[ExI] it's better than it used to be

[spike]

A comment I read here has been rattling around in my brain, the common
saying "The future ain't what it used to be."  Usually this comment goes
with noting we don't have power too cheap to meter, and we don't have flying
cars and we don't have yakkity yak and bla bla, and too bad for us.  

 

To that whole notion I must say as politely as I can, bullshit.  Sure some
things didn't work out for us, but look what we did get that no one really
anticipated, even AC Clarke.  Right, we don't have flying cars like the
Jetsons.  Road travel is remarkably similar to how it was in my own
childhood.  But look what we did get: a new technology for getting
information into the home which is so good and so effective, many of us
don't want to go chasing off somewhere else, even if we could fly out of our
own driveway.  I wouldn't give up my internet for flying cars, given the
choice of a trade straight across.  Think about that.  The future is better
than it used to be.

 

Consider Asimov's notion of a company being formed to create an encyclopedia
of everything, as in the Foundation series.  They struggled so hard to get
that, and yet along comes Wikipedia in our own lifetimes, we put together
something that actually is better than Hari Seldon's Encyclopedia Galactica,
all put together in a few years by volunteers.  We didn't need to collect
the most intelligent minds in the galaxy, we made do just fine with a few
tens of thousands of ordinary hipsters, and now the product exceeds our
wildest imagination even if the information in there isn't always correct,
it's free, it's available in our own homes instantly always.  The future is
better than it used to be.  The right now is waaay better than it used to
be.

 

spike

 

 

 

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