re: #82 Romantic Heretic

I heard the exact same thing from a computer science PhD in the mid-70s when I asked him about the PCs (that is Apple IIs, PETs and TRS80s) coming onto market.

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.