No one predicted phone addiction
Comment on we are creators
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
It’s why a lot of sci-fi written in the 1900’s takes place in like the 90’s and 2000’s. Writers thought that we would keep on exponentially advancing and have Mars colonies and flying cars by now. They could have never predicted that interest in space exploration would have waned, like people stopped caring about the space shuttle, and that the actual technological revolution took place in the computing space.
jnod4@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
It’s weird reading work by authors like Asimov, where people travel between planets as a matter of routine, and we have sentient robots, but not mobile phones.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
but then on the flipside there’s stuff like star trek, which since it’s literally the inspiration for cellphones is remarkably normal
even the fucking tricorders aren’t that far off these days, just today i used an app on my phone to identify plants automatically for fuck’s sake, that’s insane!
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
Or there are phones or cybernetic radio implants but they’re just a way to make phone calls.
gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
i think a lot of people simply couldn’t have imagined computers back in 1900. that is simply because computers are a rapid qualitative progress instead of just a quantitative one.
buttnugget@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
This is because of the socio-political dimension of things. It’s not just that people just randomly changed their minds, so much technological innovation is driven by war or the threat of war.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
To be fait, a lot of sci fi does involve very advanced computing, like HAL in 2001.
dzsimbo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
And some even got the cyberpunkiness almost right (Johnny Nmemonic swung so hard!). I think for every visionary piece, we have 100 lost contemporary ‘trash’ (not trash, more like a picture of the spirit of the time) that has already been lost.
I mean Star Trek was pretty wickedly ahead of it’s time for all of the creator’s shortcomings. Still can’t believe that teleporting doesn’t kill you every time.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Has it ever been proven in any of the shows that the transporter didn’t kill everyone that used it and just made such prefect copies that no one realized?
Like it created an extra copy of Riker and there was the tragedy of Tuvix. Though I’d say the former is evidence that it is new copies but the latter might be evidence against it, since they each had memories of their time merged when they separated. Actually, that whole incident kinda brings into question what’s going on for a transporter to accidentally merge two people and not in a “horrible teleportation into a wall accident” way and then somehow de-merge them.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
the thing is that a copy is indistinguishable from the original, it’s like trying to figure out which copy of a text file is the original, it’s a question that simply doesn’t apply in the first place.
you change more in a week than a transporter would change you in the process of disassembly and reassembly, if you argue that the person stepping out of the transporter somehow isn’t the same person then you’ve just made the concept of “the same person” meaningless.
dzsimbo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
Yeah, there definitely are some waved away elements that are basically magic. I’m just binging TNG now, but I saw the Lower Decks tribute to many-a transporter incidents.
I mean if you can transport and not at the same time (the copy version), it is not hard to think that once that buffer is cleared on the one side, it’s game over man.