re: #89 Blind Frog Belly White

It’s instructive to look at the ‘Computers take over the world’ genre over the last 50 years. They’ve gone from “Gigantic mainframe computer becomes sentient and takes over the world” to “Sentient AI develops on the Innertubes and takes over the world”, entirely because of the development of the PC and internet, which wasn’t imagined by the folks who were writing even 30 years ago (think Terminator)

I see it as part of the “Dude, Where’s My Flying Car” phenomenon, where most folks trying to imagine the future extrapolate from the wrong trends.

Case in point, the endless predictions of the 50s that nuclear power would be widespread and replace much of the common forms of energy generation. Hell, the Big Three each looked at the idea of introducing nuclear power to automobiles, such that Ford built a mock-up and told the press about the idea of swapping out reactors whenever they needed refueling or had issues.