| That's just mostly viral hype thinking, maintained sometimes by key people in the industry through the press, because it drives money to them and willingness to work for less in certain cases. The decades around 1900 were more innovative than what we've been experiencing the last decades. And yes you can find people thinking the same thing way back in history, with the difference is that now it's been psychotically amplified by mass media, and it is actually annoying. In popular press, and when people have things to sell, they do not include historical facts, because then they cannot drive the hype to new degrees, if they the include historical facts. You may think that they have done their homework when they say "never before in history" but they have either never checked or deliberately ignored history. I've had people I know, and the press swearing up and down that 'this time it's different' since the 90s when it comes to 'A.I' for instance. I'm sure older guys can go back even earlier and remember 'the impending A.I revolution'. Sweet money in that hyped narrative. If you think that "this time it will be different" - congrats they got into your brain, and they do not care that they have done it just 10 years prior.
With enough repetition of the same information, and the way the human memory works - it doesn't really matter. You will help them every time by reliably assuming that someone else cared enough to check history before saying that something is "historical", "first time", "never before in millions of years of human civilization". They haven't, and it doesn't matter for their goals. One of these times something will eventually happen. Until then PR money, clickbaits, VC money, startups.. the whole classical techno-utopian centrifuge. |