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Computers could hardly do anything back then. Mostly backend data processing. Yet this speech could have been written today. Intriguing.
by profsummergig 1y ago
Computers could hardly do anything back then. Mostly backend data processing.
Yet this speech could have been written today.
Intriguing.
- ttoinou 1y agoSimilar to Guy Debord in The Society of Spectacle, what he wrote witnessing the beginning of TV and mass cinema applies for us in 2025, 100 fold
- profsummergig 1y agoI just looked up the Wiki page for the book. Prescient.
- layer8 1y agoNeuromancer was published only half a year later. Or take The Machine Stops from 1909.
- noosphr 1y agoPeople act like you need a petaflop for something to be useful. The US census of 1890 would have been impossible to complete before the next one started without puchcard machines. One may as well say the information age arrived then. Anyone with basic numeracy and imagination could imagine what the future held at that point.
- profsummergig 1y ago> Anyone with basic numeracy and imagination could imagine what the future held at that point. Yet most of us (myself included) are in denial (willful or just delusional) about what AI is going to do.
- forinti 1y agoData processing by itself was a major leap in productivity. My city ran its payroll on a single computer with 64KB of RAM. This would have required weeks of work from a whole team of bureaucrats.
- profsummergig 1y agoI remember armies of "stenographers" and "bookkeepers" in the central areas of office buildings.