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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

For me personally, some of the not-being-that-excited-ness is that I grew up reading sci-fi and cyberpunk, and basically always assumed these things were possible and likely, just a matter of implementation details. A device that can translate any language at a button-push? Sure, I heard about it when I was eight. A device you carry around that instantly connects to some sort of communication network? Yeah, I've probably read about a dozen takes on those. Etc.

Weirdly, actually having it doesn't seem to make a huge difference to me. The idea of something like a smartphone was pretty exciting when I read about it in the 1980s, and it was interesting to follow early PDA forays like the Newton. But now that they exist and work well, I haven't even gotten around to buying one yet; by the time reality caught up, it wasn't that exciting anymore.

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I grew up with a ravenous appetite for science fiction too. In particular, I was fascinated by handheld computers.

Tricorders, PADDs, Al's Handlink, SELMA, they all drove my imagination nuts.

From my early Handspring visor to today's iPhone 4, real life handhelds have been exciting because they slake my childhood thirst for a piece of the future.

I'm a little sad, though. The first iPhone pretty much put all scifi handhelds to shame, and the iPhone 4 with FaceTime beats even the video communicator from Earth: Final Conflict. After playing with Epic Citadel and seeing the ridiculous graphical power in that tiny package, there's nothing left to thrill in me in the land of pocket computers. The depths of those childhood fantasies have been plumbed.

Ah well. We still have ocular implants with augmented reality HUD overlays and telescopic vision to look forward to!

Hmm, I can see that on the technological front, but culturally to me it hasn't surpassed the imagined future. I might've read too much cyberpunk, but when I was a kid I really thought this kind of tech was going to totally change things... we were going to live in cyberspace now. Somehow, using smartphones to look up yelp reviews, traffic directions, and email doesn't seem like what I was hoping for. In some weird way, BBSs were more exciting and futuristic to me, creating an ASCII-based virtual world out of beeps on a telephone line between my computer and some random sysop's computer, and with a cultural ethos that this was a new world we could define. Maybe I'm jaded, but now the internet just feels like an extension of irl.

Yeah, perhaps the thing you took from what I'm guessing was a much more literary exploration of Scifi than my own was a sense of a new sort of place, driven by technology. A new way of conceiving of community.

And in many ways, though it was clunky by modern standards, BBS satisfies the conception of "cyberspace" much better than what we have today. I was a little past BBS when I was a kid, using Hotline instead, but it did feel like I was going somewhere when I connected to servers with decent communities. Everything was real-time, you could exchange data, there was just placeness to it.

So now we've got stuff like Second Life, which satisfies Stephenson-esque Metaverse fantasies, but it hasn't fundamentally changed anything. Everyone still meets up for drinks and fried chicken, goes to work in their cars. The internet ended up lacing around our lives instead of redefining them.

I could see you being, perhaps, underwhelmed with that in mind.

Having grown older, I've become more and more convinced that spending a lot of time in cyberspace is a fundamentally bad idea. Using technology to enhance my life in the real world? Fantastic. Using technology to escape into a virtual world? Doesn't sound healthy.

I guess I don't do it much anymore (posting on forums like this notwithstanding), but I'm not sure I've changed my mind overall. There's a certain kind of community that BBSs, along with medium-sized Usenet groups / webforums / mailing lists / etc. gave, that is somewhat different from IRL kinds of communities, and also different from both very small online communities (people you already know) and very large online communities (places like reddit, Slashdot, and HN). Not to promote a replacement of rl with cyberspace, but I think it's an interesting experiment where something is lost by it not persisting.

And it all woulda, coulda, shoulda happened already, if only everyone had taken to the net to the same degree that the futurist authors of those books did. The one thing they never could have predicted was that was that a lot of the people who spent all day online would be doing so because they were unpopular, thus driving a correlation between cyber-community and anti-social tendencies that has stigmatized that possible future to this day. The one thing that made me hopeful again was the ads Blizzard ran with famous, popular, pretty, celebrity-type people saying they play WoW—but we'd need a lot more of that before grandma is jacking in.

> For me personally, some of the not-being-that-excited-ness is that I grew up reading sci-fi and cyberpunk

I remember being 10? (12? not sure) and having my Mum tell me we had not, in fact, landed humans on any other planets. "Only" the moon. Seemed pretty lame.

Weirdly, actually having it doesn't seem to make a huge difference to me.

It does to me. But, then, I'm the bibliophile son of a librarian. So the new world manifests as a continuous series of oddnesses: I'm purging my book and map and magazine collection, and it is getting much smaller, and that is weird. The web changes the habits of a lifetime.

It is hard to perceive long-term changes, even when they are big.

> The instant gratification provided by being able to have almost any question answered immediately is a tiny pony.

Apart from reference questions (like dictionary meanings, map look up, programming syntax, wikipedia), we are an awfully long way from this.

Apart from reference questions (like dictionary meanings, map look up, programming syntax, wikipedia), we are an awfully long way from this.

I'm not clear what you mean, but it seems to me that we're pretty close to the point where most things that have an actual answer can be found by typing a question and clicking a button (using a search engine, with fall back to asking a question in a relevant forum)

If you are talking about more philosophical questions, then perhaps - but I think you can gain just as much enlightenment from the click of a button as you used to be able to from months of philosophy classes.

I see what you mean, but my experience is quite often that I have to hunt a lot to get answers to straightforward questions. After a fair bit of effort (if I keep going, sometimes for a considerable time...) I'll get the answer - but not always even then. (of course, for very common questions, the answer does often pop up immediately - I'm certainly pleased when that happens.) Asking in a forum is great, and usually effective, provided you know enough about the question and know an appropriate forum (eg. stackoverflow for programming questions). I should have included "commonly asked questions" as well as "reference questions". Search engines are great at harvesting this low hanging fruit which would otherwise go to waste.

But in the other two cases, the answers are not immediate, which was the thrust of the statement to which I objected - it's quoted above, and includes "instant gratification", "answered immediately" and "almost any question". We're not there yet, we've only got the easy stuff. Wolfram|Alpha is an attempt to go a bit deeper, and it's also part of Google's mission.

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