The more you read about what people thought about technological progress one hundred and twenty or thirty years ago, the more you come to question the standard line that technology always exceeds our expectations.
Tuesday, April 17, 2018
People in the late 19th century fully expected to be commuting at a hundred miles an hour in the next ten or twenty years...
THE BOYNTON BICYCLE ELECTRIC RAILWAY. Scientific American 1894/02/17
Something I've noticed in a couple of places recently is the abject lack of inventiveness in what people think technology ought to be, or will be doing/providing. The main theme of the 2025 Osaka Expo* is going to be the promise of flying cars, and a recent robotics articled claimed that we're going to be producing a zillion humanoid robots that do housework. Both of which are really old, really bad ideas.
ReplyDeleteAnother really old, really bad, and incredibly stupid idea is putting humans into space. But that's another rant.
*: The 2025 Osaka Expo is being an unbelievable planning disaster, and if it actually happens (it really ought to be cancelled), it'll be with most countries' pavilions either not completed or not there at all. (It's being built on a garbage dump that leaks methane, which expodes when confined to a building-sized space. (This already happened.))