I'd give different answers in different arenas; personal life vs. public politics vs. professional work, for example.
It was clear to me that computers were a Big Deal when I first got involved with them in 1968, and I in fact have worked in the field constantly since then. It's changed a lot, but not exactly surprisingly -- the bandwidth available to residences is the biggest surprise (and such a nice one). By my standards I haven't had to consider "mid-life retraining" into another career, which many people do (although some people might say that going from assembler and BASIC+ to PHP and C++ constituted a similar level of change).
There's also the question of degree of precision of prediction. "Drastic increase in disk and memory sizes" I would have agreed to all along, but putting numbers and dates to it I probably would have been way off (on the low side). Interestingly, the distinction between "disk" and "memory" means nearly exactly the same thing it did then.
The kind of "forseeing" I'm thinking of means I won't be surprised by the classes of things that happen, but I'm not going to have a good clear idea of which exact things will happen or when. Also, there are outside events intruding. 9/11 may have been such an event. A decent asteroid strike would definitely be such an event. Technological changes can count; solid-state electronics might be such an event. Bio-tech or nano-tech would be such an event; and stuff in those areas could start having a major impact on is sometime in the next hundred years (but could be just 5). The collapse of the Atlantic Conveyor, or whatever they formally call that current system, could be such an event.
I think the future shock will die down again as more post-baby-boomers get into executive positions (possibly by creating companies from scratch). Some of us seem to be a lot more flexible than most of us; or maybe it's that the types that end up at the executive level aren't so flexible.
I think of the "forseeable future" stretching out vaguely 50 years. The edges are very blurry and thing, so if somebody said "30 years" and somebody else said "70 years" I wouldn't feel that they were strongly disagreeing with me.
Interesting to think and ramble on about this, anyway, thanks!
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2008-03-20 06:29 pm (UTC)It was clear to me that computers were a Big Deal when I first got involved with them in 1968, and I in fact have worked in the field constantly since then. It's changed a lot, but not exactly surprisingly -- the bandwidth available to residences is the biggest surprise (and such a nice one). By my standards I haven't had to consider "mid-life retraining" into another career, which many people do (although some people might say that going from assembler and BASIC+ to PHP and C++ constituted a similar level of change).
There's also the question of degree of precision of prediction. "Drastic increase in disk and memory sizes" I would have agreed to all along, but putting numbers and dates to it I probably would have been way off (on the low side). Interestingly, the distinction between "disk" and "memory" means nearly exactly the same thing it did then.
The kind of "forseeing" I'm thinking of means I won't be surprised by the classes of things that happen, but I'm not going to have a good clear idea of which exact things will happen or when. Also, there are outside events intruding. 9/11 may have been such an event. A decent asteroid strike would definitely be such an event. Technological changes can count; solid-state electronics might be such an event. Bio-tech or nano-tech would be such an event; and stuff in those areas could start having a major impact on is sometime in the next hundred years (but could be just 5). The collapse of the Atlantic Conveyor, or whatever they formally call that current system, could be such an event.
I think the future shock will die down again as more post-baby-boomers get into executive positions (possibly by creating companies from scratch). Some of us seem to be a lot more flexible than most of us; or maybe it's that the types that end up at the executive level aren't so flexible.
I think of the "forseeable future" stretching out vaguely 50 years. The edges are very blurry and thing, so if somebody said "30 years" and somebody else said "70 years" I wouldn't feel that they were strongly disagreeing with me.
Interesting to think and ramble on about this, anyway, thanks!