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In his 80s columns he wrote (roughly, by my memory) that by the turn of the millennium you'd be able to go to your computer and ask any question with a publical

In his 80s columns he wrote (roughly, by my memory) that by the turn of the millennium you'd be able to go to your computer and ask any question with a publically known answer, and get it back right away. I thought that was ridiculous, and today you can quibble, but basically yes, you can, and he was right on the money on the timing. That was an audacious prediction back then. He influenced me the most by his columns on space development (A Step Farther Out, and a couple of anthologies The Endless Frontier). I don't clearly remember what was in them, but there was a kind of can-do attitude about developing technological civilization in a strategic way that seems more in tune with the 60s than anything happening now.

digi_owl 9y ago
For anyone who's first computer interaction was a microcomp like the C64, sure. But i suspect that for anyone that had spent time with mainframe/minicomp terminals, particularly those attached to the Arpanet, it may not have seemed as such a far fetched claim. Never mind that France rolled out Minitel back then, and similar systems were also deployed elsewhere in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Minitel_in_other_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Minitel_in_other_count...
- abecedarius 9y ago
  I had a networked account in the later 80s. I also read Ted Nelson (Literary Machines) and Eric Drexler (http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_14.html http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_14.html) predicting something like the web but in important ways better -- there are ideas there worth returning to for today's fights about "fake news" and open-access science. Drexler was right about the timing, too. Those guys were on the futuristic fringe, but their ideas looked good to me. So why didn't I believe Pournelle? I was like, sure, someday, but his scenario seemed practically AI-complete. I did not foresee it coming so soon out of a little bit of the right sort of natural language processing plus some great engineering. I'm sure there were people with a better imagination! But hindsight really is way too easy.

digi_owl 9y ago

For anyone who's first computer interaction was a microcomp like the C64, sure. But i suspect that for anyone that had spent time with mainframe/minicomp terminals, particularly those attached to the Arpanet, it may not have seemed as such a far fetched claim. Never mind that France rolled out Minitel back then, and similar systems were also deployed elsewhere in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Minitel_in_other_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Minitel_in_other_count...

abecedarius 9y ago
I had a networked account in the later 80s. I also read Ted Nelson (Literary Machines) and Eric Drexler (http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_14.html http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_14.html) predicting something like the web but in important ways better -- there are ideas there worth returning to for today's fights about "fake news" and open-access science. Drexler was right about the timing, too. Those guys were on the futuristic fringe, but their ideas looked good to me. So why didn't I believe Pournelle? I was like, sure, someday, but his scenario seemed practically AI-complete. I did not foresee it coming so soon out of a little bit of the right sort of natural language processing plus some great engineering. I'm sure there were people with a better imagination! But hindsight really is way too easy.