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> It seems the majority here thinks the next 20 years will be like the last 20 years, with only minor, gradial improvements. And every idea of a bigger shift is

> It seems the majority here thinks the next 20 years will be like the last 20 years, with only minor, gradial improvements. And every idea of a bigger shift is a scam. More like the last 200 years will be like the last 200 years. When has there been some truly "giant shift" that swept the world in less than a decade? The automobile we know today was an outgrowth of the decades of developments of steam engines to farm tractors to passenger vehicles and was only fully enabled once we built the interstate system and has required decades of further development particularly of safety systems to bring us to the comfortable place we are now. I imagine this technology will eventually be useful, but so many more developments and earned experience needs to be gained before we can build out the rest of the infrastructure that will truly allow this technology to become a ubiquitous improvement over our current state. It's maybe not that we're negative on the new technology, it's just that we'd like to acknowledge this gap and concentrate on the issues that it creates rather than getting lost in the perennial shine of the new.

TekMol 4y ago
I said "20 years", not "less than a decade". When has there been some truly "giant shift" Some examples: Cars replaced horses. Email replaced letters. Phones replaced desktops. Phones replaced cameras. Websites replaced newspapers, TV and radio.
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  These aren't exactly giant shifts though, just incremental progress. Maybe with the exception of cars vs horses, but this shift took at least half a century and two disruptive world wars happened in that time. For the other things, the enabling technologies were microchips and the internet, and those also took their time to grow.
  - TekMol 4y ago
    If the web was not a giant shift, then I don't know what is. If mobile was not a giant shift, then I don't know what is. The web created a searchable, worldwide instant knowledge base in which mankind shares what it knows. Mobile makes everyone connected to everybody else, where ever they are. For all of these examples, the time going from "most people are aware of it" to "most people use it" was less than 20 years. Example: Most people in developed countries started to become aware of email in the 90s. In the 2010s most people had an email. Probably even in the 2000s already.
    - flohofwoe 4y ago
      These were mostly 'predictable' consequences of miniaturization in electronics and connecting computers into networks which had been happening since the late 1940s and the 1960s. And those idea didn't come out of nowhere either, science fiction invented most of those concepts long before they could be technically realised (see Star Trek's communicators).

TekMol 4y ago

I said "20 years", not "less than a decade". When has there been some truly "giant shift" Some examples: Cars replaced horses. Email replaced letters. Phones replaced desktops. Phones replaced cameras. Websites replaced newspapers, TV and radio.

flohofwoe 4y ago
These aren't exactly giant shifts though, just incremental progress. Maybe with the exception of cars vs horses, but this shift took at least half a century and two disruptive world wars happened in that time. For the other things, the enabling technologies were microchips and the internet, and those also took their time to grow.
- TekMol 4y ago
  If the web was not a giant shift, then I don't know what is. If mobile was not a giant shift, then I don't know what is. The web created a searchable, worldwide instant knowledge base in which mankind shares what it knows. Mobile makes everyone connected to everybody else, where ever they are. For all of these examples, the time going from "most people are aware of it" to "most people use it" was less than 20 years. Example: Most people in developed countries started to become aware of email in the 90s. In the 2010s most people had an email. Probably even in the 2000s already.
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
    These were mostly 'predictable' consequences of miniaturization in electronics and connecting computers into networks which had been happening since the late 1940s and the 1960s. And those idea didn't come out of nowhere either, science fiction invented most of those concepts long before they could be technically realised (see Star Trek's communicators).