A couple of cool things
First, Isaac Asimov wrote about the 2014 World's Fair after attending the 1964 World's Fair.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html
My blatherings on it....
It's amusing, the way that fiction writers writing about the near future are always both right and wrong. This week I did my annual pilgrimage to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, and was contemplating what was on my person while I flew to Washington: iPhone 4S, Nintendo DS with the New York Times Crossword puzzle game, a Nook tablet with my Bujold/Vorkosigan collection, and my MacBook Air. Plus a class text book and a paperback, and my Bose Quiet Comfort noise-cancellling headphones, which really need to be serviced. Compared to eight years years ago when I flew to Ohio with my wife for my father-in-law's funeral, when the only electronics were the Bose headphones, my much heavier laptop, and a non-smart phone.
I'm just a bit over half a century old, and I can remember the '60s and what a lot of life was like back then, and I can reflect on differences, and they're not that numerous. We have home computers, and they'll continue to evolve at an insane rate. Asimov was totally off-base when he thought everyone would be a computer programmer, instead everyone is a media consumer and a small number of us are actually programmers. And that's fine. The kitchen is largely unchanged, we have niftier gadgets and microwave ovens, but fundamentally food prep has not changed in those 50 years except for a spiffier range of ingredients and spices. Cars are improved, but it's been incremental, not evolutionary, steps until you get to cars like the Tesla and the Prius. And they're still the minority, and still not self-driving, though that's visible in the hopefully not-too-distant future. I'm hopeful that it will come soon, I have a friend with epilepsy, and while it's mostly controlled, she probably shouldn't do a lot of driving and a self-driving car would be an amazing thing for her.
In that half century we've seen huge scientific advances, mostly tied to the space program, militarization, and advances in computers. And they do benefit mankind. We've also seen advances in economics, allowing us to better fleece our fellow peeps. And advances in industrialization that let us do all sorts of things that are simultaneously both bane and boon.
So a lot seems like 'the more things change, the more they stay the same.'
While on the subject of the future of computers from the perspective of the past, this interview with computer pioneer Alan Kay was really good. He was a researcher at Xerox PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, that brought us more inventions that benefited computing than I'll ever be able to name or count. His biggest disappointment with what they wanted to do back in the '70s and '80s compared to what became reality was the iPad and Android tablets. The fault is in the DRM preventing sharing, not in the tablets themselves.
http://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with-computing-pioneer-alan-kay/
And finally, how about a full-size replica of the Starship Enterprise, built in downtown Las Vegas? It came down to one person and one meeting to being reality, and that person said 'no' and killed the project. Very sad.
http://www.thegoddardgroup.com/blog/index.php/now-it-can-be-told-the-star-trek-attraction-that-almost-came-to-life-in-1992/
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html
My blatherings on it....
It's amusing, the way that fiction writers writing about the near future are always both right and wrong. This week I did my annual pilgrimage to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, and was contemplating what was on my person while I flew to Washington: iPhone 4S, Nintendo DS with the New York Times Crossword puzzle game, a Nook tablet with my Bujold/Vorkosigan collection, and my MacBook Air. Plus a class text book and a paperback, and my Bose Quiet Comfort noise-cancellling headphones, which really need to be serviced. Compared to eight years years ago when I flew to Ohio with my wife for my father-in-law's funeral, when the only electronics were the Bose headphones, my much heavier laptop, and a non-smart phone.
I'm just a bit over half a century old, and I can remember the '60s and what a lot of life was like back then, and I can reflect on differences, and they're not that numerous. We have home computers, and they'll continue to evolve at an insane rate. Asimov was totally off-base when he thought everyone would be a computer programmer, instead everyone is a media consumer and a small number of us are actually programmers. And that's fine. The kitchen is largely unchanged, we have niftier gadgets and microwave ovens, but fundamentally food prep has not changed in those 50 years except for a spiffier range of ingredients and spices. Cars are improved, but it's been incremental, not evolutionary, steps until you get to cars like the Tesla and the Prius. And they're still the minority, and still not self-driving, though that's visible in the hopefully not-too-distant future. I'm hopeful that it will come soon, I have a friend with epilepsy, and while it's mostly controlled, she probably shouldn't do a lot of driving and a self-driving car would be an amazing thing for her.
In that half century we've seen huge scientific advances, mostly tied to the space program, militarization, and advances in computers. And they do benefit mankind. We've also seen advances in economics, allowing us to better fleece our fellow peeps. And advances in industrialization that let us do all sorts of things that are simultaneously both bane and boon.
So a lot seems like 'the more things change, the more they stay the same.'
While on the subject of the future of computers from the perspective of the past, this interview with computer pioneer Alan Kay was really good. He was a researcher at Xerox PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, that brought us more inventions that benefited computing than I'll ever be able to name or count. His biggest disappointment with what they wanted to do back in the '70s and '80s compared to what became reality was the iPad and Android tablets. The fault is in the DRM preventing sharing, not in the tablets themselves.
http://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with-computing-pioneer-alan-kay/
And finally, how about a full-size replica of the Starship Enterprise, built in downtown Las Vegas? It came down to one person and one meeting to being reality, and that person said 'no' and killed the project. Very sad.
http://www.thegoddardgroup.com/blog/index.php/now-it-can-be-told-the-star-trek-attraction-that-almost-came-to-life-in-1992/