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Comment by djm | Hacker News Reader

You don't get it.

What Gibson is saying is that, (1) The rate of development of new technology is speeding up and that, therefore, (2) Humans experience an increasing amount of change in their lifetimes.

So, in a way, the future is getting here quicker.

As an aside, I can't wait to read his new book. I got it when it came out and promised myself I'll save it as a luxury to read in between getting my startups product ready to launch and actually launching. I've had to cellotape it back in the Amazon box to ensure I stick to my promise.

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Why just focus on technological change? Sure our gadgets are getting better faster but there has also been a marked reduction (at least in these parts) of people trying to force change on others at the gunpoint or by dropping bombs on them.

Places like the UK look rather placid and unchanging in many ways compared to say the first half of the 20th century.

I might just be a hippy dippy technology wonk but I have a gut belief that most societal change results from technological development.

If country A wanted country B to do X then it's ability to make it happen through violence will be limited by the willingness of citizens of country A to let it happen.

That willingness will be affected by by the degree of how "alien" people in country B are to people in country A. TV, internet, increased population movement through technological change[1] and so on will decrease that alienness.

[1] I mean both in terms of technology enabling physical travel of people from A->B and technology making a person's origin less important in where they can live during their lifetimes (for example, a programmer can go to work anywhere there is work - they are not confined by location other than by arbitrary things like visas)

I was pulling the piss out of the headline more than Gibson (if Gibson at all) - it just reeks of journalistic superficiality - and is rightly parodied by the other commenter with the futurama quote.

I mean - listen to the way gibson puts it:

"The present is really of no width whatever,"

That's a much richer metaphor to my mind.

News headlines are typically NOT written by the author of the article. This is something I've heard many journalists complain about. To my knowledge, the Wikipedia article on Headlines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headline ) is quite accurate: "Headlines are generally written by copy editors, but may also be written by the writer, the page layout designer or a news editor or managing editor."

So Gibson probably didn't write the headline.

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