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Comment by socalgal2

10 months ago

My biggest issue with most scifi now-a-days is it ignores the acceleration of tech. Of course there's "Accelerando" and "Marooned in Realtime" but lots of scifi has "race/society X has been doing Y for 1000s of years" and now I immediately tune out because no society is going to remain static enough to do Y for thousands of years unless there is some premise in the book preventing anyone from inventing anything new.

"Tales of Alvin Maker" had that. "Dune" did too but I didn't buy Dune's excuse because militaries always want new tech.

This is also one of the many reasons why I can't buy into Star Wars anymore because a society that can make droids can make droids that make droids which means they have the means make everything cheap and abundant. That they don't is just bad writing. The writers didn't think through the implications of their world building. Of course I get that Star Wars isn't hard sci-fi. It's fantasy sci-fi, hence we have droids that scream and get tortured ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

On the other hand, my first ride in a Waymo reminded me of the optimisim I used to feel about the future like when the Jetsons promised us moving sidewalks, flying cars, robot maids, etc..

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socalgal2

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Night_Thastus  10 months ago

We don't know how technological acceleration will continue into the future. We may start hitting very hard physical/chemical/material limits that make further progress hard, resulting in progress becoming more logarithmic in growth.

Or, there's always the potential for war and decline. Advanced civilizations have risen before, then crumbled and lost a lot of their technology. The same could happen on a larger scale.