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— title: Retrospect on Foresight author: Chris Hodapp date: January 8, 2018 tags:
- technobabble
- rambling
draft: true —
(Spawned from some idle thoughts around 2015-07-25.)
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?"
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 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.
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Engelbart: http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/
- 'The problem with saying that Engelbart "invented hypertext", or "invented video conferencing", is that you are attempting to make sense of the past using references to the present. "Hypertext" is a word that has a particular meaning for us today. By saying that Engelbart invented hypertext, you ascribe that meaning to Engelbart's work. Almost any time you interpret the past as "the present, but cruder", you end up missing the point. But in the case of Engelbart, you miss the point in spectacular fashion.'
- "If you truly want to understand NLS, you have to forget today. Forget everything you think you know about computers. Forget that you think you know what a computer is. Go back to 1962. And then read his intent."
- As We May Think (Vannevar Bush)
- "Do you remember a time when…" only goes so far.
- Buckminster Fuller