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JoshuaZ comments on Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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You might get a different perspective on the present when you reach your 50's, as I have. I used Amazon's book-previewing service to read parts of W. Patrick McCray's book, The Visioneers, and I realized that I could nearly have written that book myself because my life has intersected with the story he tells at several points. McCray focuses on Gerard K. O'Neill and Eric Drexler, and in my Amazon review I pointed out that after a generation, or nearly two in O'Neill's case, we can get the impression that their respective ideas don't work. No one has gotten any closer to becoming a space colonist since the 1970's, and we haven't seen the nanomachines Drexler promised us in the 1980's which can produce abundance and make us "immortal."
So I suspect you youngsters will probably have a similar letdown waiting for you when you reach your 40's and 50's, and realize that you'll wind up aging and dying like everyone else without having any technological miracles to rescue you.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Visioneers-Scientists-Nanotechnologies-Limitless/dp/0691139830/
It seems that both Taleb and Aaronde are talking about a much smaller scale change than things like space colonization and general nanotech.
Yeah, that was my impression. One of the things that's interesting about the article is that many of the technologies Taleb disparages already exist. He lists space colonies and flying motorcycles right along side mundane tennis shoes and video chat. So it's hard to tell when he's criticizing futurists for expecting certain new technologies, and when he's criticizing them for wanting those new technologies. When he says that he's going to take a cab driven by an immigrant, is he saying that robot cars won't arrive any time soon? Or that it wouldn't make a difference if they did? Or that it would be bad if they did? I think his point is a bit muddled.
One thing he gets right is that cool new technologies need not be revolutionary. Don't get me wrong; I take the possibility of truly transformative tech seriously, but futurists do overestimate technology for a simple reason. When imagining what life will be like with a given gadget, you focus on those parts of your life when you could use the gadget, and thus overestimate the positive effect of the gadget (This is also why people's kitchens get cluttered over time). For myself, I think that robot cars will be commonplace in ten years, and that will be friggin' awesome. But it won't transform our lives - it will be an incremental change. The flip side is that Taleb may underestimate the cumulative effect of many incremental changes.