alt Hacker News> If you told someone in 1995 that within 25 years [...] most people would find that hard to believe.
That's not how I remember it (but I was just a kid so I might be misremembering?)
As I remember (and what I gather from media from the era) late 80s/early 90s were hyper optimistic about tech. So much so that I distinctly remember a ¿german? TV show when I was a kid where they had what amounts to modern smartphones, and we all assumed that was right around the corner. If anything, it took too damn long.
Were adults outside my household not as optimistic about tech progress?
Replies
Indeed, AI now is what people in the 1980s thought computers would be doing in 2000.
That’s how I remember it too. The video is from 1999, during the height of the dot-com bubble. These experts are predicting that within 10 years the internet will be on your phone, and that people will be using their phones as credit cards and the phone company would manage the transaction, the prediction actually comes pretty close to the prediction made by bitcoin enthusiasts.
https://bsky.app/profile/ruv.is/post/3liyszqszds22
Note that this is the state TV broadcasting this in their main news program. The most popular daily show in Iceland.
To your point, AT&T's "You Will" commercials started airing in 1993 and present both an optimistic and fairly accurate view of what the future would look like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvZ-667CEdo