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by rdp
3255 days ago
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Coincidentally, EXTROPY magazine and its associated brand of techno-libertarianism was more reflective of where we have actually ended up. I have an old issue from 1995 that focuses on digital money that more or less advocates what we know now as cryptocurrency, including an imaginary monetary unit called Hayeks. With that said, stuff like cryonics and immortality is still pretty marginal. |
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Extropians archive: https://github.com/macterra/extropians
Cypherpunks archive: https://github.com/Famicoman/cypherpunks-mailing-list-archiv...
It's fun, sometimes a bit depressing, to search those archives for years that have now passed and see what people expected by now. (ag "by 201", ag "by 200")
Serious underdelivery so far on:
- Molecular manufacturing
- Increasing single-thread performance of desktop computers, with ever-growing clock speed
- Robotics outside of industrial facilities
- Therapeutic breakthroughs in medicine from genomics
- Encrypted and networked communications revolutionizing politics/society
You might object that most of these developments, dimly foreseen in the 1990s, are actually significant in this decade in some form. But you have to go back to the originals to appreciate just how quantitatively aggressive the predictions were. (10 GHz desktop CPUs by 2014. Followup in the same discussion: No, the clock speed will be twice that, and arrive before 2010!)