Is this me just being young? Was the internet boom or smartphone boom the same?
You can see numerous examples ranging from magazines dating back to the 1800's (and before) of all the wacky inventions they pictured denizens of the year 2000 using (rocket packs! nuclear-powered cars! pneumatic transport!), and what life might be like (through the lens of the time). Readerships enjoyed and appreciated reading about the future and giving their imaginations fertile ground to romp.
Futurist was actually a job title.
I think now we're too busy or easily distracted to care much about the possibilities of the distant future. Most of our thoughts on the subject are now doom scenarios involving climate change, collision with an asteroid, running -out- of atmospheric CO2, or the Sun eventually encompassing the Earth.
Then again, maybe there's just a big opening for someone with the right marketing skills to fill an unmet need. I think I could be a futurist.
I was old enough to have been a young teenager when Netscape was released and connected to the web via a BBS (already had Usenet) and Trumpet Winsock. I would say up until 1998 the Internet boom was met with scepticism by the general public. Most people weren't even chatting on AOL. It wasn't until broadband became more commonplace (2000?) that I think the general public became obsessed with the Internet.
As to smartphones the iPhone (specifically the 3G) was the device I had been waiting most of a decade for after seeing my friend's Palm Pilot with Internet access in 1999 or 2000. I'm probably old enough that I discount the "smartphone boom" as I viewed it as the natural progression of existing technology. Also am slightly disappointed that the original premise of the iPhone was web apps on the phone through the browser but that quickly was replaced with native phone apps.
tldr: I think a very small percentage of people are future obsessed about the AI revolution. In the HN echo chamber it might be more but the majority of people don't give it a second thought outside of, "NO SIRI! I SAID WHERE IS..."
I'm not old enough to say but I imagine the magic behind the beginning of space exploration and the race to the moon could have been the peak of future obsession.
Ditto. Outside of HN, I barely ever hear people talking seriously about AI. Perhaps the OP is more farseeing than I am, but to describe the world as "on the cusp of an AI revolution" still seems a little farfetched to me.
This is, of course, the same time period featured in the xkcd titled 'The Pace of Modern Life' [6], which takes contemporary newspaper quotes lamenting that people are always in a hurry and rarely stop to greet strangers and instead spend their commutes on the trains with their noses buried in newspapers, showing that today's critiques about people lost in their smartphones are more than a century old.
So yeah, I'd say we've always been obsessed with the future.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines#/media/Fi... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines#/media/Fi... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Electrotechnical... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Columbian_Exposition [6] https://xkcd.com/1227/
That was the dot-com bubble: even though the internet was a big deal, pets.com and Webvan were not viable internet companies as they took on something the ecosystem wasn't ready for. They did, however, anticipate, and market to, a future where their business became viable, in the form of today's Amazon. 1990's Amazon was purely a bookseller, and perpetually viewed as sitting on a knife-edge.
Now we have a second hype cycle for VR, and while it's much better stuff this time, that doesn't mean it's actually the future. The hype around AI is similar. There was hype over previous AI techniques, too: expert systems, for example, had a period in the 80's where they were promised to do everything, assuming "everything" meant encoding a huge decision tree. Now it's the neural networks that will do "everything". NN also had a hype cycle in the 90's, but without the data and computational power, they weren't able to achieve the results we're getting today.
Developments in AI today are enumerated in achievements that become banal moments after you first hear of them: Watson beat a Jeopardy! champion. AlphaGo beat a top-level Go player. We can detect cats in images. Cars can self-drive a course better than trained race-car drivers. And so on.
It's good to be excited about the future. The marketing hype is not evil, it's necessary - it creates a dialogue, focusing people to think in terms of new technology. It's not the same as its realization, which tends to be more of a "one morning I woke up and realized I was in the future" self-reflection.
> The marketing hype is not evil, it's necessary - it creates a dialogue, focusing people to think in terms of new technology
Why do you think marketing hype is necessary, and it is not evil. Our most important breakthroughs happened at a time of little marketing hype.
A curious mind is a curious mind without needing to hype it up.
I think what he meant was that a marketing hype pushes more people to get to grips with a new technology, and thus speeds up its development. The actual technology obviously has to have been invented (the breakthrough was there) but the hype pushes it further towards maturity.
And basically I feel like that's it for my lifetime. There will be incremental changes from here on out. I really hope I'm wrong though and some huge breakthrough in energy or astrophysics or biology or whatever knocks me on my ass.
Assuming flying cars travel at the roughly same altitude as helicopters, even if I didn't take all of the above into account, I have serious doubts as to whether autopilot could handle flying through Manhattan by itself.
There do exist personal flying devices for the ultra-rich. But if you look at how inefficient our current system is and try to put as many planes in the sky as there are cars on the ground....not looking good.
Plus, imagine you live in NYC or LA. You'd barely get any sunlight on the ground with all the planes in the air. I thought flying cars would be cool too. Then I looked at traffic conditions in LA and said "If this is the best we can do on the ground, then I don't want to see flying cars in my lifetime. The Futurama tube looks much more practical."
In that case, manual driving will be mostly like sailing a ship. Equipped with a gps, the car can maintain a course. And with a radar with a sufficient range, it can alert incoming bogies so that user can take proper action...
Stanford economist Paul Romer once theorized that breakthrough technologies don't really become productive for a generation. That lag time has shrunk to about a decade.
So instead of obsessing over the "vertical" invention, think about what it means to solve the "horizontal" problem. That in less than ten years time, something you take for granted today could be at the fingertips of 4B+ people ;)
Gibson said it best. "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."
It seemed like that in 1980, as well, and then this happened:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
I make no predictions around AI, although I'm skeptical it will work well outside of specialized, rules-heavy environments. Been wrong before, happy to be wrong again.
My sense is we are less future-obsessed than people were in the 1950's, during the blow-off top of the atomic age. People seem more concerned with the environment, sustainability and so forth, Moore's law is slowly grinding to a halt and technical innovation, in general, has slowed down.
Culture churn has definitely increased since the 90's, however. I attribute this to us finding ourselves at the end of modernism and post-modernism, with nothing left to deconstruct, strip away, transgress or mock. This, coupled with the internet, is leading to a blow off top in culturally combinatorial attempts to avoid a return to tradition (unthinkable) or facing up to end-state nihilism (unbearable).
It's not all bad: https://www.youtube.com/user/NewRetroWave
Peter Thiel talks about this in his book, which was published in 2014, saying the 60's was the last time people were optimistic about tomorrow, illustrated by the professions people were getting into.
That was two years ago and I feel like two years later we're just starting to see the proverbial jet packs at the end of the tunnel. To start I'm sure that's bound to have more people entering machine learning rather than web development
But the latter helps to exploit you more...So I guess that is where the big shot entrepreneurs/corporations/governments want you..