But the same stock objections seem rather tired after a few thousand years.

And of course, it's equally mind-numbing to keep hearing about how the latest doo-hickey is going to totally revolutionize human nature and turn the laws of the world upside-down.

We'll have to judge things case by case to see what's really revolutionary, and if so whether it has been good or bad. Trumpeting the outcome with few real results in is stupid and by now boring.

Against the backdrop of agriculture and industrialization, it's hard to see what's so radical about an iPhone app that notifies you every time your favorite indie rock band takes a shit.

And of course, it's equally mind-numbing to keep hearing about how the latest doo-hickey is going to totally revolutionize human nature and turn the laws of the world upside-down.

well, the optimists aren't as terrified or hypocritical. they can't be hypocritical because their changes haven't come to pass, but the luddites tend to avail themselves of all the contemporary technology with enthusiasm while bemoaning the new as qualitatively different (see the defenders of printed paper books against the rise of the internet and e-books).

This problem with being unable to identify the game-changing innovation in the future seems to be a part of Nassim Taleb's Black Swan thesis.

"facts stored outside of our brains exist a la carte, as opposed to being embedded in a network of implicit connections. To generate novel insight these connections and networks of facts need to exist latent as background conditions underneath reflective thought. Of course for most people novel abstractions, analyses and streams of data are irrelevant"

This is essentially the problem with these personal agent programs. I haven't seen any progress since Patty Maes was hyping agents up in the mid 90s. It's not too difficult to capture structured data, it's possible to capture unstructured data for a specific structured task, but capturing structured and unstructured data and making it relevant in a novel context is more trouble than it's worth

Google makes it easier to get older since even though it gets harder to remember names, it's very quick to look them up from other things you remember about them. That actress ... the blonde? In LA Confidential?

Kim Basinger!

That took 12 seconds to look up.