When the Future Deviates from the Glorious Plan

[james_davis_nicoll]

CBC is running an interview with a segway fan, who is angry over the failure of society to accomodate this revolutionary transport device.

Comments

[daev.livejournal.com]

In a way this ties in with our older discussion about how Science is actually done.

Before the Segway was announced there was a lot of hyperactive speculation about what Dean Kamen had secretly invented that would "change the world." Portable nuclear fusion? Matter replication? Cat pee carpet smell remover?

People who think that way still have a Mad Scientist view of how Science works. If something is really going to change the world it'd be already visible beforehand at a collective level, in science or in society. Even Stephen Wolfram admits that his New Kind of Science has been in the air for the last fifty years.