I wonder if your reaction to that passage is similar to mine.
My first reaction is a subjective, aesthetic one: the present moment, 2015, is more like 1985, than 1985 was like 1955. When I was in my teens in the 80s, I found music from the 1950s almost alien; my step-son in college, and his friends, listened to a mix of music from the 90s and later, without ever referring to 90s music as nostalgic. It’s similar with other sorts of entertainment. I’d expect a lightly comic movie comparing daily life in the 1980s to the 2010s would inevitably make a lot of jokes about smartphones and tablet computers and the Internet… and then quickly run out of steam. If it was more edgy comedy, there’d be a bit about how same-sex relationships have become more generally accepted.
And even that only goes so far. In the 80s, we had Walkmans and handheld electronic games, and even personal computers. The very devices we tend to cite as evidence of the rapid advance of technology fit neatly into cultural – and often literal – pockets that held gadgets thirty years ago. Someone from 1985 would be quite impressed with an iPad, but it wouldn’t be alien.
When I was in college, my favorite professor asked the students, out of idle curiosity, when we thought the “postmodern” era began; a few people said, “the mid-Sixties”, and everyone murmured assent. And it struck me at the moment, and still remains my feeling, that when I look at depictions of daily life in the US in the middle to late 60s, it seems fundamentally familiar, like a picture coming into focus. The details are different, but the fundamental patterns seem familiar, and seem to have remained stable since.
Beyond that subjective, aesthetic sense, I’ve been inclined to argue that social and political change has slowed, dramatically, in recent decades. One of my greatest fears is that the modern US ruling class is one of the few in world history to accomplish the fundamental goal of every ruling class: it’s effectively defeated the productive class, guaranteeing stagnation until this civilization collapses, and that neoliberalism was the killing blow.
More narrowly, to respond to that article: it claims that we’ve actually accomplished considerable advances in AI, but that’s a matter of shifting the goalposts. The early promoters of “hard AI” in the 60s pretty much thought we’d have robots like R2-D2 by now. One book I read suggested that there was something of a debate among DARPA-funded computer scientists over whether they should concentrate on creating AI that could outright replace human workers, or on technologies to “augment” human workers; the latter prevailed, since “hard AI” didn’t appear to be getting anywhere. The “augmentation” vision went back as far as the 1940s, with ideas such as portable devices that could contain an entire library, and led directly to the Xerox PARC lab’s early experiments with graphic interfaces in the 60s – the basic functional elements of which are present in almost all GUIs now.
Contemporary speculation about superhuman AI seems to regard it as if it will happen almost automatically, once the number of calculations per second gets high enough – the very name “the singularity” seems to reference the inevitability of a black hole forming when enough matter is packed densely enough. Black holes shouldn’t be the analogy – more like the origin of life on Earth, a circumstance we can only theorize about but we assume must have been contingent on an enormous number of variables.
And that still wouldn’t make it viable to colonize a planet that makes Antarctica seem like Hawaii.
