
How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future - Anon84
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/03/how-the-simulmatics-corporation-invented-the-future
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LyndsySimon
I would love to see a follow-up to this in the form of an interview with
someone (or as many people who are still alive) who worked behind the scenes
at Simulmatics. The events in the article happened 61 years ago, so it’s
entirely possible that some of their more junior people could still be alive.
They would be in their 80s or 90s, and time is rapidly running out for such a
story.

I’m 36. It’s striking to me how much has changed in my professional lifetime
already - we’ve gone from rumors of data-based marketing causing issues for
other companies to it being embedded in everything we do. A/B testing is
fundamental to feature development at every successful company I’ve
experienced in the past decade.

While the election of 1960 was before my time, it seems like fairly recent
history to me. To realize that it’s closer to the Wright brothers’ first
flight at Kitty Hawk than to the present day is disconcerting. I can’t begin
to imagine what the future holds sixty years from now. Subjectively, it seems
like the velocity of the societal impact of technology continues to increase.
I’ve seen the rise of social media (MySpace, Facebook, Google+, and countless
others that have failed). Sitting here today I see the only survivor of that -
Facebook - increasingly as a legacy network that appears strong on its
surface, but precariously so. I fully expect something new to hit the scene
that steals the limelight and turns Facebook into a ghost town. Each time that
has happened in the past the new platform has fundamentally changed the way we
interact with others, both virtually and in person.

We look at the current state of technology with different eyes than our
predecessors. The “People Machine” described in the article is almost
certainly possible today. It exists in various forms at Facebook, Google,
Apple, Amazon, the NSA... We see each of those implementations as limited
because we have perspective on how they could be made to be more powerful and
a better understanding of how models are limited by the purpose for which they
are created. Our dystopian fiction today takes the dystopian fiction of the
1960s as a starting condition.

