Stark Trek - How far are we?
pookleblinky: I also found Star Trek to be disappointing in its depiction of technological change. It is, at base, little different than all the other sci-fi depictions of housewives in space and Colossal-sized vacuum tube intelligences.It's a common bias to overestimate technological and societal change in the short term, and underestimate them in the long term. Think of those McCarthy-era AI guys promising GAI in a decade: I bet you $100 that their vision for the next 4 decades was surprisingly conservative and unimaginative. The same men who imagined GAI in their lifetimes were most likely the same men who could not imagine the full societal implications of civil rights legislation.I should expect the world in 500 years to be as unimaginable, complex, and alien as the world now is to someone from the 16th century. I hate to make an argument from fictional evidence, but there is no reason at all to prefer a Rodenberry future as opposed to an Egan future. The former is refuted by witnessing how pervasive and tempting it is to anchor future change on the present.If Charlemagne and Shakespeare could understand the future, it's a bad indication for how realistic you are being.