So, the "Big Thinks" assertion here is that sometimes people are wrong and as a result incorrectly predict the future and that this pattern continues today. This is all so obvious and leads to no specific conclusion so I have to wonder, who is this article actually _for_? People who just don't like hearing the word "no?"<p>The Navy general was partly right. The government was the wrong entity to pursue flight and it was best left in private hands.<p>The New York Times was partly right. It took a lot of work to develop commercial and military flight to the level it is now. They were also on the verge of a worldwide communications upgrade, so those 10m person years came together faster than imagined.<p>The other article is also partly right. Flight is not so cheap that it is widely available, there are billions of living people on this planet who will never fly because they will never have enough money to afford it before they die.<p>The British astronomer just wanted a telescope instead of individual space travel. He was arguing about the best way to use a limited amount of money and specifically disclaimed any ability to predict the future.<p>Finally.. the original idea of the Apollo program was incredibly ambitious and was put forward in a top down fashion by the president. This was unprecedented for peace time America. Even then, they have to acknowledge that half the country was on board, and a vast majority actually sat down and watched the spectacle.<p>I hate articles like this, they try to wash away all nuance to end up with a self serving conclusion designed to mollify the "move fast and break things" crowd. The "Big Think" does some of the smallest thinking I've ever seen.
This isn't a prediction, it's a joke. The context of the article makes it clear that he's making a joking comparison to the evolution of birds.
If we're discussing garbage content from the NY Times, then their criticism of Robert Goddard tops the list for me<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/07/19/the-correction-heard-round-the-world-when-the-new-york-times-apologized-to-robert-goddard/amp/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/07/19/the-corre...</a>
Here's the full page in its original form --> <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1903/10/09/102025405.html?pageNumber=6" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1903/10/09/102...</a>
I'm certain this is a form of humor for the time period, or just what we think of as good journalism has changed over time. This figure maybe came out of thin air and the author of the piece ran with it, the editor having no idea either.
Note that the first flight was also in 1903.<p>According to the legend I've heard - this was published the day before the Wright Brothers first flight in Dec 17 1903.<p>I didn't see the publication date in the article.
This is the equivalent of taking a single dumb tweet and trying to pick it apart scientifically.<p>Maybe it makes you feel good, but overall it was just a huge time waste for everyone.
What is the point of publishing such an opinion on a newspaper?<p>People often point out how ridiculous these projections turned out to be, but seemingly nobody challenges their reason for existing.
This relates very well to AGI.<p>There can be long periods of minimal quantitative progress, even quantitative regression, before a massive qualitative leap that's the result of making a few small changes.<p>Planes either fly or fall.<p>The difference is that a super-intelligent AGI could provide immense value in secret. It's somewhat hard to keep a plane secret. It's value is largely in moving people, so people have to know about it and they fly right there in the sky for everyone to see. Also, massive rockets are hard to hide, and a lot of the value was publicity.<p>I expect that somebody somewhere is going to have AGI for a period of time when the rest of the world doesn't know they have it... and right now feels like that time. People are openly publishing LLMs that float awfully close to those motorized gliders that decidedly, definitely didn't fly... until suddenly they did. It's only a matter of time until someone figures out how to make these fly, and the question isn't when, but <i>when we'll find out.</i>
In 2016, days before the AlphaGo - Lee Sedol match, most HN posters were predicting that it was just a publicity stunt and that AlphaGo will lose all matches and that we were at least 10 years away from a computer beating the Go world champion.
> Many Americans and even astronomers opposed the plan for various reasons. Even former President Eisenhower (who created NASA) said: “Anybody who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts.”<p>I think he was right.
And in light of that, can you believe there <i>still</i> remain cynics just as pessimistic about time travel, FTL travel, cold fusion, perpetual motion, agelessness, immortality, world peace, etc?<p>Absurd! You never know what's just around the corner!<p>/s
Hacker News is not the audience for “haters gonna hate”.<p>The list of similarly cynical responses to great innovations and great businesses is a long one here.
Haters gonna hate is such a deep thought, I guess we have a new journalist competing for the pulitzer this year.<p>All in all, thinking about it, would have been better to have a world without flight, since I think it favoured globalisation and shrinking of working class rights, pollution, hypertourism and another kind of pollution, as italian i’d summon inhabitants of venice to see what they think of the americans flying in, I’d argue flying is a net negative discovery