That entire era was absolutely insane if you think about it.

I have been thinking quite a lot lately. Because as a programmer, it really feels like things had slowed down a bit (at least in new technology). And it wasn't until these tools and services that have come out lately that bring a serious amount of computing power with a few commands - which when it comes to speeding up development time is a HUGE deal. Things are picking up again, impressively rapidly. I find myself thinking about the future more these days, similar to how I was in the 90s.

So I had a shower thought, and started reading up on it to see if this actually was a thing, turns out it is. So, people in the past, pre Enlightenment and earlier didn't really think about the future in the way we do now. The highly educated academic types, anyone in science and engineering definitely had deeper thoughts on it, and I'm sure you could find many outliers. But generally speaking, your average person had no real evidence of changing technology, or at least nothing on the scale of what has been going on in the last 120 years. And big jumps in technology would happen more locally and could take 100s of years to spread to other cultures, if that.

But even during the Enlightenment, things were changing all the time. But to see it, to plot out the progress of technology during the window of your life would take a lot more thought and outside the box thinking to really get an idea of where things are going when you're older, or even after your death and beyond. Most people were just taking what was around them, and extrapolate it out and more or less the idea was it was all the same, just more of it and in better quality.

But it wasn't until this explosion of completely new technology like cars, planes, and then the computer. Things like penicillin as you mentioned were astronomically huge. Now your common person's minds were exploding, they knew that when they would get old things were going to be very very different, they may not have been able to accurately predict how, but they had a clear understanding that this is going somewhere much faster than ever before.

And I gotta be honest, I really do think we are going through one of those periods again right now. I think it's very fair to say that in 20-30 years, when I'm reaching retirement age, my life, the world, etc is going to be much different than it is now, on every single front of technology from medical to computers to space, to AI. And culturally. It feels like nothing was really changing between the 90s - 2010, just faster and faster computers, which allowed higher quality CGI and the expansion of the internet. These are big deals, but I don't think we really started seeing it rapidly increase in quality until 2010ish. And culturally, it felt like we were clinging on to the 90s that entire time - until we've finally started letting go (ignoring all the Disney remakes lmao).

There's a lot of terrible shit going on in the world right now, but ultimately I remain optimistic.