One of the great amusements of my life is looking at how technology was portrayed in the past.
It's fun because it's usually wrong. The issues are portrayed, but views of the future are always locked inside their own time.
Take computers, for instance.
Information is at the heart of most business processes, and the inefficiency of this process sparked many of our great dystopic visions. Those untold rows of desks in Metropolis are based on the same false assumptions about the future which marked Marxism and Luddism. A refusal to see problems for what they are, namely a business opportunity.
The first assumption with any new technology's introduction is that it will concentrate wealth and leave people impoverished. This was also true for computers. Even an innocent movie like Desk Set, perhaps the least-known Tracy-Hepburn romance, was driven by the idea that a computer Tracy sold for Hepburn's network research department would leave her without a job.
It's silly, naive. More never leads to less. More leads to more.
When computers were becoming microprocessors, 40 years ago, few believed today's abundance of computing resources was even possible. Digital Equipment CEO Ken Olsen notably questioned whether every home would ever need a PC, but my home today has 7 dedicated, general purpose PCs in it. And most everything else here is computerized, designed by computers, absolutely infected with them.
Your home is probably the same way.
Just as computers in our time eased the fears of a previous generation, so manufacturing transformed the world before that. Each generation's breakthroughs end the previous one's nightmares, and are built on top of that previous generation's breakthroughs.
That's why dreams are important.
Dreams like the original Star Trek series and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 brought the possibilities of computer control to the American mind. They inspired my generation. But when I was a teenager I could not believe I would make my life around computers. Most of my Rice classmates have made their careers in this field. We're all a little surprised at just how profitable it has been.
It happened because of innovations that took place while we were in school. Ethernet. Arpanet. The microprocessor. Souls for new machines.
It's happening again.
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