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by JKCalhoun 379 days ago
Yeah, it was to me the most interesting part of the piece; and I tend to agree with it.

When I was younger I may have been amused by the technological speculation — perhaps giving him a score (sorry, no hovercraft for everyday cars, and my Makita is in fact not powered by radioisotopes, but we'll grant you the experimental fusion power plants). We've seen that there are just so many unforeseeables that it is little more than just guessing ... multiplied by how keyed in you are on the what the current state of research is.

To have predicted Maps on the phone you would have had to predict the ubiquity of GPS or some other means of location, predicted small portable displays in order to show a map, predicted a global data network, miniaturization of electronics, the computer revolution.... It's no wonder even William Gibson missed it writing two decades after Asimov.

Was there some odd sort of car with a "moving map" depicted in the 1960's? Or was I victim to some sort of viral image fakery? What did Bond have in Goldfinger — some kind of printed, scrolling map with a moving light (cursor) behind it? Or am I misremembering. Hilarious though to try to do something with 60's tech — perhaps using dead reckoning rather than GPS to guess the car's location (steering plus speed).

4 comments

There have been a few. Maybe this one? https://youtu.be/Z3We5h8pt0Q?si=btvxgZhPqDkTqNEc

The UK trialed a cassette version here https://youtu.be/4qqnHtH1RAs?si=Y9dKvKtwPVXheLWU

No there was a dead reckoning maps system, or at least a prototype. Dead reckoning can be surprisingly accurate.

https://hackaday.com/2018/06/17/retrotechtacular-car-navigat...

I’m betting we’ll all turn into part-time philosophers, staring at the old questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Where do we go next?

Finding meaning becomes the core human task.

Our best tool might be the oldest one: basic ethics. Plato, Aristotle, the $5 paperbacks gathering dust.

I think some WWII era bombers had scrolling paper maps? Or maybe I saw such maps at a museum recently. All these innovations have been on the military's wish list for a while