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Bugmaster comments on Brain Preservation - Less Wrong
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I don't think anywhere along the line though, anyone said "with sufficiently advanced engineering we might create a network of electrical difference engines capable of communicating complex packages of information across the world, but this would take hundreds of years to develop."
Some technologies are the results of long chains of developments, but I'm not aware of any cases of people conceiving of specific technologies hundreds of years down the chain based on any meaningful understanding of the principles at work.
You might have a point about information networks; I don't know enough about the history of computing to know whether Babbage or Turing or someone of that caliber ever proposed them. But there was definitely a need for difference engines and automated calculators, for use in financial and navigational calculations. This is why the technology developed so quickly (relatively speaking) once funding became available and mechanical engineering improved to the point where difference engines could actually be built.