44 lines
1.7 KiB
Org Mode
44 lines
1.7 KiB
Org Mode
---
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title: Retrospect on Foresight
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author: Chris Hodapp
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date: January 8, 2018
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tags: technobabble, rambling
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---
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/(Spawned from some idle thoughts around the summer of 2015.)/
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Why are old technological ideas that were "ahead of their time", but
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which lost out to other ideas, worth studying?
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We can see them as raw ideas that "modern" understanding never
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refined - as misguided fantasies or just mistakes, even. The flip
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side of this is that we can see them as ideas that are free of the
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modern preconceptions that are now nearly inescapable.
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In some of these visionaries is a valuable combination:
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- a detachment from this context (by mere virtue of it not existing
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yet),
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- the ability to imagine and analyze far beyond the preconceptions
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that in turn surrounded them,
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- the resources and freedom to actually apply this,
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- the foresight and sometimes blind luck to have communicated their
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thoughts, feelings, and analysis in a durable way.
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To put it in another way: They gave us analysis in a context that no
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longer even exists. They help us think beyond our current context.
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They help us answer a question, "What if we took a different path
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then?"
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* Scratch
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- Douglas Engelbart is perhaps one of the canonical examples of a person
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who was an endless source of these ideas. Ted Nelson arguably is
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another. Alan Turing is an early example widely regarded for his
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foresight.
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- [[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/][As We May Think (Vannevar Bush)]]
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- However, to quote [[http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html][epigram #53]] from Alan Perlis, "So many good ideas
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are never heard from again once they embark in a voyage on the
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semantic gulf."
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- "Do you remember a time when..." only goes so far.
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