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I predict ONE of us will escape the matrix and lead a band of rebels in bringing it's demise only to free us from this modern world to a dirty desolate world where survival is the theme of the day!
I would like to know to older members on this board. Did you have any ideas what you thought the year 2000 was going to look like: For example: "I thought that by the year 2000 we would be having flying cars and jetpacks, and moon vacations by now!!!" What did you guys think about what the future was going to look like by today?
Do you really think we envisioned this type of stuff? A C5-A was the largest airplane in use by the USA and is still the leviathan they lean on to move big heavy loads. Flying cars and jet packs were never a reality and made as much sense as watching "The Jetsons".
My visions of computers weren't as grand as others as the first Texas Instruments calculators were actually more impressive than today's smart phones. Who knew a little piece of plastic, the size of a new fangled TV remote, housed more computing power than anything most would own in our homes for decades.
I would like to know to older members on this board. Did you have any ideas what you thought the year 2000 was going to look like: For example: "I thought that by the year 2000 we would be having flying cars and jetpacks, and moon vacations by now!!!" What did you guys think about what the future was going to look like by today?
When I was a kid in the early 70's, there was a show on TV called Space 1999. It had me believing that we'd be visiting other planets by 2000 and people would be shooting lasers as weapons. As I got older, the expectations dropped as my knowledge increased.
In elementary school, when we spoke about New Year's Eve, we were all bummed out because we'd be in our 30's, old with kids and not have any fun that night. I can definitely say that the days surrounding New Year's 1999 were quite awesome. I didn't hit a single party, I just went to a cabin in the mountains with a super hot young lady and moved the bed into the living room.
I didn't think much about futurism growing up in the 60s. Most of the projections of the future seemed depressing to me, and later I realized that they all seemed to bleed the human element out of society in favor of the technological. I guess I had good reason to be depressed. In the technological age, a lot of people really are a lot less human and a lot more like competitive, political robots. But I thought that notion of the future was just a phase, a vision based on naive technological extrapolations. In the 80s, I was pretty optimistic about some authentic sort of human progress, not the sort envisioned by "progressivism," which is a lot like animal husbandry, but people becoming a lot more tolerant, resilient, and cooperative. Boy, was I wrong about that.
Some things surprised me. The sudden end of the Cold War. The sorting out of apartheid in South Africa without a bloodbath and the calming of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. The change in the public discourse from at least moderately reasoned arguments to thoughtless, intuitive, knee-jerk, dismissive mockery, and the unwillingness to even consider that people with different views might be motivated by something other than hatred, conspiracy, mental illness, or stupidity. So-called "post"-modernism being taken seriously as an intellectual movement and as something "post" modern.
I predict ONE of us will escape the matrix and lead a band of rebels in bringing it's demise only to free us from this modern world to a dirty desolate world where survival is the theme of the day!
Do you really think we envisioned this type of stuff? A C5-A was the largest airplane in use by the USA and is still the leviathan they lean on to move big heavy loads. Flying cars and jet packs were never a reality and made as much sense as watching "The Jetsons".
My visions of computers weren't as grand as others as the first Texas Instruments calculators were actually more impressive than today's smart phones. Who knew a little piece of plastic, the size of a new fangled TV remote, housed more computing power than anything most would own in our homes for decades.
It was a bunch of humbug over nothing.
And judging by the unbridled optimism over "self-driving cars", "solar roadways" and the like by some of the younger and both less-tecnhically-oriented and less-jaded participants here, the gap between fantasy and feasibility is widening.
And judging by the unbridled optimism over "self-driving cars", "solar roadways" and the like by some of the younger and both less-tecnhically-oriented and less-jaded participants here, the gap between fantasy and feasibility is widening.
I guess we are jaded by wisdom which comes along with age.
Are robots, as portrayed by 20th century sci-fi, truly feasible today? Nope. AI isn't reality yet as the science is far more than sticking a munch of CPUs together and hoping it can be autonomous by nature. That time frame is decades away as the human brain must be replicated - electronically - to achieve a simple desktop which can reason logically on it's own. It will require computing power on a scale the common computer savvy person cannot fathom at this point. Most modern programmers couldn't draw a flowchart to depict such.
Back then, I just didn't see things in society being as bad as it is today. Like all the mass killings and a total disregard for human life, the lack of respect people have for themselves and others, the lack of compassion and empathy. People just don't care about much beyond their front yards these days, or it seem that way.
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