BLUF

Predicting the future is difficult; in the forties and fifties nobody saw a world where analog could be replaced by digital*—but they did predict flying cars.

Summary

This article in Wired is a summary of the main points from Steven Novella's The Skeptics' Guide to the Future:
  • One futurism fallacy is imagining that future society will be just like present-day society, only with more gadgets.
  • Futurologists tend to oversell the future, and while we have not found a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's, we do have digital phones and the internet.
  • Past futurists have focussed on incremental advances, missing game-changers such as the analog-to-digital transition.
*In 1948, Claude Shannon wrote a paper demonstrating that information could be captured in the form of bits----either a 1 or a 0. Claude Shannon, the Father of the Information Age, Turns 1100100 | The New Yorker

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