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What stands out to me is the prescience in the speed and penetration of technological advancements juxtaposed with an apparent blind spot for the advancements i
by parksy 5y ago
What stands out to me is the prescience in the speed and penetration of technological advancements juxtaposed with an apparent blind spot for the advancements in social change. Even the most dire or utopian science fiction of the early to mid 20th century seems to reasonably accurately predict technological changes but somehow expects that future social structures will somehow fall into place or adapt to the technology. They imagine these wild technological advancements and bludgeon them into their current-day social mores.
Thinking about today, where the topic of the day is distributed trustless computing and so on, it's easy to imagine now the cat's out of the bag that in 100 years, old institutions like banks, notaries, record-keeping (Hansards etc) could be obsolete, knowledge becomes distributed and every human commands one or more nodes in a constant system of cross-referencing - clients and servers cease to be relevant as a concept, information is just a pool you dip into as needed (with helpful AI assistants to bring things to your attention and/or demand your attention). It could be so pervasive it wouldn't garner a second's thought in the mind of a 2122 individual. Information is just there, always, forever, and always cross-checked for correctness. Duh. (not saying this is even an ideal future, or likely, but it's a trend that's easily extrapolated)
But if that did come to pass, how does that change the fabric of society in 2122? Does the relationship between society and the products it demands and produces change significantly? Does the status-quo stay more or less the same between the workers and the organisers? Do we find a way to deal with cultural differences globally or adopt the "metaverse" and slowly fragment into virtual islands of relative ideological same-ness? These are much harder things to predict, just how in 1922 the idea of not having servants at home to do the bidding of the family matriarch seemed so far-fetched that even an imagined hundred years of progress couldn't fully erase the notion; what concepts do we see as being so firmly entrenched in our culture(s) today that no upheaval of technology could convince us they'd also be on the way out, if not obsolete, in 100 years.
I love seeing these old predictions as much for what they got right as for what they missed. I showed my 12 year old daughter this article and we had a light-hearted conversation about it but she said something that struck me; "society probably won't even be here in 100 years" - I hope that isn't true, it's not something I've directly taught her to believe, but we're surrounded on all fronts by media filled with dire predictions of humanity's collapse and self-destruction on a daily basis, so I'm going to have to work to instil some hope. I am heartened slightly as historically it seems we're really bad at predicting how society as a whole will change long-term, so I do hope we're wrong on the old boiled frogs / status-quo inertia analogies, and that our species makes some giant leaps in terms of collective environmental and social responsibility in the next 100 years.
Nothing really profound I know just a dad pondering his kids futures, fingers crossed we figure some things out.
- throwawaygh 5y ago> where the topic of the day is distributed trustless computing No one in my circles talks about those things. Even the vast majority of crypto investors don't give a shit about "distributed" or "trustless" or "computing". The topics of the day are: 1. climate change 2. automation (especially logistics and war) 3. the tension between nationalism and globalization (both with respect to communication, commodity extraction, manufacturing, knowledge production, ...). Flip the ordering of 1 and 3 if you'd like. > old institutions like banks, notaries, record-keeping (Hansards etc) could be obsolete I can't think of a single less exciting thing to say about the future. The average person uses a notary perhaps a few times in their life. The average bank provides the average person with a nearly flawless UX. Anything that replaces a bank will look like a digital bank account and behave like a digital bank account and probably also be regulated like a digital bank account. For almost all people, this is literally equivalent to staying "by 2122 the IBM COBOL mainframes powering banks will have been replaced with Java running on commodity hardware". Even if it's true... who cares? > knowledge becomes distributed and every human commands one or more nodes in a constant system of cross-referencing - clients and servers cease to be relevant as a concept, information is just a pool you dip into as needed (with helpful AI assistants to bring things to your attention and/or demand your attention). It's not 1999 anymore; we know how the WWW turned out.
- parksy 5y agoI feel like you just wanted to go on the attack for the examples I gave, I can definitely see where you're coming from. My point was that you can pick a tech, extrapolate a few decades, and you'll probably get a few wins. You wanted to attack my example of banks, notaries, parliamentary records etc becoming obsolete, since it's "not exciting". Sadly these boring things are the bedrock of civilisation, so exciting or not, if they become obsolete, then the technological and social fabric of society is impacted in some way or another. The boring changes are sometimes the most meaningful long-term.