It will, but stuff doesn’t get better linearly forever. That’s why everybody in the 50s thought we’d be living in Mars, have starships and flying cars by now. Also why a bunch of investors and nerds thought AI was the new social media at some point.
Turns out most things get a lot better very fast and then a little better very slowly, and it’s very, very hard to know when that line is going to flip ahead of time.
I do want to point out that while our tech doesnt look as amazing in the same way as the 50’s thought it’d be, its pretty amazing in its own ways. I’m writing this message to you on a glass obelisk physically connected to nothing, that enables me to talk to my adopted family on the literal opposite end of the planet with maybe a few seconds of delay (if that), who dont speak the same language as me, and its more than 100,000 times more powerful than the computers thay first got us to the moon, while being small enough to comfortably fit in my pocket
You type posts that long on mobile? I am genuinely an old now.
Anyway, yeah, absolutely. We do live in the future. The point is that people extrapolate from whatever tech is in growth mode and inevitably go past where the real asymptote is. So yeah, if you were living in the 60s nuclear power and the space race seemed like amazing achievements, but it turns out the tech stopped shy of… you know, moonbases and the X-Men. If you were in the 80s automation and computers seemed like magic, but sentience didn’t emerge from sheer computation and… well, actually short of the cyborg part pretty much every other part of Robocop happened, so we’ll call that a tie.
So now we get affordable machine learning leading to working language and synthetic image models and assume that’s gonna grow forever until we get the holodeck and artificial general intelligence. And we may, but we could also hit the ceiling pretty close to where we are now.
Thats fair, and yeah I spend a lot of time on transit these days, so I have the time to write up long posts on mobile xD As another aside, VR Tech and Mocap tech mean that we do actually have modern reality adjusted versions of the Holodeck right now! Check out Sandbox VR, they have locations in multiple different countries and its super cool! I’m sure there are other companies that have done similar, Sandbox is just the one I know of and have used!
The Jetson’s was supposed to take place 100 years from when it was being made in the 1960s.
Which means the following technologies beat their predictions by decades:
Video calls
Robot vacuums
Tablet computing
Smart watches
Drones
Pill cams
Flat screen TVs
Flying cars exist, they just aren’t economically viable or practical given the cost, necessity to have a flight license, and aviation regulations regarding takeoff and landing.
And we’re still 40 years away from that show’s imagined future.
Your thesis focuses too much on the things here and there that were wrong, which typically related to expensive hardware cycles being assumed to be faster because the focus was only on the underlying technology being possible and not thinking through if it was practical (doors that slide into the ceiling is a classic example - the cost of retrofitting for that vs keeping doorknobs means the latter will be around for a very very long time).
What we are discussing is the rate of change for centrally run software which has already hit milestones ahead of expert expectations several times over in the past few years and set the world record for fastest growing new product usage beating the previous record holder by over a 4x speedup.
Yes. Technology went faster than people expected in some areas and much slower in others, to the point where the outcome may not be possible at all.
That IS my “thesis”. the idea that in the 1960s video calls and a sentient robot cleaning your house seemed equally cartoonishly futuristic is the entire point I’m making.
And to be clear, that holds even when restricted simply to consumer software and hardware. We got a lot better than expected at networking and data transmission… and now we’re noticeably slowing down. We are actually behind in terms of AI, but we’re way better at miniaturization.
Again, people extrapolate from their impression of current rates of progress endlessly, but it’s hard to predict when the curve will flatten out. That’s the thesis.
Obviously it will never get better. Ha ha… Ha…
It will, but stuff doesn’t get better linearly forever. That’s why everybody in the 50s thought we’d be living in Mars, have starships and flying cars by now. Also why a bunch of investors and nerds thought AI was the new social media at some point.
Turns out most things get a lot better very fast and then a little better very slowly, and it’s very, very hard to know when that line is going to flip ahead of time.
Captain obvious
I do want to point out that while our tech doesnt look as amazing in the same way as the 50’s thought it’d be, its pretty amazing in its own ways. I’m writing this message to you on a glass obelisk physically connected to nothing, that enables me to talk to my adopted family on the literal opposite end of the planet with maybe a few seconds of delay (if that), who dont speak the same language as me, and its more than 100,000 times more powerful than the computers thay first got us to the moon, while being small enough to comfortably fit in my pocket
You type posts that long on mobile? I am genuinely an old now.
Anyway, yeah, absolutely. We do live in the future. The point is that people extrapolate from whatever tech is in growth mode and inevitably go past where the real asymptote is. So yeah, if you were living in the 60s nuclear power and the space race seemed like amazing achievements, but it turns out the tech stopped shy of… you know, moonbases and the X-Men. If you were in the 80s automation and computers seemed like magic, but sentience didn’t emerge from sheer computation and… well, actually short of the cyborg part pretty much every other part of Robocop happened, so we’ll call that a tie.
So now we get affordable machine learning leading to working language and synthetic image models and assume that’s gonna grow forever until we get the holodeck and artificial general intelligence. And we may, but we could also hit the ceiling pretty close to where we are now.
Thats fair, and yeah I spend a lot of time on transit these days, so I have the time to write up long posts on mobile xD As another aside, VR Tech and Mocap tech mean that we do actually have modern reality adjusted versions of the Holodeck right now! Check out Sandbox VR, they have locations in multiple different countries and its super cool! I’m sure there are other companies that have done similar, Sandbox is just the one I know of and have used!
The Jetson’s was supposed to take place 100 years from when it was being made in the 1960s.
Which means the following technologies beat their predictions by decades:
Flying cars exist, they just aren’t economically viable or practical given the cost, necessity to have a flight license, and aviation regulations regarding takeoff and landing.
And we’re still 40 years away from that show’s imagined future.
Your thesis focuses too much on the things here and there that were wrong, which typically related to expensive hardware cycles being assumed to be faster because the focus was only on the underlying technology being possible and not thinking through if it was practical (doors that slide into the ceiling is a classic example - the cost of retrofitting for that vs keeping doorknobs means the latter will be around for a very very long time).
What we are discussing is the rate of change for centrally run software which has already hit milestones ahead of expert expectations several times over in the past few years and set the world record for fastest growing new product usage beating the previous record holder by over a 4x speedup.
You’re comparing apples to oranges.
Yes. Technology went faster than people expected in some areas and much slower in others, to the point where the outcome may not be possible at all.
That IS my “thesis”. the idea that in the 1960s video calls and a sentient robot cleaning your house seemed equally cartoonishly futuristic is the entire point I’m making.
And to be clear, that holds even when restricted simply to consumer software and hardware. We got a lot better than expected at networking and data transmission… and now we’re noticeably slowing down. We are actually behind in terms of AI, but we’re way better at miniaturization.
Again, people extrapolate from their impression of current rates of progress endlessly, but it’s hard to predict when the curve will flatten out. That’s the thesis.