Technology Perspectives: Past, Present, and Predictions

I am older than Facebook. I remember when Netflix mailed DVDs. I am older than Google, which once promised not to be evil. I am older than the World Wide Web itself. I remember the DOS prompt, and A and B floppy disk drives being more important than an internal C hard drive. Fiction at the time presented computers as almost magical devices, and "cyberspace" was often treated as a literal parallel dimension we would one day travel, yet here we are with ads and echo chambers on Web2 social media while we try to build Web3 for a world that isn't ready for it yet.

Beyond that, I remember standalone word processors and manual typewriters. I remember a time when families often owned only a single television, and tuned into scheduled programming with rabbit-ear antennae for PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX. The VCR was played on channel 3. There was a time we didn't even own a VCR. They were incredibly expensive 30-odd years ago when my family got one because a well-meaning relative gave me some videocassettes for Christmas one year, and we had no way to play them.

My childhood was almost entirely analog. Electronic toys required disposable batteries to function, and those were a significant expense. My most-used toys were LEGO, Tonka trucks, and Matchbox cars. I rode a Big Wheel tricycle until I graduated to a hand-me-down bicycle. If we wanted to know something, we needed to use reference books at home, or visit the library. Library card catalogs were literally a cabinet of index cards. Cross-country travel required an atlas, not GPS, for navigation.

Was life better then? In some ways yes, in some ways no. I'm not a nostalgic Luddite with rose-tinted glasses when looking back on the past. Technological advancements bring convenience, but convenience also breeds apathy. I grew up learning to not blindly trust Google results even before it became a wasteland of advertisements, to say nothing of A.I. slop. We knew Mapquest could give bad directions. People get fooled now by A.I. deepfakes, but I remember chain letter e-mails and spam relying on classic grifts, urban legends, and Photoshop to spread nonsense, too.

My biggest concern today is not the proliferation of screens so much as the blind acceptance of corporate and government surveillance through our devices, and blind reliance on the top search results in Google or an A.I. prompt response. I like the convenience of technology, but I grew up without it. Imagine how it was for our grandparents or great-grandparents who remembered a time before electricity. We grumble about subscriptions, but accept the power bill as a necessity when they used iceboxes and kerosene lanterns. Why should they pay Edison Electric when what they had worked just fine?

All of this is to say I think I have some experience on which to base some predictions.

We are lurching into a world of Limited Language Model "A.I. assistants" and tools. It reminds me of the dot-com boom. Corporations are dumping money into ventures that seem more hype than anything else, and only after a lot of them crash and burn will we see what survives the strain of a bursting bubble.

In another year or so, a new generation of server GPUs will likely hit the market from AMD, Intel, and less well-known enterprise-focused competitors, potentially disrupting Nvidia's position. No one seems to want Microsoft's Copilot despite their heavy push for integrating it everywhere. Companies which rushed into A.I. integration are often backpedaling as they discover where slop has messed up their systems.

I think it has a future as a tool, but not the way its loudest proponents believe, and while it will bring changes and disruption, it won't create systemic unemployment. Feel free to revisit my predictions in five to ten years and see whether I got it right or not.