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ArisKatsaris comments on Abandoning Cached Selves to Re-Write My Source Code Partially, I've Become Unstable - Less Wrong Discussion
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And yet we have crystal balls, flying chariots, and metallic servants that do our housework. There doesn't seem to be any actual difference in kind between the type of "magic" you mock people of imagining, and the "magic" we have achieved.
If it's an actual difference in kind, tell me why "ability to transmute elements" would be seen by a 16th person as more exotic or absurd than "the ability to communicate instantly around the world" or "the ability to travel to the moon"
What's the limit of the technological development that you foresee in the e.g. 21st century? Human cloning? Robotic babysitters? Artificially grown organic limbs? Self-driving cars? Less than that?
I'm not saying that there are no inventions. But it is important to understand that there are two kinds of inventions; let's call them "microinventions" and "macroinventions".
Microinventions are inventions that have already been invented. Ordinary things, such as an airplane or an iPod. Nobody sane is denying that microinventions exist. Suggesting that would be committing a strawman fallacy.
On the other hand, macroinventions are inventions that haven't been invented yet. Such as AGI or nanotechnology. By definition, there are no examples of existing macroinventions. Therefore speaking about their possibility is completely unscientific. Your faith in macroinventions is like a faith in Santa Claus.
(To avoid misunderstanding in the absence of non-verbal signals: This comment is sarcastic, it expresses its author's frustration from reading this thread, and does not represent the true beliefs of its author.)
Scrying is a divinatory practice akin to tarot reading. Crystal balls as magical television is a modern fantasy trope that might have originated with the "palantíri" in Tolkien's legendarium, which is more recent than the actual invention of television.
"Unmanned hot air balloons are popular in Chinese history. Zhuge Liang of the Shu Han kingdom, in the Three Kingdoms era (220-280 AD) used airborne lanterns for military signaling. These lanterns are known as Kongming lanterns (孔明灯)." - History of ballooning
It's not so difficult to immagine a bigger version of something that already exists.
Which are quite unlike any kind of servant than a 16th century person could have imagined.
Why were the alchemists focusing on transmutation and life extension rather than remote communication or lunar travel?
My guess is that actual technological development is hard to predict with significant advance, while some human fantasies, such as immortality or the ability to manipulate matter in arbitrary ways, are more or less always the same.
Sure. I mean, they would have had to have a classical education to have heard of Vulcan's metal servants, or have been rich before they could ever have heard of any clockwork automatons that were all the rage in the medieval, Renaissance or high Imperial ages. They could not possibly have imagined any thing like that...
IIRC, Dante's Purgatorio did have things strongly reminiscent of flat-screen TVs, playing back scenes from dead people's lives or something.
I agree with your guess. I additionally suspect that the ability to move without restraint (e.g., flying chariots) and the ability to spy on one's neighbors without being seen (e.g., invisibility and/or clairvoyance) are also human fantasies of long standing which precede the development of hot air balloons or television.
Agreed. In some sense you can always trace any technological innovation to some long-standing need or desire, but it would be an historical distortion to read ex-post any expression of these desires as a technological prediction.
A paleolithic man could easily have said: "I would really like to hear from my cousin Urk who went the other way when our tribe split." That doesn't mean he's predicting Facebook.
Yup.
Completely unrelatedly, the narrative conceit of paleolithic speakers who are capable of complex syntax but nevertheless use grunts for names never fails to entertain me.
Tradition. Why do you have the name of some Jewish king who lived 3000 years ago? XD
...okay, I'm not really clear about what point we're disputing anymore. Yes, the actual result is different that what is envisioned four centuries in the past. If it had been envisioned perfectly it would have probably occured in a few decades, not centuries in the future. But imagined plausible paths of inventing something eventually close in to the actually successful path of inventing something.
In the 1st century CE Lucian first (that I know of) wrote about lunar travel by just having a whirlwind lift a ship to the heavens. By the 19th century, Julius Verne was thinking about giant cannons, but the mode of travel (with the need to have oxygen supplies and the like) had become closer to what would eventually be reality. When in the 20th century rockets developed, the actual method that we'd use to go to the moon was pretty much known by every science fiction writer before we ever went there, and then it was just a matter of technical details to work out...
Again how is this different from imagining about golden apples in ancient times, and elixirs of life in medieval times, and currently our imagining nanotech providing medical immortality? Nanotech (and computing) is a currently-being-fast-developed technology, much like the early 20th century had the fast-developing technology of rocketry.
You've not really made an argument that the world isn't closing in to AGI or medical immortality. What makes you argue that the difference between us and medical immortality is larger than the difference between some 1930s science fiction writer who writes about lunar travel, and the actual success of lunar travel?