[noamyoungerm]

>My first thought was "Try describing the internet to someone 100 years ago - your claim that there is going to be an interconnected global network of electricity-powered adding machines that transport pictures of moving sex by pretending they are made of numbers is going to sound stupid."

Because you're limiting yourself to a single sentence. How about this: "The internet is essentially an expansion of the concept of a telegraph - it is already possible to pass any type of information between two distant people almost instantly. The internet combines this system of information transfer with machines that know how to respond to messages without human intervention - under the condition that the messages follow a certain set of rules. By defining these rules in advance, the telegraph system, which up to now only transferred individual letters, can be co-opted to send things such as pictures and films. The machine can tell who is speaking with it, and perform tasks for that particular person upon request."

This does not sound stupid - it might take some explaining, but anyone with a brain between their ears can understand the basic concept of fast information transfer. They might not think of all of the possible uses of such an invention right away, but I bet that they would easily understand the uses if they were explained in terms of things these people already know.

[marcosdumay]

Well, Totient's main fault was that he didn't ask for a time interval big enough.

Make that 150 years, and you couldn't talk about information running through the lines, because people's understanding of "information" was a completely different (and much less powerful) concept.

Make that 200 years, and people that were trying to make machines react to well formed message were as criticized as AI proponents are now.