The anniversary of the moon landing is a great reminder of how it messes with your expectations to be on a "we thought it was exponential!" technology curves when it flattens out, as is happening with computers today. I gave a whole talk about this! https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm …
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Pan Am took reservations for moon flights (expected to start in 2000) until 1971! It was really hard for people to accept that aviation and space flight technology had pretty much petered out along the cool axis of speed and range. Now we innovate on fuel economy (whee).pic.twitter.com/7m3ddu2TRH
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Computers are in this phase now. Devices will get more efficient, data centers will get more enormous, but you're never going to have a 17 GHz CPU in your laptop. And we're never going to have a Singularity. Which is a relief, because those people were incredibly annoying
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Anyway, just think about how insane it would have sounded in 1965 to argue that the U.S. would have no moon bases—in fact, no human space flight capability of any kind—in 2020, even though there had been no nuclear war. That's what it feels like to top out on exponential growth!
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Replying to @Pinboard
What do you think would have happened if funding had stayed at 1960s levels?
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The Vietnam War would have pushed us into hyperinflation
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