> A few weeks ago I commented on some thread about robot maids and such. My point was and is that when we picture a far off idea that we suspect is coming (AI, VR, human-less hotel-resorts) we need mental placeholders where people go now. Technology tends to replace people in the way reddit replaces librarians but we can’t picture reddit in advance until the world wide web or something similar exists. So, flying cars, robot mades and sexy female AIs. They’re placeholders for future automation or changes that make the need go away rather then meeting the need.
That's an incredibly interesting point. I've never seen 'future' technology like that before, but it's certainly an excellent analogy. Looking back to how people saw the future in the 20th century, you can see that many things did not come to exist in the way they were imagined, but do exist now in some other fashion.
It's incredibly difficult to predict what will be the next reddit, or the next anything. It remains to be seen if/when VR will take off, and how it will differ as we see it right now. Certainly what's interesting is that we're watching our VR dreams being turned into tangible products that can bring real VR experiences.