Someone smarter than me noted that most science fiction has badly missed the mark of what the present and near future will look like b/c the assumption was that power sources would trend towards zero cost ("too cheap to meter") and that this would enable all sorts of interesting world altering gizmos's like jetpacks, flying cars, physics defying spacecraft etc.
What actually happened is that communication density exploded upward (pony express, telegraph, radios, phones, industrial printing, computers, etc.) at the same time that communication cost plummeted (aka I'm paying a flat rate for internet access and video chatting with people all over the globe).
And I think this is still the case, that we generally still look down on communications as a kind of lesser technology compared to power gizmos. When if anything it should be the opposite, that the ability to communicate so much more effectively across all of humanity has smeared the ideas and inventions around much faster and more thoroughly than anyone really considers.
Why did things take so long? Because everything had to be individually re-invented, we had no shoulders of giants.
It's not just power sources vs communications. People always assume that the future will simply be like present only more so.
After two world wars, people assumed the future would be wars of tremendous destruction.
When aviation was growing fast, people assumed the future would be flying everything.
During the space race, people assumed the future would be space everything.
During the growth of nuclear power, people assumed the future would be atomic powered everything.
This fails to match reality, because the future doesn't arrive as if we are barreling down a highway at an ever increasing speed. Advances tend to be a left turn down a road you couldn't reach before. Rather than building ever faster jets, we went to space. Rather than going further into space, we built communication satellites etc...
Our current 'Internet' age will be no different. The 'next big thing' will not be Internet v2, but it will be something that could only exist with the internet as a prerequisite.
> People always assume that the future will simply be like present only more so.
Thanks for your thought. It reminded me a little bit about an interview with peter thiel where he responded to a question about the future. I guess popular culture in tech moves past ideas rather quickly and generally seems to jump from trend to trend until realizing the value of a trend.
What actually happened is that communication density exploded upward (pony express, telegraph, radios, phones, industrial printing, computers, etc.) at the same time that communication cost plummeted (aka I'm paying a flat rate for internet access and video chatting with people all over the globe).
And I think this is still the case, that we generally still look down on communications as a kind of lesser technology compared to power gizmos. When if anything it should be the opposite, that the ability to communicate so much more effectively across all of humanity has smeared the ideas and inventions around much faster and more thoroughly than anyone really considers.
Why did things take so long? Because everything had to be individually re-invented, we had no shoulders of giants.