
Kevin Kelly on Soft Singularity and Inevitable Tech Advances - t23
http://www.newsweek.com/kevin-kelly-soft-singularity-advances-we-cant-stop-465914
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cgriswald
"I think there's many, many other second- and third-order disruptions that
will come from having self-driving cars. For instance, what are we going to do
in the car if we're not driving it? There's this whole time slot that suddenly
opens up."

Unless it's a cure for car sickness, I'll be spending that time looking out
the window.

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Aelinsaar
I find it hard to believe that VR/AR won't have solved that by then, so yes,
you should have both a cure for motion sickness and a means to be entertained
in the same package.

~~~
svantana
That's actually a cool application of VR/AR that I haven't heard of before --
having your GUIs on a 'virtual steadicam', which should (in theory) have a
similar effect to looking out the window, while allowing people to get work
done.

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allworknoplay
| went on to found WELL, an early, hugely influential online community.

Is Kevin Kelly just rewriting history now? I was a kid at the time and have
only second-hand knowledge through aging hippies I used to know, but pretty
sure he was brand's employee, and had heard that brand was the driving force.
As someone who's been written out of the story of my own startup by a sad
narcissist, this stuff really irks me.

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sgt101
I loved the observation about a visitor from 1970 to 2016 : wow what a cool
thing in your pocket; the internet is amazing; TV's are huge; cars are
slightly better; people survive cancer better; you're all much richer. I don't
subscribe to the "there's no breakthrough technology vibe" but the difference
between 50 years and 100 years of technology seems quite striking (in 1916
there were a handful of military aircraft and telephony was relatively rare).
Perhaps the trope about needing three generations of management to fully
exploit technology and innovation (rejectionists, adopters but confused, full
on believers) is true? 20-25 years per generation?

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pmontra
> I see an opportunity where people will start charging to watch an ad,
> charging to read someone's email, charging to see this thing.

In some way we're already doing that. Companies that don't get our attention
spend time money to reach to us with no return. But those money don't get to
us.

To be paid to receive means that part of those money should go to the
recipient, which requires to link the recipient to a bank account or
equivalent, so to a verified identity.

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legulere
I don't share the optimism.

> They're [dystopias] traumatic and dramatic, but they don't last very long
> because they blow themselves out, and they blow themselves up.

People actually just get used to them. North korea exists since over half a
century already. Even our western societies have dystopian qualities that we
now just accept.

