Last night, I watched Artemis II return to Earth. I did this at my mother’s house, on her television, which means we saw the local TV news have a couple of talking heads speak over the NASA live feed of the splashdown. This entertained me slightly, because it was plainly obvious that these people’s whole job was to provide filler commentary to prevent the sensation of dead air, yet they had absolutely no idea what was going on. They were quite stressed by this.

When the Orion capsule actually completed its splashdown, a male anchor was earnestly surprised that the spacecraft still used parachutes to land. This seemed to shock him a bit. “They’re still using parachutes,” he said at least two or three times, as if parachutes had somehow become obsolete between 1972 and today.

I think this is an example of how people’s expectations of what progress looks like have been warped by their experiences with software. In the past 20 years, things have changed less than people have imagined that they have; computers largely work the same way they did since then. But many people feel like things have changed a lot, since the ubiquity of the smartphone has expanded who even uses software and in what context. Because spacecraft are “technology,” people expect it to look just as radically different as software has, because software is also “technology.”

I wonder if this is going to eventually cause some kind of civilizational whiplash, where we see vast increases in computing, but everything else is pretty much the same, and people’s expectations get all weird and out of whack as a result. Actually, I guess that already happened; stupid ideas like “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” spread all over social media even though the fundamental reasons why communism will not work are completely unchanged because they have nothing to do with technology.

I think I should simply post on LinkedIn one day that “I use Claude Code but I still put my pants on one leg at a time every morning” just to see what people do with this information.