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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a popular position, and I think it's because space rockets and cities on the moon are large-but-simple advances that people can get their heads around. Computer tech is so far past their "magic" threshold that a modern smartphone doesn't seem much different to the original microcomputers.

Maybe you could explain it as "if rockets had advanced as fast as computers, we'd have flying cities that could travel to the moon and back in minutes."

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At least for her, computer technology didn’t result in structural change in the way people live. They had television, phones, cameras, etc., when she was a teenager. She uses her iPhone and iPad as a television, a telephone, a camera, and a combination of television and telephone (FaceTime). Neat and convenient, but not life changing in the same way as cars, planes, moon colonization, etc. Certainly not “magic.”

FaceTime is a little magical. How often would she get to see and talk to her grandkids without it?

And would people living on the moon have really changed her life either? Unless she was one of them she'd just end up hearing about it in the news and then going about her day.

TBH if I really had to pick the thing that has most changed her life I'd bet it's the shipping and logistics technology that has dramatically lowered the cost of all the consumer goods she buys.

She lives with us, so every day. She grew up in a society where even extended families all lived in the same town, so better ways to communicate don’t really impress her. (My dad, who went to boarding school, does find it very impresssive.) She was also rich in Bangladesh, so she doesn’t have much positive to say on the consumer goods front either. Obviously that’s a highly specific viewpoint. I do think though, there is something generalizable about the idea that folks of a certain generation don’t find communications technology that amazing because (1) they don’t work in a profession that’s really been changed by it; (2) they’re from communities where families lived in close contact and video chat seems like a step down.

As to people living on the moon: she grew up with America being this frontier that was very inspiring. I think she sees space travel the same way (also, probably bias from reading a lot of sci-fi of the time).

There's great sci-fi from the 50's where people are traveling through space in wonderfully detailed ships.

However they're still wearing fur-lined space suits and calculating trajectories using slide rulers.

Predicting future technology (especially new out of the box ideas) is really hard.

This is a bit patronising and doesn't address the interesting question: why the technological expectations of 50, 60 years ago didn't materialize.

In my view it's an economic issue, not a technological one. If as much money had been spent on space travel as has been spent on computers in the last fifty years then we'd have cities on the moon, no problem. But "we" didn't, because it made no economic sense -- or at least there's a vast technological gulf we need to breach before it starts to make economic sense. Money to develop computers came from the pockets of individuals and companies because they wanted computers -- money for space travel came from government departments for reasons unclear even to themselves.

If progress in space travel seems slow, remember that almost all of the money going into it is spent by a single organisation whose budget is less than 10% of Apple's revenue.

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