most of the technology we have today, existed when I was born.
No, it sucks--but not from a lack of advancement. Rather, as a child I failed to foresee the extent to which technology would be used against the common people.
When I was a kid I never dreamed I would grow up to live in a cybernetic totalitarian dystopia. Yet here we are!
Ubiquitous panoptic surveillance, for-profit global censorship, rabid financialization, actual flying robots, actual killer robots (many of which fly), algorithms and "AI" constantly evaluating every aspect of our lives... The list goes on and on.
Sure sure, it's a boot stamping on a human face - forever But I guess maybe you could say the tech is cool.
I predicted it would be better than in the 1970s.
Current tech is abysmal, Windows becomes unstable merely downloading patches, Linux' legendary reliability is no more. Tech peaked in the mid to late 90s and has gone downhill since.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I already thought it was cool when I got a Hercules graphics card for my PC, which could show 80! lines of text, can you imagine?
Also my first HP500 Color printer for 1500$ was cool as hell, much better than the near letter quality needler I had before.
My first Postscript Laser Printer for only 12000$ was beyond bliss.
Now people have a computer on their wrist, that checks their heartbeats, a small phone that plays music, games and videos and talks to satellites to see where it is exactly on the planet, people talk to their Bluetooth speaker and they even answer, some of them even will bring you beer if you ask them, albeit only the next day.
Rockets come back to the place they landed 7 minutes later after they put dozens of satellites in space and electric cars can be bought that are way faster and cooler than Ferraris or Lamborghinis for a fraction of the price.
And the young whippersnappers just think: Meh.
And now get off my lawn.
it's only my coworker's insistence on dropping crap on my desk that keeps my office from being paperless. For me I hate the stuff. I can't search it. I hate holding pens and pencils and it's a huge waste of money.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Orwell predicted that the government would mandate telescreens in homes so they could spy on people. He never considered that people would actually _voluntarily pay money_ to put telescreens in their homes! (Google home, Alexa, etc)
sustainable living