A point that shows up in some of my writing. e.g.:
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I'm not going to try to convince you that the foreseeable future is a wondrous place: either you accept the implications of the present rate of technological progress towards everything allowed by the laws of physics, in which case you’ve probably thought this all through at some point, or you don't. Life, space travel, artificial intelligence, the building blocks of matter: we’ll have made large inroads into bending these all to our will within another half century. Many of us will live to see it even without the benefits of medical technologies yet to come: growing up without the internet in a 1960s or 1970s urban area will be the new 1900s farmboy youth come 2040. Just like the oldest old today, we will be immigrants from a strange and primitive near-past erased by progress, time travelers in our own lifetimes.
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But fundamentally the issue is that most people live in the world of their parents and grandparents, their [views] shaped by what has happened to people who did not have access to the technologies that will exist in 20 or 40 or 60 years time. [People] expect the course of life they have seen happen already to those they know best, not the course of life that is possible with [technologies] that will be developed over the next couple of decades.
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I'm not going to try to convince you that the foreseeable future is a wondrous place: either you accept the implications of the present rate of technological progress towards everything allowed by the laws of physics, in which case you’ve probably thought this all through at some point, or you don't. Life, space travel, artificial intelligence, the building blocks of matter: we’ll have made large inroads into bending these all to our will within another half century. Many of us will live to see it even without the benefits of medical technologies yet to come: growing up without the internet in a 1960s or 1970s urban area will be the new 1900s farmboy youth come 2040. Just like the oldest old today, we will be immigrants from a strange and primitive near-past erased by progress, time travelers in our own lifetimes.
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But fundamentally the issue is that most people live in the world of their parents and grandparents, their [views] shaped by what has happened to people who did not have access to the technologies that will exist in 20 or 40 or 60 years time. [People] expect the course of life they have seen happen already to those they know best, not the course of life that is possible with [technologies] that will be developed over the next couple of decades.