Asking the wrong questions

Asking the wrong questions
ben-evans.com

I know, it's nitpicking.

I think some of those predictions were pretty spot on.

Part of this phenomenon of even experts unable to predict the new is that often our current technology is capped by our societal understanding of physics. Before the Wrights and other early pioneers, we knew that powered heavier-than-air flying was possible for light things like birds, but weren't sure whether the same applied to large, heavy frames, or how we'd be able to deliver enough power to the machine while keeping the weight down. But after a couple of early success, a vibrant field of haphazard experimentation and serious scientific research opened up, and we learned a lot about aerodynamic lift.

Before the transistor, it was difficult to seriously posit that electricity-powered, non-mechanical computers would be ubiquitous not just to the point of every government and large enterprise having them, but also every single person possessing multiple miniaturized versions on their person. The invention of integrated circuits was a transformational achievement: it enabled us to go from having very scarce computing capacity to having a slight excess, and so new programs emerged to harness that ability to do calculation. VR and AR in turn aren't that transformative yet: they're simply video games where a portion of the input comes from the 'real world'.

Today, we're at a UI/UX/AI/ML crisis, where we have immense computing resources at our disposal and still lack an effective ability to communicate our intent with the machine. We dip down to the ancient metaphor of manipulating a pre-set UI with a pointer like a mouse or our fingers or our eyes, or we have to speak audibly to those within earshot so a microphone can capture our command, ascertain some meaning, then map it to one of many predefined actions. These seem like the dark ages. It's not hard to guess that something revolutionary is going to happen in this arena, and will require actual scientific discoveries to make it possible.

One is the classic hard vs soft sci fi. A classic example in book form is Stranger in a Strange Land reads like a story about 60s boomer hippies from India who meditate and get high and die in an allegory of Jesus, because it is. There's a very thin wrap of search and replace science fiction over that hippie story most famously a giant plot hole where the author wrote in video telephone video conferencing without following up on the hole in the plot generated by being able to see the other party. In comparison, hard sci fi takes into account and weaves a story about the human effects of technology...

The other problem is in the "The authors polled a range of experts". Asking my plumber about theology or my lawyer about physics is obviously dumb, and in pop culture we accept that asking a 50s dude about the 70s is pretty much a waste of time. However in all fields of human activity if you want an intelligent commentary on contemporary computer programming you have to either hatch or grow a contemporary computer programmer. The opinions of a dude in another field from decades ago are only accidentally going to be correct. Regardless who was an expert in automation in the 60s, I'm pretty sure they weren't being asked because they almost certainly didn't have cool authoritarian credentials because the topic wasn't cool enough at that time, so by definition they were talking to the wrong people. The history of many present day trends and concepts shows they were not very cool before they became cool, therefore asking contemporary experts on the topic of cool will mostly not work.