When attempting to introduce non-rationalists to the ideas of cryonics or Strong AI, it appears that their primary objections tend to be rooted in the absurdity heuristic. They don't believe they inhabit a universe where such weird technologies could actually work. To deal with this, I thought it would be useful to have a cache of examples of technologies that have actually been implemented that did, or ideally, still do, challenge our intuitions about the way the universe works.
The first example that comes to my mind is computers in general; imagine what Ernest Rutherford, let alone Benjamin Franklin, would have thought of a machine that uses electricity to calculate, and do those calculations so fast that they can express nearly anything as calculations. Nothing we know about how the universe works says it shouldn't be possible, indeed it obviously is knowing what we do now, but imagine how weird this would have seemed back when we were just coming to grips with how electricity actually worked.
I suspect there may be better examples to challenge the intuitions of people who've grown up in an age where computers are commonplace though. So does anyone have any to volunteer?
Hmm, that just isn't true. There isn't a perfect match (indoor plumbing is low-tech with big benefits, I've seen really cool tech that's useless out of tiny niches), but there's a correlation (like, I could name five laser-based things you've used this week). There have been huge social changes (farming, literacy, urbanization, medicine, electric lighting, the Internet) due to technology.
They have more of a point about time scales. "Technology improves too slowly for us to benefit." But that's not so true since the industrial revolution, and completely false now.
If the Internet hasn't changed their lives (it sure changed mine), and neither have cell phones or cheap TV or recent medical advances or new kinds of jobs or satellite TV that reports on revolutions in nearby countries, then at least they could have noticed that as it accelerates so does social change (you mean they don't marry two black genderqueer atheists, either?).