Forum Overview :: Rants :: Futurists

[quote name="Fussbett"]I always side with the pessimistic view as default, and it's not because I'm a nihilist and I listen to music that is WAY too angry and obscure for you to understand. It's because I'm an optimist and a casual sci-fi fan. Those novels and movies got my hopes up for years and years, and I've been burned. Worse, it became depressing to read story after story about starships set in the 1990s. As I pointed out in my <a href="http://www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?action=viewPost&pid=51549">Forever War review</a> and again when I read the stupid <a href="http://www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?action=viewPost&pid=14961">Right to Read</a>, futurists are fucking terrible at predicting things. Jim Morrison predicted music would eventually be made by just one musician and his machines. [youtube id=onnAzHz02Q8] So he's in the lead, tied with Arthur C. Clark who thought up satellites. Of course Jim said "five years" from 1970, so even there he was being way too aggressive. Robert Heinlein predicted televised super-preachers but then loses a million points for talking dogs casually mentioned in Starship Troopers. On the flipside was a co-worker friend of mine back at the post office. He said that medical technology was advancing so rapidly that he wasn't going to stop smoking or binge drinking, since surely by the time he was 40 (20 years away) they would have routine lung and liver transplants. So why worry? Now that's faith. He never read sci-fi. In related news, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#2020-2070" target="kurz">even Kurzweil agrees with me that 2015 is too soon for a computer to pass the Turing Test</a>.[/quote]