Why is science fiction important? Ask the Chinese. Or rather, ask Neil Gaiman, who in 2007 was invited to Chengdu for the first-ever government-sponsored sci-fi convention in China. As the story goes, he asked why the state was promoting the subject. The reply was that although China had become the workshop of the world, things were not being invented there. To understand how things were invented in the USA, Chinese officials had visited and interviewed people at companies like Google & Apple. …
As technologies go, there’s nothing new in opining that the internet is one of the greatest inventions of all time. But it’s easy to forget this wasn’t always the case. Shortly after the dot-com bust, the internet was quite widely written off, with comparisons being drawn to another bubble that popped — the Gold Rush. I know this because in 2003, ‘history’s-richest-man’ Jeff Bezos delivered a prescient TED talk on how the Gold Rush analogy was incorrect. He suggested that the analogy of electricity was more relevant to describe the internet and its potential. …
Andrew Rozara
Interested in the intersection of tech & the liberal arts. Avid reader of history, technology, business. Sci-fi buff who thinks 2001:ASO is overrated. CCeCS.
