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Some things seem so obvious. How can those old people not immediately realize the implications of recorded and proliferated sound? How could Charlie Chaplin possibly think that talkies were a passing fad? How can people today think that our media isn't heading towards the virtual, our computation towards brain interfacing?

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I think it is just the environment. We grew up with computers. Technology is advancing at a crazy rate compared to what it was 100 years ago. The idea of things constantly changing just didn't exist...because things generally didn't change.

In my lifetime people went from a single family landline phone to every family member carrying an internet connected smartphone over just 20 years. There just wasn't that rapid pace of change in any time period before now.

Different kinds of technology accelerate at different rate.

Most of the time it follows some kind of S curve, and i dear say that the IC, and thus the computer, is hitting the flattening top of the S these days.

Lots of people today think electric cars are a fad, renewables are unworkable, climate change doesn't exist, automation/self-driving cars won't replace manual labor, etc etc. Some of those will seem obvious with hindsight.

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