Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

It's funny how being closer to the reality and more informed about the technology can mean one's guesses about the future are more pessimistic than people making pie in the sky guesses (think scientists versus sci-fi authors).

I'm not directly involved in tech/hardware and I'm imagining full on reality-quality 'virtual reality' beamed into people's brains within 20 years. I imagine those in VR would scoff at this, but I'm kinda hoping I'll be closer to the truth ;-)




Hah, being a grad student in machine learning I feel this quite strongly. The popular science perception is that computers are already close to being smarter than us (BS articles about Turing tests don't help...), whereas it seems like if we truly reach computers that "think", it won't look anything like what we're doing now.


> It's funny how being closer to the reality and more informed about the technology can mean one's guesses about the future are more pessimistic than people making pie in the sky guesses (think scientists versus sci-fi authors).

Bill Gates has an interesting quote about this phenomenon, for which I forgot the exact wording... it says that you are always wrong as to how fast things will occur, but you are also wrong when you think stuff will not be available for a very long time. There's many examples of such assumptions being wrong now and then.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: