alt Hacker News>Is the future mostly written by visionaries in fiction, or by the engineers and scientists bringing it to life?
I find Charles Stross' blog to be quite informative.
He has a tendency to predict a thing, write a book demonstrating how it will be good, and then absolutely hate the real world implications of the technology.
Famously he picked up Nick Szabo's old whitepaper on smart contracts, and envisaged a world where the technology would be used to disrupt an evil US government. Making it too hard for them to examine complex business structures.
By the time we got smart contracts, he was dead set against their use. And has written a lot about how corporations are in fact evil AI running on the operating system of the government.
He also has a variant of crypto currency in one of his novels, used to trade at light speed (so incredibly slowly) against distant space colonies. He is quite anti crypto, and I believe if such a system were deployed he would be quite against it.
The problem I guess is that its fun to imagine a thing, but not as fun always to live with it.
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In general, people being people, it is always safe to assume that some will use a thing for its best purpose and others for its worst possible purpose.
That’s an interesting point you make, and a great example with Charles Stross. It’s a good reminder that ideas and inventions can have surprising real-world effects, sometimes not what the creators hoped for.
I’m dreading the day I hear, “I’m sorry Ed, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” (kidding).
>And has written a lot about how corporations are in fact evil AI running on the operating system of the government.
I would say his view of them is more Lovecraftian than "evil", but here's the speech (as a blog entry): https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...