The most remarkable election moment
I should give my anti-social socialist 2 cents about the Obama election, about wingnut heads melting and libertarians threatening to "go John Galt". But I simply can't.
Because of this.
Click to viewI couldn't stop fucking laughing from the moment this showed up. As a media person myself, I can imagine how embarrassing it must have been for the anchor to be there talking to empty space while we saw a blurry, pixelated woman form on the fake holo-dot. I'm sure he can look at his paycheck for comfort later, but right at the moment, it was infinitely goofy.
In a way, I feel that we are aware of how distant modern life is from the expectation people had between the 60s and 80s. Precious few imagined we'd get such a thing as the Internet, but we were all banking on flying cars, holograms, easy fix-all cures for all diseases, and maybe cities on mars or the moon. Our main worry would be finding stuff to do with our vast amounts of free time, since robots and computers would work for us, and we'd all be wearing clothes of aluminum foil.
It's been a long time since technology has bowled us over. We've been getting very good, incremental steps to concepts we already know, but few new elements enter the equation.
Once we get out of this financial rollercoaster, it'd be great if the US (or some country..I'm rooting for Italy) would just bring something big and flashy to the table. An orbital elevator or space railgun for orbital launches, or deep-sea habitats or Shadowrun-style arcologies...something we can all point at and say "Holy shit, we still got it as a species!"
But I suspect we'll be finding ways to incorporate a waffle-iron into our iPhones instead.