Whenever technologists start dreaming of the future, they end up overestimating the pace of changes. They think too much in terms of what is possible and too little of the many forces of the market and government that hold them back.
I have little doubt that if we were building a brand new country from scratch with a huge budget, we'd all have cars that drive themselves. But, because some percentage of the population couldn't afford them in our current reality, it's greatly complicated by the fact that not all cars would be self-driven. So rather than having roads and central control designed to make computerized cars safe, which we could probably already do, we have to design ones that can drive down a 50 year old expressway full of human-driven cars.
That's how it works with most technologies. Legacy systems and things being good enough the way they are prevent the sort of rapid progress technologists always predict.
I think that's true to a certain extent, but I also tend to subscribe to Ray Kurzweil's theory that futurists overestimate the pace of change in the short-term and underestimate the pace of change in the long-term.
The reason for this is that the pace of change is not constant, but is increasing exponentially, as new technologies enable more rapid iterations of development and market adoption of even newer technologies, and so on. However, this exponential trend is difficult to grasp from our perspective today, so futurists tend to extrapolate out the current pace of change into the future (along with a healthy dose of optimism), when in reality, change is accelerating.
An good example would be Marc Andreessen of Netscape talking about Browsers making Operating System irrelevant in late 90's but the real potential of browsers is coming to be realized now and they are making OS irrelevant today.
Are they? I mean, they're giving you more choice for sure, but I don't see any PCs sold without them. People still make their decisions largely based on OS.
"Flying cars" will never be created, the same way a road-running sailboat will never be created. But we could probably build an aircraft today that would serve most of the purposes a car does.
Well, they definitely underestimated how powerful and cheap computers would be. No one from that era saw the biotech revolution coming. I guess that's long-term enough?
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 53.9 ms ] threadI have little doubt that if we were building a brand new country from scratch with a huge budget, we'd all have cars that drive themselves. But, because some percentage of the population couldn't afford them in our current reality, it's greatly complicated by the fact that not all cars would be self-driven. So rather than having roads and central control designed to make computerized cars safe, which we could probably already do, we have to design ones that can drive down a 50 year old expressway full of human-driven cars.
That's how it works with most technologies. Legacy systems and things being good enough the way they are prevent the sort of rapid progress technologists always predict.
The reason for this is that the pace of change is not constant, but is increasing exponentially, as new technologies enable more rapid iterations of development and market adoption of even newer technologies, and so on. However, this exponential trend is difficult to grasp from our perspective today, so futurists tend to extrapolate out the current pace of change into the future (along with a healthy dose of optimism), when in reality, change is accelerating.
It's not that it is impossible. We could have flying cars and moon tourists any time we want, but the cost is much greater than the benefits.
Companies will continue to find things people want, and people will continue to buy things they want. The end. Move on, nothing to see here.
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