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— 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 - as misguided fantasies or just mistakes, even. The flip side of this is that we can see them as ideas that are free of the modern preconceptions that are now nearly inescapable.
In some of these visionaries is a valuable combination:
- a detachment from this context (by mere virtue of it not existing yet),
- the ability to imagine and analyze far beyond the preconceptions that in turn surrounded them,
- the resources and freedom to actually apply this,
- the foresight and sometimes blind luck to have communicated their thoughts, feelings, and analysis in a durable way.
To put it in another way: They gave us analysis in a context that no longer even exists. They help us think beyond our current context. They help us answer a question, "What if we took a different path then?"
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.
- As We May Think (Vannevar Bush)
- However, to quote epigram #53 from Alan Perlis, "So many good ideas are never heard from again once they embark in a voyage on the semantic gulf."
- "Do you remember a time when…" only goes so far.