Overview

"Everyone knows that today's rate of technological change is unprecedented. With technological breakthroughs from the Internet to cell phones to digital music and pictures, everyone knows that the social impact of technology has never been as profound. But everyone is wrong. In fact, the pace of change isn't notably faster than in times past and most ""revolutionary"" technologies are just refinements of past breakthroughs. Using dozens of entertaining examples, high-tech industry veteran Bob Seidensticker debunks nine technology myths, proving that- The rate of change is not exponential (myth #1), Important new products don't arrive any faster than they ever have (myth #3), The Internet doesn't really change everything (myth #8), and much more. Future Hype exposes the hidden costs of technology and will help both consumers and businesses take a shrewder position when the next 'essential' innovation is trotted out."

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9781576753705

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Reviews

A must-read for those who think the Internet changes everything. --Bob Frankston, VisiCalc developer and computer industry pioneer This clear-eyed, level-headed, historically sophisticated view of the realities of technological change by a knowledgeable insider will be absorbing reading for early adopters, neo-Luddites, and everyone in between. --Edward Tenner, author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences Future Hype is a great antidote to the familiar boosterism about unprecedented technological growth. Seidensticker puts technological change into historical perspective, which enables us to measure progress against what we have known, rather than against what we are promised. --Henry Petroski, Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and Professor of History, Duke University, and author of Pushing the Limits .. .. a wonderful compendium of the way the world works, and not just the way it should work. Future Hype reveals when we should be optimistic and when we should be skeptical.... An important contribution. --Michael Shermer, Publisher, Skeptic magazine and the Skeptic columnist for Scientific American

Author Information

I learned how to program in high school in the mid-1970s on a computer designed in 1962. It had four cubes of core memory each the size of a coffee cup (holding roughly 64K bytes) and two 10-megabyte disk drives each bigger than a car tire. Teletype terminals in the school connected to the computer with a 110 bit-per-second telephone modem. From that point to the present, I've taken a ringside seat and watched technology change with fascination.

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