The future was stolen from us, and it started during the dot-com boom back in the late 90s. What happened? There was wide-spread manic investment in computer technology and computer networks. This was low-hanging fruit for the holders of capital. What did we get? Shitty websites. A surveillance panopticon powered by the locked-down and cloud-dependent computing devices in our pockets which we still ever-so-quaintly refer to as "phones". And now, artificial "intelligence". Which, by the way, is technically just machine learning. Oh, and while I'm at it, "AI" is another bubble that is fixin' to pop, just like the dot-com bubble did.
A green economy. Widespread use of nuclear fission to replace fossil fuels, with a sustained effort to replace that transitional technology with renewables or clean fusion.
A real international space program funded by the governments of the world after they tore down their instruments of death. We would reach for the stars as a worldwide brotherhood of man. With this and other efforts, we would start to realize the dream of John Lennon, embodied in the lyrics of the song *Imagine*. Imagine there's no country; it isn't hard to do.
Amazing medical advancements. And yes, this is the one most important to me right now. Suppose we could repair my damaged heart with gene therapy and other treatments of which I can barely conceive.
We could have had some of that. Maybe not all of that, but some. What do we have instead? Chat motherfucking GPT and its ilk.
I want the future back, and so should you. The real one, not this Fisher-Price "babby's first future" bullshit.
I'll leave you with an afterthought that occurred to me after I wrote this post.
I think I realized that the future would be stolen in the early 1990s, when I first heard the word cyberspace. I grew up on Star Trek and still love it. Probably some of that comes through in this post. For me, the word "cyberspace" had some negative connotations. It struck me as a cop-out, because none of the thought leaders in the early 90s had the vision to imagine a bright future or the will to make it happen. "We aren't going to go to space or remake the world, but here's this alternate world for you: cyberspace."
I'm not here to throw shade at the Internet, which seems to be a popular pastime these days. Don't get me wrong: computer networks -- especially the Internet (a network of networks) -- are great tools for smashing barriers and bringing people together. They are media, I.E. things that mediate, and they're great at that job. I can't imagine a bright future without computer networks. What they are not is some alternate space or alternate reality, and no amount of breathless talk of cyberspace during the 1990s could change that.