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gwern comments on Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 01 December 2012 05:00AM

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Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 02 December 2012 02:52:33PM 9 points [-]

I get the same feeling. It seems unusually hard to come up with an idea for how things will be like after ten or so years that don't sound either head-in-the-sand denial of the technological change or crazy.

I wonder how you could figure out just how atypical things are now. Different than most of history, sure, most people lived in a world where you expected life parameters to be the same for your grandparents' and grandchildren's generations, and we definitely don't have that now. But we haven't had that in the first world for the last 150 years. Telegraphs, steam engines and mass manufacture were new things that caused massive societal change. Computers, nuclear power, space rockets, and figuring out that space and time are stretchy and living cells are just chemical machines were stuff that were more likely to make onlookers go "wait, that's not supposed to happen!" than "oh, clever".

People during the space age definitely thought they were living in the future, and contemporary stuff is still a bit tinged by how their vast projections failed to materialize on schedule. Did more people in 1965 imagine they were living in the future than people in 1975? What about people doing computer science in 1985, compared to 2005?

The space program enthusiasts mostly did end up very disappointed in their 50s, as did the people who were trying to get personal computing going using unified Lisp or SmallTalk environments that were supposed to empower users with the ability to actually program the system as a routine matter.

Following the pattern, you'd expect to get a bunch of let down aging singularitarians in the 2030s, when proper machine intelligence is still getting caught up with various implementation dead ends and can't get funding, while young people are convinced that spime-interfaced DNA resequencing implants are going to be the future thing that will change absolutely everything, you just wait, and the furry subculture is a lot more disturbing than it used to be.

So I don't know which it is. There seems to be more stuff from the future in peoples' everyday lives now, but stuff from the future has been around for over a century now, so it's not instantly obvious that things should be particularly different right now.

Comment author: gwern 02 December 2012 10:50:40PM 2 points [-]

I get the same feeling. It seems unusually hard to come up with an idea for how things will be like after ten or so years that don't sound either head-in-the-sand denial of the technological change or crazy.

You know, that's a good description of my reaction to reading Brin's Existence the other day. I think 10 years is not that revolutionary, but at 50+ years, the dichotomy is getting pretty bad.