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0 pointsdm211y ago0 comments

Even considering telegraphs only input and output was clicks? No wireless, no converting the clicks to anything but words using Morse Code. Was it really reasonable back then to imagine wires running to every house? Electronic signals all around us providing data constantly?

Today I can stand almost anywhere (ignoring cell coverage and different technologies required to use satellite phones) and talk to any other human on the planet with video chat. I can instantly access any and all information online that's being sent to me from millions of servers. It still blows my mind that it's actually been implemented in such a small amount of time, and I grew up with it.

I can barely believe we have electricity, water, sewage, internet, and phone lines running to 99+% of the houses and businesses in the country, in most countries even.

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vidarh11y ago

> Even considering telegraphs only input and output was clicks?

It wasn't for very long.

Remember Jules Verne "predicting" transmission of pictures over long distances? He almost certainly had either tried it, or at least knew about the contemporary commercial Pantelegraph telefax service that operated between Paris and Lyon from 1865. The first patent on telefax like devices dates to 1843. From 1881 onwards, an array of scanning photo telegraphs arrived (the Pantelegraph required reproducing your image with a special ink on a metal plate, and so couldn't send arbitrary images without lots of manual work).

And well before the telegraph, complex systems of long distance routing of messages "manually" via semaphore towers was common in parts of Europe as far back as 1792 (France was criss-crossed by several semaphore "lines" stretching border to border), so the idea of encoding messages into different symbols, and routed transmission via relay stations even predates the electric telegraph by decades.

dm2OP11y ago

Ok, ok, I get it, some kind of long distance communication was imaginable 200 years ago. It's highly debatable whether or not anyone could imagine the internet in it's current form, it's very amazing with giant fiber optics spanning the oceans, wireless signals allowing massive mobility, connections to every home, but it's completely irrelevant to the point I was trying to make.

My original point was that the person I was replying to was saying the technological singularity (AI becoming smarter than humans or possibly taking over the universe) things were impossible, I was simply saying that because some people have trouble imagining advanced technologies doesn't mean that they are impossible.