Arthur C Clarke in 1964: "[We] will no longer commute. [We] will communicate."

43 points by firstSpeaker 1 year ago | 11 comments
  • tetris11 1 year ago
    We're inching close to Asimov's Solaria[0] world, where private armies of robots do all the work, the scant humans never meet, preferring to use video calls that set up holographic environments which seamlessly blend the backgrounds of all participants into a cohesive virtual space.

    0 :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_universe#Solaria

    • aduwah 1 year ago
      It would be nice to have that level of luxury
      • 1 year ago
    • bfeist 1 year ago
      Yes, but he failed to predict the lameness that is MS Teams.
      • wkat4242 1 year ago
        True, it is pretty terrible. Like everything Microsoft. It seems like that they always aim for "just not bad enough to make you invest in something third party". Because their stuff all comes as one package that's a very low bar. It's very hard to justify paying for something you're already paying for.

        And they don't seem to be interested in building real top quality UX or performance. Why would they, we buy it anyway. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

        • mnky9800n 1 year ago
          I don't even know what teams is. Chat? Email? Calendar? Msword? It seems to do everything but also sometimes want to open a separate application that does these things too. And I'm not entirely sure where conversations go because I seem to have a million created by other people that all get abandoned at some point. It makes me feel rather stupid that I cannot figure this out. Especially since slack just seems to make sense to me.
        • hughesjj 1 year ago
          I think comparing us to Neanderthals didn't do it justice. Imo it's more like going from single cellular organelle-less life to a full blown human.

          That said, today the "machine brains" we're building are closer to the single cell side of the scale than the human side.

          I like this analogy better because cells never went away -- they just self organized into something greater than their whole, and I'd imagine the same will be (is?) True with 'thinking machines' as well

          • wkat4242 1 year ago
            He didn't foresee the forced return to office, clearly :(
            • db48x 1 year ago
              He was fairly prescient. I started working remotely in 1998, and haven't stopped since.
              • entaloneralie 1 year ago
                He must have read Forster's When The Machine Stops.

                https://wiki.xxiivv.com/docs/machine_stops.txt

                • pvdoom 1 year ago
                  Lol, reading this in a call booth at work sure is something ...
                • phendrenad2 1 year ago
                  1878: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony