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Risto_Saarelma comments on Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
Thinking a bit more of this, I think the basic pattern I'm matching here is that each era there's some grand technocratic narrative where an overarching first-principles design from the current Impressive Technology, industrial production, rocket engines, internetworked computers, or artificial intelligence, will produce a clean and ordered new world order. This won't happen, and instead something a lot more organic, diffuse, confusing, low-key and wildly unexpected will show up.
On the other hand, we don't currently seem to be having the sort of unified present-day tech paradigm like there was during the space age. My guess for the next big tech paradigm thing would be radical biotechnology and biotech-based cognitive engineering, but we don't really have either of those yet. Instead, we've got Planetary Resources and Elon Musk doing the stuff of the space age folk, Bitcoin and whatnot that's something like the 90s cypherpunks thought up, IBM Watson and Google cars are something that AI was supposed to deliver in the 80s before the AI Winter set in, and we might be seeing a bit of a return to 80s style diverse playing field in computing with stuff like Raspberry PI, 3D printing and everybody being able to put their apps online and for sale without paying for brick & mortar shelf space.
So it's kinda like all the stuff that was supposed to happen any time now at various points of the late 20th century was starting to happen at once. But that could be just the present looking like it has a lot more stuff than the past, since I'm seeing a lot less of the past than the present.