It's a toughie. I like the Marshall McLuhan quote “We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future” [1] [2] but I also bemoan what I call the "ahistoric turn", the tendency I perceive that people today aren't interested in the past at all. I can point to many old obscure books that were quite prophetic [3] [4] and lines of research such as neuro-symbolics in the 1990s that went from science fiction to obvious. In the late 1960s, before the CMOS transistor was established as the universal computing element there was a lot of interest in neuromorphic computing and speculation about the "intelligence explosion" that was fresh, not the dogmatic and narrow-minded dogma of the Yudkowsky cult.
Lines of argument that have long gone out of favor are likely to come back [5] as much as some concerns will be reversed [6] and one book that spoke to the zeitgeist of the 1970s is accepted in Japan as an interpretation of the Tokugawa period [7]
One of the ways to deal with rapid social change is to extend your reach to the widest range of cultures and history.
(Funny I was talking the other day to a coworker from a previous job who started programming on 370 mainframes in the 1970s and was telling me how he built a test harness for fly-by-wire control systems for military aircraft based on a cluster of 80386 PCs in the later 1980s.)
Lines of argument that have long gone out of favor are likely to come back [5] as much as some concerns will be reversed [6] and one book that spoke to the zeitgeist of the 1970s is accepted in Japan as an interpretation of the Tokugawa period [7]
One of the ways to deal with rapid social change is to extend your reach to the widest range of cultures and history.
(Funny I was talking the other day to a coworker from a previous job who started programming on 370 mainframes in the 1970s and was telling me how he built a test harness for fly-by-wire control systems for military aircraft based on a cluster of 80386 PCs in the later 1980s.)
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/618118-we-look-at-the-prese...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Forward-Through-Rearview-Mirror-Refle...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image:_A_Guide_to_Pseudo-e...
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_of_Narcissism