Recently discovered this movie. I still can't believe it was done in 1970! The visual props of the huge mainframes, tape drives, blinking lights, etc were real-computing gear from Control Data Corporation (CDC). Probably one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time.
That’s a fair point, material abundance and consumer freedom have lifted billions out of hardship. What I found eye-opening in the essay, though, is that abundance can coexist with emptiness: when every decision is individual and transactional, we lose the shared meaning that once came from depending on one another. The argument isn’t against comfort or choice, but against mistaking options for connection.
I never really connected the modern idea of "freedom of choice" with today’s loneliness epidemic until reading this. The author makes a compelling case that our obsession with individual choice has quietly eroded the social fabric that makes freedom meaningful, turning independence into isolation.
Building a new layer of hyper-personalization over the web.
Instead of generating more content, it helps you reformat and interact with what already exists, turning any page, paper, or YouTube video into a summary, mind-map, podcast, infographic or chat.
The broader idea is to make the web adaptive to how each person thinks and learns.
Microsoft Songsmith is another one that deserved a second life. It let you hum or sing a melody and would auto-generate full backing tracks, guitar, bass, drums, chords, in any style you chose.
It looked a bit goofy in the promo videos, but under the hood it was doing real-time chord detection and accompaniment generation. Basically a prototype of what AI music tools like Suno, Udio, or Mubert are doing today, fifteen years too early.
If Microsoft had kept iterating on it with modern ML models, it could’ve become the "GarageBand for ideas that start as a hum."
I always thought Microsoft Popfly had huge potential and was way ahead of its time. It made building web mashups feel like playing with Lego blocks, drag, drop, connect APIs, and instantly see the result.
If something like that existed today, powered by modern APIs and AI, it could become the ultimate no-code creativity playground.
