51 lines
2.2 KiB
Org Mode
51 lines
2.2 KiB
Org Mode
---
|
|
title: Retrospect on Foresight
|
|
author: Chris Hodapp
|
|
date: January 8, 2018
|
|
tags: technobabble, rambling
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
/(Spawned from some idle thoughts around the summer of 2015.)/
|
|
|
|
Why are old technological ideas that were "ahead of their time", but
|
|
which lost out to other ideas, worth studying?
|
|
|
|
We can see them as raw ideas that "modern" understanding never
|
|
refined - misguided fantasies or even just mistakes. The flip side of
|
|
this is that we can see them as ideas that are free of a nearly
|
|
inescapable modern context and all of the preconceptions and blinders
|
|
it carries.
|
|
|
|
In some of these visionaries is a valuable combination:
|
|
|
|
- they're detached from this modern context (by mere virtue of it not
|
|
existing yet),
|
|
- they have considerable experience, imagination, and foresight,
|
|
- they devoted time and effort to work extensively on something and to
|
|
communicate their thoughts, feelings, and analysis in a durable way.
|
|
|
|
To put it in another way: They give us analysis done from a context
|
|
that is long gone. They help us think beyond our current context.
|
|
They help us answer a question, "What if we took a different path
|
|
then?"
|
|
|
|
[[http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html][Epigram #53]] from Alan Perlis offers some relevant skepticism here: "So
|
|
many good ideas are never heard from again once they embark in a
|
|
voyage on the semantic gulf." My interpretation of it is that we tend
|
|
to idolize ideas, old and new, because they sound somehow different,
|
|
innovative, and groundbreaking, but attempts at analysis or practical
|
|
realization of the ideas leads to a bleaker reality, perhaps that the
|
|
idea is completely meaningless (the equivalent of a [[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deepity][deepity]], perhaps),
|
|
wildly impractical, or a mere facade over what is already established.
|
|
|
|
* Examples
|
|
|
|
* Scratch
|
|
|
|
- Douglas Engelbart is perhaps one of the canonical examples of a person
|
|
who was an endless source of these ideas. Ted Nelson arguably is
|
|
another. Alan Turing is an early example widely regarded for his
|
|
foresight.
|
|
- [[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/][As We May Think (Vannevar Bush)]]
|
|
- "Do you remember a time when..." only goes so far.
|