How To See The Future

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14314

by ryannielsen • 14 years ago

60 9 14 years ago

EliRivers• 14 years ago

"Use the rear view mirror to imagine telling someone just twenty five years ago about GPS."

People _did_ tell each other about GPS twenty five years ago. Twenty five years ago it was a decade old working navigational system. Some of the ubiquitous futuristic technology we have is older than one might think.

patdennis• 14 years ago

While the ideas behind it were developed much earlier, GPS didn't become fully operational until 1995 [1].

It's also worth noting, on the other hand, that the (not yet fully operational) system was used during the first Gulf War. [2]

[1] http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/gpsinfo.html The U.S. Air Force Space Command (AFSC) formally declared the GPS satellite constellation as having met the requirement for Full Operational Capability (FOC) as of April 27, 1995.

[2] http://www.gpsnavigatormagazine.com/gps-at-war.html

keeptrying• 14 years ago

This is a corollary to the fact that the software in your head wasn't written by you. Ie you see more with your brain than with your eyes.

Artists call this color blindness. Ask a newbie painter to paint the color of the sky. And then ask them to take it outside and compare it to the real sky. Pretty different huh.

A large part of this normalcy field is due to marketing. Things need to look and feel somewhat familiar so that they can be sold.

001sky2• 14 years ago

There are a lot of colors in white

001sky2• 14 years ago

This is an interesting piece. Its true that today's weapons are designed to fight yesterday's wars. Today, we have new problems, our current weapons don't make these problems go away. In tech, this is a little bit of "standing on the shoulders of giants". etc

This argument arguably scales to life itself. When you are a kid you want to be tall. When you are a teen (and you're tall) you want to be independent. When you are independent your single (want an SO). When you get an SO, you want a house. Etc.

smashing• 14 years ago

I have an easy method to see the future. In fact it is so effective it works 100% of the time without fail. I will teach you my method if you read a little further.

Here it is:

Wait.

T_S_• 14 years ago

As a corollary to this, keep your eyes on relative prices, incentives and human nature. Dull be highly effective.

What technology does is send some the prices of some actions from infinity to nearly zero. Meanwhile humans remain pretty much unchanged.

squonk• 14 years ago

For 10 years I've been driving home from work in Silicon Valley thinking, "I am living in the future."

eslachance• 14 years ago

Not what I was expecting from the title but nevertheless, this is something I've been trying to tell my wife for so long now... The advances that we make ever day on this planet are so immense, so life changing, that "life changing" has become... routine.

People love to look at today and say "Where are the flying cars? Where are the meal pills and the Mars colonies?", completely overlooking mobile phones, microwaves, GPS and fiber-optic worldwide communication.

It's a shame really, that the "masses" simply don't see this and keep on living their lives like there's nothing to it.

How To See The Future

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