AdamI
Skilled Investigator
It's a question I've asked many people, so I'd like to ask it here...
The post-WWII era seems to have been an era of incredible optimism. In the 1950s we were trying to go to space and talking about zipping around the planets with nuclear rockets.
If you go back and read scientific publications and especially more popular scientific writing back then, you see not only a lot of optimism but a lot more open-mindedness than today. Carl Sagan is a great example... back in the early 60s if I remember correctly he was talking about the likelihood of finding ET artifacts (crashed probes, etc.) on the moon or planets.
Scientists in psychology were talking about re-imprinting human consciousness to cure mental illness and empower people. In physics they were talking about energy "too cheap to meter" and anti-gravity. In medicine they were talking about life extension and artificial organs.
The mood in the culture seems different too. I was not alive then, but I've always been fascinated by the era. Two things have always struck me: the rate of cultural innovation and the rate of technological innovation. I find it hard to name a technology that I use on a daily basis that was not essentially invented in the 50s or 60s. (Maybe a few in the 70s...)
To see what I'm talking about, just take a look at what was being done in the 60s:
Here's, well, most of what's in the computer in front of you:
Doug Engelbart: The Demo
Users of Adobe Illustrator, AutoCAD, etc. will recognize this, from 1963:
Stuff like this was getting built in the early 60s using mostly 50s technology:
Wikimedia Error
... I could keep going forever.
Sure, a lot of the wild optimism was hype. I don't find it that surprising that a lot of it turned out to be a lot harder than we thought. But that's not what I'm getting at...
It's been clear to me for years that something "happened" to us around 1970. It seems like we entered a minor dark age.
Technological progress in many fields has virtually halted. Music got stale and stagnant. Cultural experimentation slowed down or stopped. It seems like something "happened" at a deep almost parapolitical or "Jungian collective subconscious" level. Some door slammed shut.
Bold, visionary thinking became verboten. Science adopted the demeanor of rigid dogmatic ultra-materialist skepticism, while equally rigid dogmatic religious fundamentalism swept through the culture at large. A similar fate befell the optimism, with optimistic visions of the future replaced by (among the scientifically-minded) malthusian ecological doomsday hysteria or (among the general public) religious or conspiracy doomsday hysteria. The "can-do" mentality in engineering gave way to curmudgeony pessimism.
Think of Carl Sagan again, and notice how his opinions seemed to go from fearless speculation and optimism to stodgy dogmatic skepticism and doomsday prognostications.
Even the optimism that remains seems... well... different. Contrast the informed, scientific optimism of the 50s and 60s with the silly almost cartoonish "singularity" cult of today. Then it was "we will make a better future, and here's how." Today it's "the singularity will just happen (lots of hand-waving)." It's like a parody of optimism.
Later on in the thread I'll reveal some of my thoughts and some of the answers I've received from people I've asked, but I'm curious about what the Paracast crowd thinks:
What the heck happened to us?
The post-WWII era seems to have been an era of incredible optimism. In the 1950s we were trying to go to space and talking about zipping around the planets with nuclear rockets.
If you go back and read scientific publications and especially more popular scientific writing back then, you see not only a lot of optimism but a lot more open-mindedness than today. Carl Sagan is a great example... back in the early 60s if I remember correctly he was talking about the likelihood of finding ET artifacts (crashed probes, etc.) on the moon or planets.
Scientists in psychology were talking about re-imprinting human consciousness to cure mental illness and empower people. In physics they were talking about energy "too cheap to meter" and anti-gravity. In medicine they were talking about life extension and artificial organs.
The mood in the culture seems different too. I was not alive then, but I've always been fascinated by the era. Two things have always struck me: the rate of cultural innovation and the rate of technological innovation. I find it hard to name a technology that I use on a daily basis that was not essentially invented in the 50s or 60s. (Maybe a few in the 70s...)
To see what I'm talking about, just take a look at what was being done in the 60s:
Here's, well, most of what's in the computer in front of you:
Doug Engelbart: The Demo
Users of Adobe Illustrator, AutoCAD, etc. will recognize this, from 1963:
Stuff like this was getting built in the early 60s using mostly 50s technology:
Wikimedia Error
... I could keep going forever.
Sure, a lot of the wild optimism was hype. I don't find it that surprising that a lot of it turned out to be a lot harder than we thought. But that's not what I'm getting at...
It's been clear to me for years that something "happened" to us around 1970. It seems like we entered a minor dark age.
Technological progress in many fields has virtually halted. Music got stale and stagnant. Cultural experimentation slowed down or stopped. It seems like something "happened" at a deep almost parapolitical or "Jungian collective subconscious" level. Some door slammed shut.
Bold, visionary thinking became verboten. Science adopted the demeanor of rigid dogmatic ultra-materialist skepticism, while equally rigid dogmatic religious fundamentalism swept through the culture at large. A similar fate befell the optimism, with optimistic visions of the future replaced by (among the scientifically-minded) malthusian ecological doomsday hysteria or (among the general public) religious or conspiracy doomsday hysteria. The "can-do" mentality in engineering gave way to curmudgeony pessimism.
Think of Carl Sagan again, and notice how his opinions seemed to go from fearless speculation and optimism to stodgy dogmatic skepticism and doomsday prognostications.
Even the optimism that remains seems... well... different. Contrast the informed, scientific optimism of the 50s and 60s with the silly almost cartoonish "singularity" cult of today. Then it was "we will make a better future, and here's how." Today it's "the singularity will just happen (lots of hand-waving)." It's like a parody of optimism.
Later on in the thread I'll reveal some of my thoughts and some of the answers I've received from people I've asked, but I'm curious about what the Paracast crowd thinks:
What the heck happened to us?