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Comment by kaoD | Hacker News Reader

> If you told someone in 1995 that within 25 years [...] most people would find that hard to believe.

That's not how I remember it (but I was just a kid so I might be misremembering?)

As I remember (and what I gather from media from the era) late 80s/early 90s were hyper optimistic about tech. So much so that I distinctly remember a ¿german? TV show when I was a kid where they had what amounts to modern smartphones, and we all assumed that was right around the corner. If anything, it took too damn long.

Were adults outside my household not as optimistic about tech progress?

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To your point, AT&T's "You Will" commercials started airing in 1993 and present both an optimistic and fairly accurate view of what the future would look like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvZ-667CEdo

I didn't know about these ads, thanks for sharing! Can't imagine how people reacted to that when they aired — the things they described sound so "normal" today, I wonder if it was seen as far fetched, crazy or actually expected.

In these commercials, it wasn't the technology itself but the ease of access and visualized integration of these technologies into the commoners' everyday lives that was the new idea.

I was in my late teens at the time. My memory is that I felt like the tech was definitely going happen in some form, but I rolled my eyes heavily at the idea that AT&T was going to be the company to do make it happen.

If you’re unfamiliar, the phone connectivity situation in the 80s and 90s was messy and piecemeal. AT&T had been broken up in 1982 (see https://www.historyfactory.com/insights/this-month-in-busine...), and most people had a local phone provider and AT&T was the default long-distance provider. MCI and Sprint were becoming real competition for AT&T at the time of these commercials.

Anyway, in 1993 AT&T was still the crusty old monopoly on most people’s minds, and the idea that they were going to be the company to bring any of these ideas to the market was laughable. So the commercials were basically an image play. The only thing most people bought from AT&T was long distance service, and the main threat was customers leaving for MCI and Sprint. The ads memorable for sure, but I don’t think they blew anyone’s mind or made anyone stay with AT&T.

We’re the same age, and I had exactly the same reaction.

AT&T and the baby bells were widely loathed (man I hated Ameritech…), so the idea they would extend their tentacles in this way was the main thing I reacted to. The technology seemed straightforwardly likely with Dennard scaling in full swing.

I thought it would be banks that owned the customer relationship, not telcos or Apple (or non-existent Google), but the tech was just… assume miniaturization’s plateau isn’t coming for a few decades.

Still pretty iconic/memorable, though!

Thanks for that context. Was your expectation/prediction about that tech that it was going to happen in say 2000s or sooner/later?

Wow, that genuinely gave me goosebumps. It is incredible to live in a time where so much of that hopeful optimism came to pass.

Same here. It's wild that every single thing in that video came to pass, and more. Within our own lifetimes.

Still no flying cars, though.

Indeed, AI now is what people in the 1980s thought computers would be doing in 2000.

Except people thought it would get basic facts right.

We can't decide whether to take a vaccine even when we are dying left and right. And we have brains, not chips inside.

Or hell, as Neil deGrasse Tyson said in a video, just put 2 lines with different arrows at the ends then our brains can't even tell if they're the same size!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Müller-Lyer_illusion

That’s how I remember it too. The video is from 1999, during the height of the dot-com bubble. These experts are predicting that within 10 years the internet will be on your phone, and that people will be using their phones as credit cards and the phone company would manage the transaction, the prediction actually comes pretty close to the prediction made by bitcoin enthusiasts.

https://bsky.app/profile/ruv.is/post/3liyszqszds22

Note that this is the state TV broadcasting this in their main news program. The most popular daily show in Iceland.

Still waiting on my flying car.

To be fair, that has been a Sci-Fi trope for at least 130 years and predates the invention of the car itself (e.g. personal wings/flying horse -> flying ship -> personal balloon -> flying automobile). So countless generations have been waiting for that :)

Might not be waiting for long.

There's no way I'm trusting the current driving cohort with a third dimension. If we get flying cars and they aren't completely autonomous, I am moving to the sticks.

Self-flying cars? I wonder if it's actually easier to have autonomous vehicles operating in 3D than in "2D".

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