

How To See The Future - ryannielsen
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14314

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EliRivers
"Use the rear view mirror to imagine telling someone just twenty five years
ago about GPS."

People _did_ tell each other about GPS twenty five years ago. Twenty five
years ago it was a decade old working navigational system. Some of the
ubiquitous futuristic technology we have is older than one might think.

~~~
patdennis
While the ideas behind it were developed much earlier, GPS didn't become fully
operational until 1995 [1].

It's also worth noting, on the other hand, that the (not yet fully
operational) system was used during the first Gulf War. [2]

[1] <http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/gpsinfo.html> _The U.S. Air Force Space
Command (AFSC) formally declared the GPS satellite constellation as having met
the requirement for Full Operational Capability (FOC) as of April 27, 1995._

[2] <http://www.gpsnavigatormagazine.com/gps-at-war.html>

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T_S_
As a corollary to this, keep your eyes on relative prices, incentives and
human nature. Dull be highly effective.

What technology does is send some the prices of some actions from infinity to
nearly zero. Meanwhile humans remain pretty much unchanged.

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eslachance
Not what I was expecting from the title but nevertheless, this is something
I've been trying to tell my wife for so long now... The advances that we make
ever day on this planet are so immense, so life changing, that "life changing"
has become... routine.

People love to look at today and say "Where are the flying cars? Where are the
meal pills and the Mars colonies?", completely overlooking mobile phones,
microwaves, GPS and fiber-optic worldwide communication.

It's a shame really, that the "masses" simply don't see this and keep on
living their lives like there's nothing to it.

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smashing
I have an easy method to see the future. In fact it is so effective it works
100% of the time without fail. I will teach you my method if you read a little
further.

Here it is:

Wait.

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keeptrying
This is a corollary to the fact that the software in your head wasn't written
by you. Ie you see more with your brain than with your eyes.

Artists call this color blindness. Ask a newbie painter to paint the color of
the sky. And then ask them to take it outside and compare it to the real sky.
Pretty different huh.

A large part of this normalcy field is due to marketing. Things need to look
and feel somewhat familiar so that they can be sold.

~~~
001sky
There are a _lot_ of colors in white

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squonk
For 10 years I've been driving home from work in Silicon Valley thinking, "I
am living in the future."

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001sky
This is an interesting piece. Its true that today's weapons are designed to
fight yesterday's wars. Today, we have new problems, our current weapons don't
make these problems go away. In tech, this is a little bit of "standing on the
shoulders of giants". etc

This argument arguably scales to life itself. When you are a kid you want to
be tall. When you are a teen (and you're tall) you want to be independent.
When you are independent your single (want an SO). When you get an SO, you
want a house. Etc.

