| (My comment will get buried because I'm flagged but whatever) I had drinks with a bunch of Hugo award winners and candidates a couple of years back (2015?) and we started talking about near-future stuff. Mainly that I was looking for more of it. (Diamond Age fans out there?) A funny thing came up: It's getting harder and harder to predict near-future stuff for some authors. I don't understand why. Is it that technology is becoming more and more obscured from the requirements of interacting with it? Once upon a time, a person had to divine the landscape of network protocols and unix command line to understand the mystery of the internet. Nowadays that tech is just one click or swipe away -- perhaps there is less imagination required to figure out what's happening behind the scene, or perhaps no imagination is required anymore -- things just are. Maybe we're just inundated with the next big trivial far future click-bait article that the future seems... well always right around the corner and less futur-y(?). Or perhaps we're at the precipice of something entirely new and incomprehensible. I run a decentralized AI startup and we have an exercise where we try to imagine a world with particular capabilities but it (for a large part of my peers) seems out of reach -- as if it exists beyond a great divide. It makes me think that whatever is next is either really beyond the scope of understanding, or just non-existent. It's fun (and exciting) to try and think about regardless. |