Comment by profsummergig
5 months ago
Computers could hardly do anything back then. Mostly backend data processing.
Yet this speech could have been written today.
Intriguing.
5 months ago
Computers could hardly do anything back then. Mostly backend data processing.
Yet this speech could have been written today.
Intriguing.
Neuromancer was published only half a year later.
Or take The Machine Stops from 1909.
People act like you need a petaflop for something to be useful. The US census of 1890 would have been impossible to complete before the next one started without puchcard machines. One may as well say the information age arrived then. Anyone with basic numeracy and imagination could imagine what the future held at that point.
> Anyone with basic numeracy and imagination could imagine what the future held at that point.
Yet most of us (myself included) are in denial (willful or just delusional) about what AI is going to do.
Similar to Guy Debord in The Society of Spectacle, what he wrote witnessing the beginning of TV and mass cinema applies for us in 2025, 100 fold
I just looked up the Wiki page for the book. Prescient.
Data processing by itself was a major leap in productivity.
My city ran its payroll on a single computer with 64KB of RAM. This would have required weeks of work from a whole team of bureaucrats.
I remember armies of "stenographers" and "bookkeepers" in the central areas of office buildings.