steerpike opened this issue on Nov 25, 2004 ยท 42 posts
ockham posted Thu, 25 November 2004 at 4:48 PM
"Even on the subject of technology, most of what Star Trek had was simply contemporary items in new housings... was little sense of the re-organization of tasks that new technology brings. " You said a mouthful there. Consider this forum, or Google, or blogs. The notion that you can ask a question and get voluntary answers, or request voluntary work, from anywhere on the globe, was totally unforeseen. Even after the web was well-established, huge AI projects were still trying to build an authoritative database of all knowledge, using paid experts. Just like the 1954 idea of how an "electronic brain" should work. I haven't heard anything about those projects lately; I suspect they've faded away.