10 ms·

Asking the wrong questions

247 points by kurren 10y ago

SandersAK 10y ago
I thought this would be about how we have prioritized the advancement of technology for the few over the welfare of the rest. Maybe it should be titled "Still asking the wrong questions"
makerbraker 10y ago
We carry the PSTN over the Internet over private IP networks that interconnect with each other over the PSTN. I know, it's nitpicking.
- SSLy 10y ago
  That last one part i don't believe in.
  - ComodoHacker 10y ago
    You don't believe in ADSL?
    - SSLy 10y ago
      Check the sibling comment for expressing my concern clearer than I could.
  - dsr_ 10y ago
    Yeah. Long-haul fiber that never interconnects directly with the pstn is not part of the pstn. If I order metro Ethernet over fiber to an ISP with a network that peers at a few public IX and privately with Comcast, Google and Facebook, there's no voice framing or call switching underlying most of my traffic.
scardine 10y ago
Thanks for this piece, it made me recall the joy of spending my afternoons in the library and the vivid dreams I got from science fiction books - I remember reading Verne's "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" as a kid in the 70's and picturing the Nautilus as a nuclear submarine in Victorian clothes. Back then the cold war was rampant and Brazil was under military dictatorship. Now I'm living in the future, and it is half familiar and half surprising.
jankotek 10y ago
> Centralized (possibly randomized) wire tapping. I think some of those predictions were pretty spot on.
- saghm 10y ago
  I think the point the author was making was that people predicted this would take much longer to become feasible than other things like "radar implants for the blind", which obviously was not the case.
  - xherberta 10y ago
    How cool that they actually don't need implants! The existing hardware can be hacked to provide sonar capabilities.
- gpvos 10y ago
  Look at the schematic: people predicted that that would never come to pass.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
niftich 10y ago
This is the premise of 'disrupt', isn't it? That the existing business models or technological solutions are so thoroughly shaken by the appearance of something new that doesn't pass for a mere iteration of the same. Electricity was not directly comparable to steam, despite having some of the same uses at first, cars were quite different from horses, and the packet-switched internet behaves differently from circuit-switched telephone lines. Part of this phenomenon of even experts unable to predict the new is that often our current technology is capped by our societal understanding of physics. Before the Wrights and other early pioneers, we knew that powered heavier-than-air flying was possible for light things like birds, but weren't sure whether the same applied to large, heavy frames, or how we'd be able to deliver enough power to the machine while keeping the weight down. But after a couple of early success, a vibrant field of haphazard experimentation and serious scientific research opened up, and we learned a lot about aerodynamic lift. Before the transistor, it was difficult to seriously posit that electricity-powered, non-mechanical computers would be ubiquitous not just to the point of every government and large enterprise having them, but also every single person possessing multiple miniaturized versions on their person. The invention of integrated circuits was a transformational achievement: it enabled us to go from having very scarce computing capacity to having a slight excess, and so new programs emerged to harness that ability to do calculation. VR and AR in turn aren't that transformative yet: they're simply video games where a portion of the input comes from the 'real world'. Today, we're at a UI/UX/AI/ML crisis, where we have immense computing resources at our disposal and still lack an effective ability to communicate our intent with the machine. We dip down to the ancient metaphor of manipulating a pre-set UI with a pointer like a mouse or our fingers or our eyes, or we have to speak audibly to those within earshot so a microphone can capture our command, ascertain some meaning, then map it to one of many predefined actions. These seem like the dark ages. It's not hard to guess that something revolutionary is going to happen in this arena, and will require actual scientific discoveries to make it possible.
thinkalone 10y ago
For anyone interested: There's an enjoyable radio adaptation of 'A Logic Named Joe' from X Minus One in 1955 https://archive.org/details/XMinusOne55122831ALogicNamedJoe https://archive.org/details/XMinusOne55122831ALogicNamedJoe
VLM 10y ago
Two problems in the article analysis One is the classic hard vs soft sci fi. A classic example in book form is Stranger in a Strange Land reads like a story about 60s boomer hippies from India who meditate and get high and die in an allegory of Jesus, because it is. There's a very thin wrap of search and replace science fiction over that hippie story most famously a giant plot hole where the author wrote in video telephone video conferencing without following up on the hole in the plot generated by being able to see the other party. In comparison, hard sci fi takes into account and weaves a story about the human effects of technology... The other problem is in the "The authors polled a range of experts". Asking my plumber about theology or my lawyer about physics is obviously dumb, and in pop culture we accept that asking a 50s dude about the 70s is pretty much a waste of time. However in all fields of human activity if you want an intelligent commentary on contemporary computer programming you have to either hatch or grow a contemporary computer programmer. The opinions of a dude in another field from decades ago are only accidentally going to be correct. Regardless who was an expert in automation in the 60s, I'm pretty sure they weren't being asked because they almost certainly didn't have cool authoritarian credentials because the topic wasn't cool enough at that time, so by definition they were talking to the wrong people. The history of many present day trends and concepts shows they were not very cool before they became cool, therefore asking contemporary experts on the topic of cool will mostly not work.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >In comparison, hard sci-fi takes into account and weaves a story about the human effects of technology... I find two problems with the above analysis. Oftentimes soft sci-fi (PK Dick for example or even someone like Frederic Brown) identifies the "human effects of technology" far better than someone from the "hard" camp, such as Clark or Asimov. Second, the article specifically covers bad predictions made by hard sci-fi and concerning use and impact of technology itself. >The other problem is in the "The authors polled a range of experts". Asking my plumber about theology or my lawyer about physics is obviously dumb Not that obvious to me. That's a great way to overcome systematic bias and domain blindness and get some outsider insight. You talk about being silly to talk to a "plumber about theology", but I've heard that a carpenter is supposed to have made some great contributions to the field, as did some fishermen.
choxi 10y ago
It's a little gloomy to see how early most of the predictions are, they were overly-optimistic by 10-20 years in most cases. Has anyone ever tried aggregating popular predictions over time? It would be interesting to see a history of predictions for self-driving cars up to now.
singham 10y ago
I will relate to my observation in Harry Potter books. Harry Potter universe has time machine which we know scientifically are impossible while in the same HP universe, Hermoine has to physically go to the forbidden library to read books. JK Rowling couldn't think of wikipedia or internet which both exist in real world but not time travel.
- Tomte 10y ago
  Okay, please look up and tell us the second sentence of page 37 of "Typolemik" by Willberg. You've got Wikipedia, after all!
- sarreph 10y ago
  I think, to expand on your point there, you can make the general observation that there is no 'WizardNet' or usage of the internet by any wizard (as far as we know). Further still°, there is a complete lack of computer technology from any of the Wizarding World™. Was this done intentionally? Were they supposed to be shunning it? Did they need it? Were they secretly Amish? That said, I think it would've been dramatically less pleasing for Harry to whip out his Nokia for the camera flashlight, instead of simply uttering 'lumos'. ° Please correct me if I am wrong for my HP knowledge is rather rusty indeed.
  - detaro 10y ago
    I think the in-universe explanation is that magic messes up electric devices, and they are thus not usable in areas with a lot of magical presence. It's not really answered if that could be fixed or not, generally wizards just don't have any clue about how muggle tech works.
    - dTal 10y ago
      Which of course implies that magic is detectable using ordinary electronic equipment (even inadvertantly - would Kings Cross Starbucks notice their WiFi dropped out twice a year?) It also raises the question of how electric something has to be to not work. Flash photography works, so capacitors are seemingly okay. Even a simple one-wire telegraph system would be an improvement on owls.
walshemj 10y ago
I am not surprised that a telco centric forcasts would be locked into a switched circuit mind-set. eve in 96/97 interviewing at a british telecom board the 3 (all mainframe guys) just did not get the internet at all - ironically the board was at 207 old street
fancy_pantser 10y ago
When I see things like the RAND 'long-range forecasting' study, I always look to see if they specify ubiquity -- it's very different to assert that we'll have ultrasonic implants for the blind in a laboratory setting vs. being commonplace and woven into the fabric of society. As William Gibson is fond of saying, "the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." Predicting what will become integral to our daily life is much more interesting/difficult than determining how long it would take to develop a specific technology's proof-of-concept.
mhb 10y ago
It would be great to read more about the grandfather and the glider.
facepalm 10y ago
Any reason to expect women will be more likely to be rocket pilots in the future than truck drivers today?
- CurtMonash 10y ago
  In Starship Troopers, Heinlein suggested they'd be pilots due to better reflexes. I have no idea whether that had scientific grounding.
stygiansonic 10y ago
Interesting aside: One of the RAND's predictions (No. 24) is for "International agreements which guarantee certain economic minima to the world's population as a result of high production from automation", which sounds pretty much like Basic Income, along with some of the same arguments we've heard recently about why it will be increasingly needed. (Not saying I agree nor disagree)
- gpvos 10y ago
  The RAND study is from 1964. There have been several experiments with basic income systems in the US and Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, and I may assume that the general idea is even older.
  - paulajohnson 10y ago
    It is. The idea was floated by the US founding fathers as a form of compensation for having all the land parceled up and owned. Further back you have the Levelers who were essentially proto-communists.
barrkel 10y ago
This is a bit banal. Nobody can predict second and third order effects reliably because they don't know how to weight one predicted effect vs another to know how they'll intersect and interact. Extrapolation for any one technology usually works well for a short distance into the future (a decade or so), but the chances of a technology being blindsided by something else entirely rapidly rise over time.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  It's not second or third order effects, it's the way that technologies facilitate social changes that trips people up. The astounding thing about the Internet isn't just that it's possible to do all kinds of science fiction things with it, but that it has no single inventor. In fact a public internet for shopping, dating, and photo sharing was never even considered as a goal when the core technologies were being RFC'd. The real value of technology only appears when it intersects with user land. The broader the take-up, the bigger the potential for bottom-up social and political effects. Telegraphy, radio, heavier than air flight, internal combustion ground cars, TV, and even printing were all defined by the political and social changes they created far more than by the physics that made them work. So traditionally when someone prognosticates about a new shiny thing they assume their culture won't change and the technology will somehow fit into it. Far more often, the most interesting thing about new technology is the way it affects belief systems, economic and social activity, and political power relationships.
intrasight 10y ago
I enjoyed the photo, the family history, and the premise of "asking the right/wrong question". I think that all technologists - or perhaps everyone - can and should take a step back from their daily grind and ask some questions. I think the wisdom of the crowd can be leveraged in asking questions about the future. There are sites like longbets.org where you can weight in. It is one of the great gifts to the human species to be able to contemplate a future beyond tomorrow.
skywhopper 10y ago
I am going to choose to believe that the wrap-up paragraph, asking "who will have the right kind of driving data for autonomy?" is a subtle wink, because the current conventional wisdom about autonomous cars -- that they are coming soon, and that machine learning on massive datasets is the key to their success -- is very likely going to end up being one of those things we talk about jokingly in 50 years. Ha! Remember when they thought we'd have a colony on the moon in 1990, that machines would have genius IQs by 2000, and that cars could drive themselves by 2025? Oh, the people of the past were so cute.
jwatte 10y ago
Applied AI will be the next "nobody knew how fundamentally things would change." I don't believe in the singularity (at least as currently envisioned) but I do believe we need to figure out what a society must look like when most human beings are, almost literally, not useful for commercial employment. Like, the whole tenets of a market economy and capitalist ownership will smash into the tenets of human worth and the function of society, with violence and consequences much greater than we've seen until now. We can see it coming. It's obviously clear. And nobody in charge is taking about it, much less doing anything about it. A totally avoidable tragedy, walked into on purpose.
- averagewall 10y ago
  If technology makes the cost of supporting a person's life is nearly zero, then the wages they'll demand can also approach zero. So a human can undercut a robot worker on cost. Currently, that doesn't happen because humans are so expensive to maintain - they'd sooner starve to death than work for less money than they need to keep themselves alive. But it's more than before. We do have a huge tertiary sector of the economy which is basically humans being employed to do low-value or unnecessary work because they're so plentiful and cheap.
- stevedonovan 10y ago
  There's the fabled 'Singularity' (with the capital letter) or the usual meaning: something we cannot predict beyond. That's always a problem in prediction, because even if we can imagine a singularity, we don't know what follows.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
I really liked this article because it was a concise demonstration of the 'known' solution problem. A while ago[1] there was a discussion of what folks from the 19th century thought the world would be like in the 20th century. The common theme is that the futurists could never anticipate a change to a technology they didn't have any experience with. The rise of communications as a means of linking people together was completely missed, even by the Dick Tracy types who had wristwatch phones. Why? Because not only did it communicate like everyone had experienced (telegraph, telephone) it persisted with bulletin boards, MUDS, Facebook, and Twitter. That is why I always try to ask a question my Dad suggested I ask when looking a future predictions, "What is so common place that they can't see it changing?" That is so difficult to do. Things like "What would the future be like if there literally was no disease and any physical injury could be patched up quickly?" Or "Energy is suddenly free?" or "Lie detection becomes infallible?" etc. Very tough to do. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13101643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13101643
- Senderman 10y ago
  Your dad sounds cool.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  "The rise of communications as a means of linking people together was completely missed" Not by everyone. Take a look at "The Machine Stops" by E.M.Forster (of "A Room with a View" and "A Passage to India" fame).[1][2] In 1909 he predicted something like the internet, chatrooms, internet addiction, and various other things that have since happened. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops [2] - http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    I don't disagree, my point wasn't that nobody gets it right, it was that in order to get it right you have to think about the things which you take for granted being different. And that is not a natural act :-). Some of the best science fiction that anticipated the Internet has been stuff that assumed telepathy and looked at issues associated with that. We hit some of those problems with voice activation and bluetooth headsets :-).
congerous 10y ago
I have to say I find this piece pretty disappointing. Slightly smug throughout, which is easy in retrospect, with approximately zero to add to the conversation. The thesis seems to be: The future is hard to predict, and even if you can, it's hard to get the timeline right. No shit. Is this what VCs do with their spare time? Remember granddad and contemplate uncertainty?
dwaltrip 10y ago
My main take-away from this article was that people often use the underlying paradigms of today (perhaps unknowingly) to predict surface level details of tomorrow. "Asking the wrong questions", as the article byline states. Instead, we should try to predict how the fundamental paradigms will change, and then deduce visible, commonplace details from that. I did just started reading "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Kuhn, which is all about paradigms (of a specific sort). It's good stuff.
- tlow 10y ago
  Kuhn argues that it would be difficult to discern if one were inside of a revolution as it was occurring, correct? So how does one ask the "right question"?
  - dwaltrip 10y ago
    I'm not sure. But I think knowing that the default mode is usually to ask the wrong questions can help us. It provides a new lense for analyzing any ideas that come up: "What assumptions am I sub-conscioisly making here? What current paradigms does the idea depend upon?" etc.
Veen 10y ago
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre writes about why the future is inherently unpredictable in his book After Virtue. It's in the context of social sciences but it applies just as well here. There's a decent summary here[0] [0]: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/doclib/20120203_aftervirtuechaptersummary.pdf http://www.thenewatlantis.com/doclib/20120203_aftervirtuecha... > MacIntyre argues that "there are four sources of systematic unpredictability in human affairs" which preclude social science from being like natural science (93). The first is radical conceptual innovation, which can be explained in retrospect, but inherently can only be predicted when the innovation has already occurred. MacIntyre notes that this also means that the future of scientific innovation cannot be predicted, invoking the Church-Turing thesis as further proof. The second source is the fact that "the unpredictability of certain of his own future actions by each agent individually" implies the unpredictability of that agent by any other agent, and hence an aggregate unpredictability to the social world (95). The third source "arises from the game-theoretic character of social life" (97). Social life in fact embodies multiple games, players, and transactions and thus cannot be studied as a single instance, reducing the predictive power of game theory. The fourth source is "pure contingency", the way in which "trivial contingencies can powerfully influence the outcome of great events", such as the length of Cleopatra's nose, or Napoleon's cold at Waterloo (99-0).
oftenwrong 10y ago
One way to detect suspect predictions is to look at which ones suggest improvements to things we have today without changing them significantly. For example, people envision self-driving cars that are exactly like the cars we have today, only automatic. They predict that they will still be big, expensive, complicated, multi-person vehicles. I'm sure that category will continue exist, but why will that remain the norm? The size and complexity of cars are major drawbacks (e.g. storage, traffic, cost). With bicycles, we can see that small individual vehicles have significant advantages due to their size, cost, and simplicity. With self-driving cars, I think there will be room to borrow some of those advantages. Today, we have to build cars with safety as a major concern, but when self-driving vehicles are common, we will not have to. If we are free to relax during a car journey, the ability to travel at high speed may not be such a major concern, either. The typical self-driving car could easily be something inexpensive, small, and simple like the PodRide instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lKq1fGtXFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lKq1fGtXFM
- Ntrails 10y ago
  >If we are free to relax during a car journey, the ability to travel at high speed may not be such a major concern, either. Most of the people I've spoken to firmly believe self driving cars will be faster, not slower. They'll be safer and more consistent at speed so it's reasonable to trust them to do so safely. When the train takes 4 hours and I can drive it in 2h30 - I take the car. Just the fact that I get to "relax" is not sufficient.
  - oftenwrong 10y ago
    Most car trips are much shorter than that, although that could change when driving is no longer necessary. For an occasional long-distance trip, it would make sense to buy a ride on a purpose-built high-speed self-driving vehicle. Kind of like a personal train cabin. For day-to-day commuting and errands, people could be able to spend much less for a smaller, slower, simpler vehicle that is potentially cheap enough for an average person to own.
CurtMonash 10y ago
One of my favorite examples of SF writers underestimating the pace of certain changes is a scene early in Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation -- which is set 1000s of years in our future -- showing the life of a teenage girl before she starts adventuring. Sitting in the bedroom of her suburban house, she uses the new technology of a voice-activated typewriter to write a paper for history class. Looking over this homework assignment, her father reprimands her for one of her writing choices, and she sullenly revises the paper accordingly. (The choice, as you will likely recall if you read the Foundation Trilogy, was to brag about her grandmother, the heroine of the previous book.)

247 points by kurren 10y ago

I thought this would be about how we have prioritized the advancement of technology for the few over the welfare of the rest. Maybe it should be titled "Still asking the wrong questions"

makerbraker 10y ago

We carry the PSTN over the Internet over private IP networks that interconnect with each other over the PSTN. I know, it's nitpicking.

SSLy 10y ago
That last one part i don't believe in.
- ComodoHacker 10y ago
  You don't believe in ADSL?
  - SSLy 10y ago
    Check the sibling comment for expressing my concern clearer than I could.
- dsr_ 10y ago
  Yeah. Long-haul fiber that never interconnects directly with the pstn is not part of the pstn. If I order metro Ethernet over fiber to an ISP with a network that peers at a few public IX and privately with Comcast, Google and Facebook, there's no voice framing or call switching underlying most of my traffic.

scardine 10y ago

Thanks for this piece, it made me recall the joy of spending my afternoons in the library and the vivid dreams I got from science fiction books - I remember reading Verne's "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" as a kid in the 70's and picturing the Nautilus as a nuclear submarine in Victorian clothes. Back then the cold war was rampant and Brazil was under military dictatorship. Now I'm living in the future, and it is half familiar and half surprising.

jankotek 10y ago

> Centralized (possibly randomized) wire tapping. I think some of those predictions were pretty spot on.

saghm 10y ago
I think the point the author was making was that people predicted this would take much longer to become feasible than other things like "radar implants for the blind", which obviously was not the case.
- xherberta 10y ago
  How cool that they actually don't need implants! The existing hardware can be hacked to provide sonar capabilities.
gpvos 10y ago
Look at the schematic: people predicted that that would never come to pass.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

niftich 10y ago

This is the premise of 'disrupt', isn't it? That the existing business models or technological solutions are so thoroughly shaken by the appearance of something new that doesn't pass for a mere iteration of the same. Electricity was not directly comparable to steam, despite having some of the same uses at first, cars were quite different from horses, and the packet-switched internet behaves differently from circuit-switched telephone lines. Part of this phenomenon of even experts unable to predict the new is that often our current technology is capped by our societal understanding of physics. Before the Wrights and other early pioneers, we knew that powered heavier-than-air flying was possible for light things like birds, but weren't sure whether the same applied to large, heavy frames, or how we'd be able to deliver enough power to the machine while keeping the weight down. But after a couple of early success, a vibrant field of haphazard experimentation and serious scientific research opened up, and we learned a lot about aerodynamic lift. Before the transistor, it was difficult to seriously posit that electricity-powered, non-mechanical computers would be ubiquitous not just to the point of every government and large enterprise having them, but also every single person possessing multiple miniaturized versions on their person. The invention of integrated circuits was a transformational achievement: it enabled us to go from having very scarce computing capacity to having a slight excess, and so new programs emerged to harness that ability to do calculation. VR and AR in turn aren't that transformative yet: they're simply video games where a portion of the input comes from the 'real world'. Today, we're at a UI/UX/AI/ML crisis, where we have immense computing resources at our disposal and still lack an effective ability to communicate our intent with the machine. We dip down to the ancient metaphor of manipulating a pre-set UI with a pointer like a mouse or our fingers or our eyes, or we have to speak audibly to those within earshot so a microphone can capture our command, ascertain some meaning, then map it to one of many predefined actions. These seem like the dark ages. It's not hard to guess that something revolutionary is going to happen in this arena, and will require actual scientific discoveries to make it possible.

thinkalone 10y ago

For anyone interested: There's an enjoyable radio adaptation of 'A Logic Named Joe' from X Minus One in 1955 https://archive.org/details/XMinusOne55122831ALogicNamedJoe https://archive.org/details/XMinusOne55122831ALogicNamedJoe

VLM 10y ago

Two problems in the article analysis One is the classic hard vs soft sci fi. A classic example in book form is Stranger in a Strange Land reads like a story about 60s boomer hippies from India who meditate and get high and die in an allegory of Jesus, because it is. There's a very thin wrap of search and replace science fiction over that hippie story most famously a giant plot hole where the author wrote in video telephone video conferencing without following up on the hole in the plot generated by being able to see the other party. In comparison, hard sci fi takes into account and weaves a story about the human effects of technology... The other problem is in the "The authors polled a range of experts". Asking my plumber about theology or my lawyer about physics is obviously dumb, and in pop culture we accept that asking a 50s dude about the 70s is pretty much a waste of time. However in all fields of human activity if you want an intelligent commentary on contemporary computer programming you have to either hatch or grow a contemporary computer programmer. The opinions of a dude in another field from decades ago are only accidentally going to be correct. Regardless who was an expert in automation in the 60s, I'm pretty sure they weren't being asked because they almost certainly didn't have cool authoritarian credentials because the topic wasn't cool enough at that time, so by definition they were talking to the wrong people. The history of many present day trends and concepts shows they were not very cool before they became cool, therefore asking contemporary experts on the topic of cool will mostly not work.

coldtea 10y ago
>In comparison, hard sci-fi takes into account and weaves a story about the human effects of technology... I find two problems with the above analysis. Oftentimes soft sci-fi (PK Dick for example or even someone like Frederic Brown) identifies the "human effects of technology" far better than someone from the "hard" camp, such as Clark or Asimov. Second, the article specifically covers bad predictions made by hard sci-fi and concerning use and impact of technology itself. >The other problem is in the "The authors polled a range of experts". Asking my plumber about theology or my lawyer about physics is obviously dumb Not that obvious to me. That's a great way to overcome systematic bias and domain blindness and get some outsider insight. You talk about being silly to talk to a "plumber about theology", but I've heard that a carpenter is supposed to have made some great contributions to the field, as did some fishermen.

choxi 10y ago

It's a little gloomy to see how early most of the predictions are, they were overly-optimistic by 10-20 years in most cases. Has anyone ever tried aggregating popular predictions over time? It would be interesting to see a history of predictions for self-driving cars up to now.

singham 10y ago

I will relate to my observation in Harry Potter books. Harry Potter universe has time machine which we know scientifically are impossible while in the same HP universe, Hermoine has to physically go to the forbidden library to read books. JK Rowling couldn't think of wikipedia or internet which both exist in real world but not time travel.

Tomte 10y ago
Okay, please look up and tell us the second sentence of page 37 of "Typolemik" by Willberg. You've got Wikipedia, after all!
sarreph 10y ago
I think, to expand on your point there, you can make the general observation that there is no 'WizardNet' or usage of the internet by any wizard (as far as we know). Further still°, there is a complete lack of computer technology from any of the Wizarding World™. Was this done intentionally? Were they supposed to be shunning it? Did they need it? Were they secretly Amish? That said, I think it would've been dramatically less pleasing for Harry to whip out his Nokia for the camera flashlight, instead of simply uttering 'lumos'. ° Please correct me if I am wrong for my HP knowledge is rather rusty indeed.
- detaro 10y ago
  I think the in-universe explanation is that magic messes up electric devices, and they are thus not usable in areas with a lot of magical presence. It's not really answered if that could be fixed or not, generally wizards just don't have any clue about how muggle tech works.
  - dTal 10y ago
    Which of course implies that magic is detectable using ordinary electronic equipment (even inadvertantly - would Kings Cross Starbucks notice their WiFi dropped out twice a year?) It also raises the question of how electric something has to be to not work. Flash photography works, so capacitors are seemingly okay. Even a simple one-wire telegraph system would be an improvement on owls.

walshemj 10y ago

I am not surprised that a telco centric forcasts would be locked into a switched circuit mind-set. eve in 96/97 interviewing at a british telecom board the 3 (all mainframe guys) just did not get the internet at all - ironically the board was at 207 old street

fancy_pantser 10y ago

When I see things like the RAND 'long-range forecasting' study, I always look to see if they specify ubiquity -- it's very different to assert that we'll have ultrasonic implants for the blind in a laboratory setting vs. being commonplace and woven into the fabric of society. As William Gibson is fond of saying, "the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." Predicting what will become integral to our daily life is much more interesting/difficult than determining how long it would take to develop a specific technology's proof-of-concept.

mhb 10y ago

It would be great to read more about the grandfather and the glider.

facepalm 10y ago

Any reason to expect women will be more likely to be rocket pilots in the future than truck drivers today?

CurtMonash 10y ago
In Starship Troopers, Heinlein suggested they'd be pilots due to better reflexes. I have no idea whether that had scientific grounding.

stygiansonic 10y ago

Interesting aside: One of the RAND's predictions (No. 24) is for "International agreements which guarantee certain economic minima to the world's population as a result of high production from automation", which sounds pretty much like Basic Income, along with some of the same arguments we've heard recently about why it will be increasingly needed. (Not saying I agree nor disagree)

gpvos 10y ago
The RAND study is from 1964. There have been several experiments with basic income systems in the US and Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, and I may assume that the general idea is even older.
- paulajohnson 10y ago
  It is. The idea was floated by the US founding fathers as a form of compensation for having all the land parceled up and owned. Further back you have the Levelers who were essentially proto-communists.

barrkel 10y ago

This is a bit banal. Nobody can predict second and third order effects reliably because they don't know how to weight one predicted effect vs another to know how they'll intersect and interact. Extrapolation for any one technology usually works well for a short distance into the future (a decade or so), but the chances of a technology being blindsided by something else entirely rapidly rise over time.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
It's not second or third order effects, it's the way that technologies facilitate social changes that trips people up. The astounding thing about the Internet isn't just that it's possible to do all kinds of science fiction things with it, but that it has no single inventor. In fact a public internet for shopping, dating, and photo sharing was never even considered as a goal when the core technologies were being RFC'd. The real value of technology only appears when it intersects with user land. The broader the take-up, the bigger the potential for bottom-up social and political effects. Telegraphy, radio, heavier than air flight, internal combustion ground cars, TV, and even printing were all defined by the political and social changes they created far more than by the physics that made them work. So traditionally when someone prognosticates about a new shiny thing they assume their culture won't change and the technology will somehow fit into it. Far more often, the most interesting thing about new technology is the way it affects belief systems, economic and social activity, and political power relationships.

intrasight 10y ago

I enjoyed the photo, the family history, and the premise of "asking the right/wrong question". I think that all technologists - or perhaps everyone - can and should take a step back from their daily grind and ask some questions. I think the wisdom of the crowd can be leveraged in asking questions about the future. There are sites like longbets.org where you can weight in. It is one of the great gifts to the human species to be able to contemplate a future beyond tomorrow.

skywhopper 10y ago

I am going to choose to believe that the wrap-up paragraph, asking "who will have the right kind of driving data for autonomy?" is a subtle wink, because the current conventional wisdom about autonomous cars -- that they are coming soon, and that machine learning on massive datasets is the key to their success -- is very likely going to end up being one of those things we talk about jokingly in 50 years. Ha! Remember when they thought we'd have a colony on the moon in 1990, that machines would have genius IQs by 2000, and that cars could drive themselves by 2025? Oh, the people of the past were so cute.

jwatte 10y ago

Applied AI will be the next "nobody knew how fundamentally things would change." I don't believe in the singularity (at least as currently envisioned) but I do believe we need to figure out what a society must look like when most human beings are, almost literally, not useful for commercial employment. Like, the whole tenets of a market economy and capitalist ownership will smash into the tenets of human worth and the function of society, with violence and consequences much greater than we've seen until now. We can see it coming. It's obviously clear. And nobody in charge is taking about it, much less doing anything about it. A totally avoidable tragedy, walked into on purpose.

averagewall 10y ago
If technology makes the cost of supporting a person's life is nearly zero, then the wages they'll demand can also approach zero. So a human can undercut a robot worker on cost. Currently, that doesn't happen because humans are so expensive to maintain - they'd sooner starve to death than work for less money than they need to keep themselves alive. But it's more than before. We do have a huge tertiary sector of the economy which is basically humans being employed to do low-value or unnecessary work because they're so plentiful and cheap.
stevedonovan 10y ago
There's the fabled 'Singularity' (with the capital letter) or the usual meaning: something we cannot predict beyond. That's always a problem in prediction, because even if we can imagine a singularity, we don't know what follows.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

I really liked this article because it was a concise demonstration of the 'known' solution problem. A while ago[1] there was a discussion of what folks from the 19th century thought the world would be like in the 20th century. The common theme is that the futurists could never anticipate a change to a technology they didn't have any experience with. The rise of communications as a means of linking people together was completely missed, even by the Dick Tracy types who had wristwatch phones. Why? Because not only did it communicate like everyone had experienced (telegraph, telephone) it persisted with bulletin boards, MUDS, Facebook, and Twitter. That is why I always try to ask a question my Dad suggested I ask when looking a future predictions, "What is so common place that they can't see it changing?" That is so difficult to do. Things like "What would the future be like if there literally was no disease and any physical injury could be patched up quickly?" Or "Energy is suddenly free?" or "Lie detection becomes infallible?" etc. Very tough to do. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13101643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13101643

Senderman 10y ago
Your dad sounds cool.
deleted 10y ago
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pmoriarty 10y ago
"The rise of communications as a means of linking people together was completely missed" Not by everyone. Take a look at "The Machine Stops" by E.M.Forster (of "A Room with a View" and "A Passage to India" fame).[1][2] In 1909 he predicted something like the internet, chatrooms, internet addiction, and various other things that have since happened. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops [2] - http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  I don't disagree, my point wasn't that nobody gets it right, it was that in order to get it right you have to think about the things which you take for granted being different. And that is not a natural act :-). Some of the best science fiction that anticipated the Internet has been stuff that assumed telepathy and looked at issues associated with that. We hit some of those problems with voice activation and bluetooth headsets :-).

congerous 10y ago

I have to say I find this piece pretty disappointing. Slightly smug throughout, which is easy in retrospect, with approximately zero to add to the conversation. The thesis seems to be: The future is hard to predict, and even if you can, it's hard to get the timeline right. No shit. Is this what VCs do with their spare time? Remember granddad and contemplate uncertainty?

dwaltrip 10y ago

My main take-away from this article was that people often use the underlying paradigms of today (perhaps unknowingly) to predict surface level details of tomorrow. "Asking the wrong questions", as the article byline states. Instead, we should try to predict how the fundamental paradigms will change, and then deduce visible, commonplace details from that. I did just started reading "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Kuhn, which is all about paradigms (of a specific sort). It's good stuff.

tlow 10y ago
Kuhn argues that it would be difficult to discern if one were inside of a revolution as it was occurring, correct? So how does one ask the "right question"?
- dwaltrip 10y ago
  I'm not sure. But I think knowing that the default mode is usually to ask the wrong questions can help us. It provides a new lense for analyzing any ideas that come up: "What assumptions am I sub-conscioisly making here? What current paradigms does the idea depend upon?" etc.

Veen 10y ago

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre writes about why the future is inherently unpredictable in his book After Virtue. It's in the context of social sciences but it applies just as well here. There's a decent summary here[0] [0]: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/doclib/20120203_aftervirtuechaptersummary.pdf http://www.thenewatlantis.com/doclib/20120203_aftervirtuecha... > MacIntyre argues that "there are four sources of systematic unpredictability in human affairs" which preclude social science from being like natural science (93). The first is radical conceptual innovation, which can be explained in retrospect, but inherently can only be predicted when the innovation has already occurred. MacIntyre notes that this also means that the future of scientific innovation cannot be predicted, invoking the Church-Turing thesis as further proof. The second source is the fact that "the unpredictability of certain of his own future actions by each agent individually" implies the unpredictability of that agent by any other agent, and hence an aggregate unpredictability to the social world (95). The third source "arises from the game-theoretic character of social life" (97). Social life in fact embodies multiple games, players, and transactions and thus cannot be studied as a single instance, reducing the predictive power of game theory. The fourth source is "pure contingency", the way in which "trivial contingencies can powerfully influence the outcome of great events", such as the length of Cleopatra's nose, or Napoleon's cold at Waterloo (99-0).

oftenwrong 10y ago

One way to detect suspect predictions is to look at which ones suggest improvements to things we have today without changing them significantly. For example, people envision self-driving cars that are exactly like the cars we have today, only automatic. They predict that they will still be big, expensive, complicated, multi-person vehicles. I'm sure that category will continue exist, but why will that remain the norm? The size and complexity of cars are major drawbacks (e.g. storage, traffic, cost). With bicycles, we can see that small individual vehicles have significant advantages due to their size, cost, and simplicity. With self-driving cars, I think there will be room to borrow some of those advantages. Today, we have to build cars with safety as a major concern, but when self-driving vehicles are common, we will not have to. If we are free to relax during a car journey, the ability to travel at high speed may not be such a major concern, either. The typical self-driving car could easily be something inexpensive, small, and simple like the PodRide instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lKq1fGtXFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lKq1fGtXFM

Ntrails 10y ago
>If we are free to relax during a car journey, the ability to travel at high speed may not be such a major concern, either. Most of the people I've spoken to firmly believe self driving cars will be faster, not slower. They'll be safer and more consistent at speed so it's reasonable to trust them to do so safely. When the train takes 4 hours and I can drive it in 2h30 - I take the car. Just the fact that I get to "relax" is not sufficient.
- oftenwrong 10y ago
  Most car trips are much shorter than that, although that could change when driving is no longer necessary. For an occasional long-distance trip, it would make sense to buy a ride on a purpose-built high-speed self-driving vehicle. Kind of like a personal train cabin. For day-to-day commuting and errands, people could be able to spend much less for a smaller, slower, simpler vehicle that is potentially cheap enough for an average person to own.

CurtMonash 10y ago

One of my favorite examples of SF writers underestimating the pace of certain changes is a scene early in Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation -- which is set 1000s of years in our future -- showing the life of a teenage girl before she starts adventuring. Sitting in the bedroom of her suburban house, she uses the new technology of a voice-activated typewriter to write a paper for history class. Looking over this homework assignment, her father reprimands her for one of her writing choices, and she sullenly revises the paper accordingly. (The choice, as you will likely recall if you read the Foundation Trilogy, was to brag about her grandmother, the heroine of the previous book.)