My lovely pocket calculator, he says these are lessons for us, for the present. And, since he is talking about technology in general, presumably for the future. The past events were only the inspiration.
We will never know if Mark Twain would have or would not have lost his money betting on chat bots because he lost it all on a different machine that didn’t work
> I’d argue that there’s a clear line connecting the automation of typesetting and counting in the late 19th century to the rise of electrical computers a generation later, and then the early Internet and AI research a generation after that. (...)
> I think there are three transferrable lessons we can pull from this story: (...)