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<blockquote data-quote="Matt McIrvin" data-source="post: 12508" data-attributes="member: 590"><p>Computer/information technology has been accelerating, though I wonder if it isn't approaching a plateau (CPU clock speeds have certainly stopped exponentiating).</p><p></p><p>I don't think advances in transportation tech has been speeding up since about 1970, except inasmuch as it's been improved by better computers. In the first two-thirds of the 20th century we went from the Model T and the Wright Brothers to interstate highways, supersonic jetliners and people walking on the Moon. In 2012 we have interstate highways, subsonic jetliners and nobody going beyond low Earth orbit, so in some ways things might have gone backward (though I think a better way to put it is probably that we hit a time of slower growth, and certain ambitious but impractically expensive one-shot projects didn't lead to better things).</p><p></p><p>Interstellar travel by human beings is such a difficult prospect that I'd be hard put to say it can ever happen, much less by 2093. As a science-fiction movie premise you can just stipulate that it did, somehow, and it's fine. The bright side of this is that it makes it that much less likely we have to worry about xenomorphs.</p><p></p><p>Artificial intelligence didn't quite go where people thought it might at midcentury. But the brute power of dumb computers exploded beyond imagination, and some AI-esque things (machine translation, self-driving cars) are sneaking up on us through the back door via the power of massively networked data. So I might actually be a little more bullish about androids than about starships.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Matt McIrvin, post: 12508, member: 590"] Computer/information technology has been accelerating, though I wonder if it isn't approaching a plateau (CPU clock speeds have certainly stopped exponentiating). I don't think advances in transportation tech has been speeding up since about 1970, except inasmuch as it's been improved by better computers. In the first two-thirds of the 20th century we went from the Model T and the Wright Brothers to interstate highways, supersonic jetliners and people walking on the Moon. In 2012 we have interstate highways, subsonic jetliners and nobody going beyond low Earth orbit, so in some ways things might have gone backward (though I think a better way to put it is probably that we hit a time of slower growth, and certain ambitious but impractically expensive one-shot projects didn't lead to better things). Interstellar travel by human beings is such a difficult prospect that I'd be hard put to say it can ever happen, much less by 2093. As a science-fiction movie premise you can just stipulate that it did, somehow, and it's fine. The bright side of this is that it makes it that much less likely we have to worry about xenomorphs. Artificial intelligence didn't quite go where people thought it might at midcentury. But the brute power of dumb computers exploded beyond imagination, and some AI-esque things (machine translation, self-driving cars) are sneaking up on us through the back door via the power of massively networked data. So I might actually be a little more bullish about androids than about starships. [/QUOTE]
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