Ask HN: Were we ever future-obsessed as we are now?

Re:Ask HN: Were we ever future-obsessed as we are now? by fitzwatermellow on Friday October 07, 2016 @06:39PM (#12664479)

William Gibson stated his famous maxim about the future already being here way back in 1990. Just last week, Lagos, Nigeria celebrated its own "Startup Week". Currently there are over 2000 technology accelerators spanning the globe. But the "future" you and I are living in barely appears in the halcyon dreams of the vast majority of Earth's citizens!

Stanford economist Paul Romer once theorized that breakthrough technologies don't really become productive for a generation. That lag time has shrunk to about a decade.

So instead of obsessing over the "vertical" invention, think about what it means to solve the "horizontal" problem. That in less than ten years time, something you take for granted today could be at the fingertips of 4B+ people ;)

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Re:Ask HN: Were we ever future-obsessed as we are now? by FullMtlAlcoholc on Friday October 07, 2016 @08:05PM (#12664857)

The future as depicted in various fictional sci-fi works is more or less here. Rail guns, check. Autonomous killing machines are not quite there, but the unmanned ones are becoming ubiquitous. VR, check. New, synthetic drugs appearing with increased frequency, check. Self driving cars, check. Advanced gene editing techniques, check. Elon Musk promised us interplanetary spaceships by 2020. The only staples of sci-fi missing are aliens, AGI, and sustainable fusion.

Gibson said it best. "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."

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