many systems seem eternal, self-perpetuating, and unchangeable, until the day they aren't
In my dream last night, a guy sat at a desk with one of those old-school microphones connected to a PA where you press a big button to talk over the loudspeaker. He leaned into the mic, pressed the button, and gently intoned, “Dick schedule.”
i think a lot of people are easily mislead by rhetoric because they don't know the difference between the ideology someone talks about having, and the ideology they show through action. the first is often a smokescreen for the second, even if the person sincerely believes they follow the first and not the second. the subconscious ideology is more powerful than the limited conscious one.
i'm realizing that a major reason lots of technically savvy people believe weird things about the future is that they have accepted an idea, over the last ~10 years of software trying to eat the world: that anything computable is inevitably, nay soon, going to become practical to compute, at scale, everywhere, for everyone.
people had a lot of wacky ideas about what electricity would do during electrification. a lot of wacky ideas about magnetic fields when those were figured out. a lot of wacky ideas about what nuclear power could do. and so now there's a lot of wacky ideas about what computers can do.
but the current climate in "tech" goes even further than those weird hype bubbles. tech is basically consumed right now by Digital Christianity, a reinvention of the Christian framework of belief within the domain of computer science. And Digital Christianity has its own Digital Manifest Destiny, where everything not done by a computer will, inevitably, become something that only computers do. and belief in a revelation where civilization as we know it will end, because of the arrival of a supreme higher power (the Singularity). hell, some dodos even go far enough to say the supreme higher power will harshly judge us all based on our faith in this higher power, or lack of faith (Roko's Basilisk).
it's all just Christianity in silicon drag. it's all extremely old, and extremely boring to anyone who isn't Christian, at least, once you identify it for what it is