The early and mid-20th centuries looked like they were on the way to the overpower future: if trends in power generation continued as they had, by now we'd all

The early and mid-20th centuries looked like they were on the way to the overpower future: if trends in power generation continued as they had, by now we'd all have access to the dedicated output of a few nuclear power plants for a hundred dollars a month. It is interesting to speculate on what technology would arise at that point. Instead power generation and storage turned out to be some combination of harder than expected and less desirable than thought. We got the infotech future instead, the path that wasn't foreseen, but is probably the better one from the point of view of living standards, since it drives (a) medicine, and (b) technological development as a whole. The point here is that people still live in the 50s when they knee-jerk about the technologies they consider progress - they think about things that are on the line of increasing power rather than on the line of increasing data.