alt Hacker NewsI was sloppy. I didn't mean to include science fiction authors, or extreme futurists.
"everyone", being, a typical average of realistic predictions.
In the 90's. I remember people talking about voice recognition will take 50 years. Let alone understanding. Now this is an easy base line feature.
Let alone protein folding.
> I didn't mean to include science fiction authors, or extreme futurists.
Science fiction authors are quite influential, and I don't think they were the only ones either. I expect that plenty of actual scientists had similar views. It wasn't extreme.
> In the 90's. I remember people talking about voice recognition will take 50 years.
Sure. Who? How many people said that? How many people said the opposite? If we're doing anecdotes, I remember that circa 2010 it was a fairly normal belief that fully self-driving cars would be widespread by 2020. I mean, I thought they would.
Point is, many people say many different things, there's never been any widespread agreement about what the future holds. They underestimate, they overestimate, but mostly reality moves sideways in directions nobody thought of and which are somehow simultaneously way more impressive and way less impressive than our expectations.