Asklemmy

43856 readers

1601 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

186

what fact about our current world would freak people out if it were a newspaper headline a century ago? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 1 year ago by Phen to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

193 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Some news that would be completely mundane today but scary or shocking in the past.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's a pattern that emerges over and over again. Technology is reasonably easy to predict (we're still using 1920s physics after all) but the way people will react to and interact with technology is completely impossible to see coming. Like, our guesses are about as good as random chance; that's why nobody saw PCs and smartphones coming and then turned around and poured a lot of money into 3D TVs and wearables.

I don't think it would be impossible to model somehow, but I've yet to see any convincing work in that direction.