People act like you need a petaflop for something to be useful. The US census of 1890 would have been impossible to complete before the next one started without puchcard machines. One may as well say the information age arrived then. Anyone with basic numeracy and imagination could imagine what the future held at that point.
> Anyone with basic numeracy and imagination could imagine what the future held at that point.
Yet most of us (myself included) are in denial (willful or just delusional) about what AI is going to do.