ATTN Sigmatic

[Elder Iptuous]

Dr. Vitriol,
I'm curious what, specifically, you had in mind when you said:

...Attitudes that were unthinkable just a few years ago are commonplace now....

[Jasper]

Dok V:

You're probably right, all I have to go off of are comparisons of my generation to older generations as they exist.  I notice decline in work ethic, and a similar increase in acceptance of unusual lifestyles or mannerisms.  There are lots of small differences that probably add up to what would seem like a big deal if I could get the whole picture.

Just as an aside, your signature picture is making me nervous.  I'm trying to think, here.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Dr. Vitriol,
I'm curious what, specifically, you had in mind when you said:

...Attitudes that were unthinkable just a few years ago are commonplace now....

Women are no longer our possessions. I mean fuckinell, they're even allowed to vote and shit now. Sooner or later, who knows, they might even gain full-human status.

[Elder Iptuous]

Ah...
i seem to have misunderstood what you meant by "a few years ago" and "unthinkable"...

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Ah...
i seem to have misunderstood what you meant by "a few years ago" and "unthinkable"...

It's commonly accepted for gays to be like, out and stuff, and keep their jobs/lives.

Blacks and whites can intermarry freely.

Women can wear pants.

Etc. Etc.

[Elder Iptuous]

yeah, those also are not what i would have called unthinkable a few years ago, either...

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

yeah, those also are not what i would have called unthinkable a few years ago, either...

I guess our views on timelines and society differ. In societal terms, a handful of decades is not a long time.

[Elder Iptuous]

So by 'a few years', you mean 'a few decades'.
and by 'unthinkable', you mean 'not the current norm'...

[P3nT4gR4m]

So by 'a few years', you mean 'a few decades'.
and by 'unthinkable', you mean 'not the current norm'...

I mean decades, yes, even centuries but by "unthinkable" I actually mean "inconceivable"

[Elder Iptuous]

you really think it was inconceivable that women might become more than possessions?

[Jasper]

Notice the way anything other than what we've got at the moment is inconceivable.  I'm sure that hasn't changed about human nature in the last four hundred years.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

you really think it was inconceivable that women might become more than possessions?

Yeah, even in the first half of the 20th century, women were expected to give up whatever jobs they had and make their education effectively useless in order to stay home and be a maid/chef/baby factory. Even with the right to vote women were pressured to vote the same as their husbands.

[Elder Iptuous]

yeah, but there was a women's suffrage movement.
and they were aware of women having equal political clout in other points of human history even before that, no?

when i heard inconceivable, i was thinking along the lines of 'whoah! not even the drug addled futurist fiction writers saw that one coming!'
for instance, i can conceive of institutions like marriage disappearing altogether in our societies future.  i don't think it's likely.
but, i could happen....

but i understand what was being said now.

i'm just being pedaaaaaaaantic, i guess.
don't mind me.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

yeah, but there was a women's suffrage movement.
and they were aware of women having equal political clout in other points of human history even before that, no?

when i heard inconceivable, i was thinking along the lines of 'whoah! not even the drug addled futurist fiction writers saw that one coming!'
for instance, i can conceive of institutions like marriage disappearing altogether in our societies future.  i don't think it's likely.
but, i could happen....

but i understand what was being said now.

i'm just being pedaaaaaaaantic, i guess.
don't mind me.

Fiction writers help shape the future by planting expectation as well as technological/societal goals into people's heads. For example, Star Trek inspired some schmoe to invent the cell phone. Apparently no one thought to try that sort of thing for the public before. Fiction writers see stuff coming because they tend to steer people in those directions eventually.  But even that's incremental. The fiction writer's imagination is also shaped by his own times and perceptions.

[Captain Utopia]

It was inconceivable that:

• It would one day be easier and quicker to show a photo to your aunt who lives 3500 miles away, than it would be to walk over to your neighbours house and show them.
• You'd carry something in your pocket ten times more powerful than a super computer of your time.
• You'd be able to design an entire artificial lifeform on a computer from scratch, assemble the DNA and bring it to life.
• Long distance phone-calls would one day become free -- this was actually predicted to me in a futurology lecture in 1996, and I thought it was far-fetched at the time.
• Little Johnny would spend less time playing with kids down the road, and more time playing with kids whom he'll never meet, who live on different continents.
• The internet would exist they way it does, and that anyone would want to use it.
• If you wanted to see what a random intersection looks like halfway across the world you could do that in a few clicks, or if you wanted to use that same tool to experience a ski-run, that'd be just as easy.
• You'd be able to take a video of anything you wanted, and make it freely available to anyone who cared to see it -- when YouTube came out in 2005, I thought woah - no one can afford infinite bandwidth and infinite storage, and who wants to upload video anyway?  I may be an idiot, but I wasn't alone in my skepticism.  People I work with, only 10 years older than I, still think it's a flash-in-the-pan.
• You'd live to see a world without daily newspapers.
• You could fit an entire collection of encyclopedias in your hand, and make a perfect copy in less time than it takes to calculate your tax return.
• Cameras could take and store thousands of pictures without needing film, and they'd be pretty fucking cheap, too.
• You could access just about any book, song, tv show or movie for free, sometimes in minutes, usually in less than an hour.
• A device could be created that could write words by rearranging individual atoms.
• You could fit thousands of albums in your pocket, and the device to do it would cost less than a few hundred bucks.
• The same device could take pictures, video, play games, tell you where you were on the planet, what the name of the song is that's playing across the street, display a map and recommend nearby places of interest, instantly search a database larger than any library ever built, operate your television, wake you up in the morning AND work as a normal phone.
• Porn would be everywhere, anywhere, available to you however you want, and all for free.

Honestly - how many of these have you lived through too?  Goddammit, we're living in the future, and it's pretty fucking awesome.