I'm old enough to remember when the sci-fi notion of a disembodied computer voice waking you up in the morning, knowing enough about you to strike up a conversation, and accompanying you through your daily routine sounded wonderful.
Now it gives me chills. That old wonderful dream is actually possible now if I turned off all my malware blockers and let :lord-bezos-amused: fully into my home.
It is going way back. But as a nerd reading about space travel, the space race, and astronomy back as an 8 year old, and my father trying to get me into Star Trek TNG at a young age, made me hopeful to believe that space travel and an early Star Trek approximating future could be available in my life time. I think that very slowly faded, but died a final death when, still as a radlib, I entered college in a STEM field and realize that a very large fraction of my class mates were Libertarian dipshits, New Atheists, and had their highest aspiration being the CEO of a successful tech startup. The easiest way to stop believing in technocracy is to spend time around technocrats as someone with even a very primitive and rudimentary class and inequality awareness.
The tensions in stem immediately turn you into either a Peter Thiel wannabe or a raging LGBT+ communist.
The difference is programmer socks. :theory-gary: