But it just always gets me when its used in media cause its just used as a deus ex machina type trope, which isnt too based in reality, and is what most people think of when they think nanotech
I would probably blame the God father of Cyberpunk for this one as well, William Gibson’s works gave birth to so many of the tech buzzwords we hear, then we have Neal Stephenson who invented the Metaverse concept which is now unfortunately the name for Facebook and associated products. Those guys brought the premise to the fore, and later authors turned those premises into tropes. Then there’s all the work that James Cameron did with the Terminator franchise too.
Again, this goes back to layman, because the media is made up of laymen, and the media is supposed to essentially parrot what the goings on’s of the days are, unbiased reporting is supposed to just be regurgitation of the facts, a perfect example of this is the Associated Press, their articles are usually short and to the point, minimum editorializing, like Joe Friday from the old Dragnet TV show used to say “just the facts ma’am”.
So laymen writing tech articles for laymen is essentially similar to the whole “copy of a copy” degradation, or the old game of “telephone” as the story gets passed from layperson to layperson it’s going to change and lose accuracy, because the experts are no longer looped in maintaining the veracity and accuracy.
So yeah there’s real danger for fear mongering in tech, but there’s also a positive aspect of tropes and buzzwords, and that’s inspiration, young tech kids taking this stuff in and becoming those people changing the tech industry, I’d hate to include Zuckerberg here but Snowcrash was absolutely an inspiration to him enough to change his company’s name to Meta, and there are many other similar examples of this both good and bad.
I would probably blame the God father of Cyberpunk for this one as well, William Gibson’s works gave birth to so many of the tech buzzwords we hear, then we have Neal Stephenson who invented the Metaverse concept which is now unfortunately the name for Facebook and associated products. Those guys brought the premise to the fore, and later authors turned those premises into tropes. Then there’s all the work that James Cameron did with the Terminator franchise too.
Again, this goes back to layman, because the media is made up of laymen, and the media is supposed to essentially parrot what the goings on’s of the days are, unbiased reporting is supposed to just be regurgitation of the facts, a perfect example of this is the Associated Press, their articles are usually short and to the point, minimum editorializing, like Joe Friday from the old Dragnet TV show used to say “just the facts ma’am”.
So laymen writing tech articles for laymen is essentially similar to the whole “copy of a copy” degradation, or the old game of “telephone” as the story gets passed from layperson to layperson it’s going to change and lose accuracy, because the experts are no longer looped in maintaining the veracity and accuracy.
So yeah there’s real danger for fear mongering in tech, but there’s also a positive aspect of tropes and buzzwords, and that’s inspiration, young tech kids taking this stuff in and becoming those people changing the tech industry, I’d hate to include Zuckerberg here but Snowcrash was absolutely an inspiration to him enough to change his company’s name to Meta, and there are many other similar examples of this both good and bad.