
Ask HN: Were we ever future-obsessed as we are now? - gallerdude
It seems like right now we&#x27;re on the major cusp of an AI revolution, but honestly, it seems like were more future obsessed than we&#x27;ve ever been.<p>Is this me just being young? Was the internet boom or smartphone boom the same?
======
mchannon
I'd say we're in many ways less future-obsessed than we used to be, at least
when it comes to the distant future.

You can see numerous examples ranging from magazines dating back to the 1800's
(and before) of all the wacky inventions they pictured denizens of the year
2000 using (rocket packs! nuclear-powered cars! pneumatic transport!), and
what life might be like (through the lens of the time). Readerships enjoyed
and appreciated reading about the future and giving their imaginations fertile
ground to romp.

Futurist was actually a job title.

I think now we're too busy or easily distracted to care much about the
possibilities of the distant future. Most of our thoughts on the subject are
now doom scenarios involving climate change, collision with an asteroid,
running -out- of atmospheric CO2, or the Sun eventually encompassing the
Earth.

Then again, maybe there's just a big opening for someone with the right
marketing skills to fill an unmet need. I think I could be a futurist.

------
wj
Who is we?

I was old enough to have been a young teenager when Netscape was released and
connected to the web via a BBS (already had Usenet) and Trumpet Winsock. I
would say up until 1998 the Internet boom was met with scepticism by the
general public. Most people weren't even chatting on AOL. It wasn't until
broadband became more commonplace (2000?) that I think the general public
became obsessed with the Internet.

As to smartphones the iPhone (specifically the 3G) was the device I had been
waiting most of a decade for after seeing my friend's Palm Pilot with Internet
access in 1999 or 2000. I'm probably old enough that I discount the
"smartphone boom" as I viewed it as the natural progression of existing
technology. Also am slightly disappointed that the original premise of the
iPhone was web apps on the phone through the browser but that quickly was
replaced with native phone apps.

tldr: I think a very small percentage of people are future obsessed about the
AI revolution. In the HN echo chamber it might be more but the majority of
people don't give it a second thought outside of, "NO SIRI! I SAID WHERE
IS..."

I'm not old enough to say but I imagine the magic behind the beginning of
space exploration and the race to the moon could have been the peak of future
obsession.

~~~
veddox
> I think a very small percentage of people are future obsessed about the AI
> revolution. In the HN echo chamber it might be more but the majority of
> people don't give it a second thought outside of, "NO SIRI! I SAID WHERE
> IS..."

Ditto. Outside of HN, I barely ever hear people talking seriously about AI.
Perhaps the OP is more farseeing than I am, but to describe the world as "on
the cusp of an AI revolution" still seems a little farfetched to me.

------
niftich
We were always this future-obsessed. Take electricity, for example, arguably
the most significant innovation of the late 1800s. In 1883 Darmstadt
University of Technology, MIT, and Cornell started teaching Electrical
Engineering as a distinct field of study. In 1889 at the expo in Paris (now-
famous for the Eiffel Tower which debuted at this fair), there was a large
pavilion with various machines [1][2] including electrically-powered moving
platforms suspended from the ceiling that shuttled visitors across from the
mezzanines [3]. Two years later in 1891 there was an expo held in Frankfurt
specifically on electrical technology [4], where several electrical
innovations were demonstrated, and two years later at the 1893 Chicago world's
fair, there was even more electric features, including motors, generators,
lamps, spotlights, and the whole fair was illuminated by electricity [5].

This is, of course, the same time period featured in the xkcd titled 'The Pace
of Modern Life' [6], which takes contemporary newspaper quotes lamenting that
people are always in a hurry and rarely stop to greet strangers and instead
spend their commutes on the trains with their noses buried in newspapers,
showing that today's critiques about people lost in their smartphones are more
than a century old.

So yeah, I'd say we've always been obsessed with the future.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines#/media/Fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines#/media/File:Interior_of_exhibition_building,_Exposition_Universal,_Paris,_France.jpg)
[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines#/media/Fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines#/media/File:Galerie_des_machines._Les_ponts_roulants.jpg)
[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Electrotechnical...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Electrotechnical_Exhibition)
[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Columbian_Exposition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Columbian_Exposition)
[6] [https://xkcd.com/1227/](https://xkcd.com/1227/)

------
zubat
There's always something to anticipate around the corner, because the future
is actively marketed to you. Oftentimes this marketing precedes the actual
goods being of value - for example, VR went through a hype cycle circa
1990-1995, then disappeared for a while, because it really just wasn't doing
very much yet, back then - and the headset and motion sensing tech was
conflated into the onrush of CGI imagery, interactive 3D scenes, digital
video, and internet technology. Most of that stuck around and consequently
became ordinary. When the technology is actually the future, it becomes
pervasive and ordinary very quickly. When it's a hype bubble, it crashes after
a while and a bunch of companies fail.

That was the dot-com bubble: even though the internet was a big deal, pets.com
and Webvan were not viable internet companies as they took on something the
ecosystem wasn't ready for. They did, however, anticipate, and market to, a
future where their business became viable, in the form of today's Amazon.
1990's Amazon was purely a bookseller, and perpetually viewed as sitting on a
knife-edge.

Now we have a second hype cycle for VR, and while it's much better stuff this
time, that doesn't mean it's actually the future. The hype around AI is
similar. There was hype over previous AI techniques, too: expert systems, for
example, had a period in the 80's where they were promised to do everything,
assuming "everything" meant encoding a huge decision tree. Now it's the neural
networks that will do "everything". NN also had a hype cycle in the 90's, but
without the data and computational power, they weren't able to achieve the
results we're getting today.

Developments in AI today are enumerated in achievements that become banal
moments after you first hear of them: Watson beat a Jeopardy! champion.
AlphaGo beat a top-level Go player. We can detect cats in images. Cars can
self-drive a course better than trained race-car drivers. And so on.

It's good to be excited about the future. The marketing hype is not evil, it's
necessary - it creates a dialogue, focusing people to think in terms of new
technology. It's not the same as its realization, which tends to be more of a
"one morning I woke up and realized I was in the future" self-reflection.

~~~
babyrainbow
Fantastic comment.

> The marketing hype is not evil, it's necessary - it creates a dialogue,
> focusing people to think in terms of new technology

Why do you think marketing hype is necessary, and it is not evil. Our most
important breakthroughs happened at a time of little marketing hype.

A curious mind is a curious mind without needing to hype it up.

~~~
veddox
> Our most important breakthroughs happened at a time of little marketing
> hype.

I think what he meant was that a marketing hype pushes more people to get to
grips with a new technology, and thus speeds up its development. The actual
technology obviously has to have been invented (the breakthrough was there)
but the hype pushes it further towards maturity.

------
buckbova
Late thirties here, I expected we'd be in flying cars and live in big glass
bubbles by now. Technology is moving fast but still too slow for my taste.

And basically I feel like that's it for my lifetime. There will be incremental
changes from here on out. I really hope I'm wrong though and some huge
breakthrough in energy or astrophysics or biology or whatever knocks me on my
ass.

~~~
FullMtlAlcoholc
The average driver having access to flying cars sounds like a nightmare. Let's
perfect self driving cars first before my klutz of a niece has access to
flying missiles.

~~~
babyrainbow
If we have flying cars, we might not need to perfect self driving. Because
autopilot for planes exisit....

~~~
FullMtlAlcoholc
Yes. However, airplanes also need help from a multi-billion dollar agency,
schedules planned far in advance, propogation of delayed or early arriving
flights throughout the whole system, scores of ground and tower air traffic
controllers to assist in taking off, landing, taxiing, and mid-air collisions,
and the pilots, I imagine, need to learn a voluminous amount of laws,
regulations, signals, etc.

Assuming flying cars travel at the roughly same altitude as helicopters, even
if I didn't take all of the above into account, I have serious doubts as to
whether autopilot could handle flying through Manhattan by itself.

There do exist personal flying devices for the ultra-rich. But if you look at
how inefficient our current system is and try to put as many planes in the sky
as there are cars on the ground....not looking good.

Plus, imagine you live in NYC or LA. You'd barely get any sunlight on the
ground with all the planes in the air. I thought flying cars would be cool
too. Then I looked at traffic conditions in LA and said "If this is the best
we can do on the ground, then I don't want to see flying cars in my lifetime.
The Futurama tube looks much more practical."

~~~
babyrainbow
I was thinking about something like antigravity..So cars can have six degrees
of freedom...So no need to take off/land in the conventional sense...I believe
movies like Blade Runner and Fifth element featured cars like that.

In that case, manual driving will be mostly like sailing a ship. Equipped with
a gps, the car can maintain a course. And with a radar with a sufficient
range, it can alert incoming bogies so that user can take proper action...

------
fitzwatermellow
William Gibson stated his famous maxim about the future already being here way
back in 1990. Just last week, Lagos, Nigeria celebrated its own "Startup
Week". Currently there are over 2000 technology accelerators spanning the
globe. But the "future" you and I are living in barely appears in the halcyon
dreams of the vast majority of Earth's citizens!

Stanford economist Paul Romer once theorized that breakthrough technologies
don't really become productive for a generation. That lag time has shrunk to
about a decade.

So instead of obsessing over the "vertical" invention, think about what it
means to solve the "horizontal" problem. That in less than ten years time,
something you take for granted today could be at the fingertips of 4B+ people
;)

~~~
FullMtlAlcoholc
The future as depicted in various fictional sci-fi works is more or less here.
Rail guns, check. Autonomous killing machines are not quite there, but the
unmanned ones are becoming ubiquitous. VR, check. New, synthetic drugs
appearing with increased frequency, check. Self driving cars, check. Advanced
gene editing techniques, check. Elon Musk promised us interplanetary
spaceships by 2020. The only staples of sci-fi missing are aliens, AGI, and
sustainable fusion.

Gibson said it best. "The future is already here, it's just unevenly
distributed."

------
carsongross
_> It seems like right now we're on the major cusp of an AI revolution_

It seemed like that in 1980, as well, and then this happened:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter)

I make no predictions around AI, although I'm skeptical it will work well
outside of specialized, rules-heavy environments. Been wrong before, happy to
be wrong again.

My sense is we are less future-obsessed than people were in the 1950's, during
the blow-off top of the atomic age. People seem more concerned with the
environment, sustainability and so forth, Moore's law is slowly grinding to a
halt and technical innovation, in general, has slowed down.

Culture churn has definitely increased since the 90's, however. I attribute
this to us finding ourselves at the end of modernism and post-modernism, with
nothing left to deconstruct, strip away, transgress or mock. This, coupled
with the internet, is leading to a blow off top in culturally combinatorial
attempts to avoid a return to tradition (unthinkable) or facing up to end-
state nihilism (unbearable).

It's not all bad:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/NewRetroWave](https://www.youtube.com/user/NewRetroWave)

------
fuqted
I feel like now is a the first time in a long time where the emerging
technologies of today are looking to have a dramatic impact in the near
future, and this probably gives birth to a lot of people thinking about
tomorrow. I think this is a good thing.

Peter Thiel talks about this in his book, which was published in 2014, saying
the 60's was the last time people were optimistic about tomorrow, illustrated
by the professions people were getting into.

That was two years ago and I feel like two years later we're just starting to
see the proverbial jet packs at the end of the tunnel. To start I'm sure
that's bound to have more people entering machine learning rather than web
development

------
tracker1
I'm still waiting for my flying car... It's well after the year 2000 and I was
promised flying cars!

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzm6pvHPSGo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzm6pvHPSGo)

------
hacker66
Look at the movie 2001 released in 1968. Commercial space flights. A full AI.
Living on the moon. And people pretty much thought all that was inevitable (so
disappointed it didn't happen). To me this point in time seems less future
obsessed.

------
tarancato
Are we future obsessed? I am not.

~~~
veddox
I think in general, as a society, we are. Although as other posters have
pointed out, our "future" has shrunk from trying to predict the next 100 years
to predicting the next 10.

~~~
flukus
I go a step further and say we're still trying to predict the last 10.

