One thing I notice when reading 20th century history is that people in the 1900s-1970s had much higher priors than modern people do that the future might be radically different, in either great or terrible ways. For example:

• They talked about how WW1 was the war to end all wars. They seriously talked about the prospect of banning war after WW1. Such things now sound hopelessly naive.
• Serious people talked very seriously about the possibility of transformative technological change and social change following from it (e.g. Keynes/Russell speculating that people would work way fewer hours in the future).
• As a minor example, between 1905-1915 Churchill spent a bunch of time trying to persuade the British government that on current trends, oil-powered ships would soon be way better than coal-powered ships, and the navy should be converted to oil power. I know of ~no recent examples where a major politician's main schtick was being thoughtful about the future of technology and making policy based on it. More generally, it was obvious after WW1 that states needed to be doing futurism and technological development in order to understand the military implications of modern technology.

I really feel like the ambient cultural sense among educated Americans is: the future will be kind of like the present, treating it as if something radical will happen is naive. (They sort of say that they think climate change will be apocalyptic, but it feels to me like what they're really imagining is that the world is "enshittified" further, in the same way that it sucks that DoorDash is now expensive, and maybe poor people elsewhere die.)

I think this is probably mostly because there's an important sense in which world has been changing more slowly (at least from the perspective of Americans), and the ways in which it's changing feel somehow less real. Someone who was 50 in 1945 had seen the collapse of empires that had lasted centuries, unprecedented wars, the sudden shocking rise of Communism, the invention and mass adoption of cars, radio, tanks, etc. That's just way way crazier than anything that 50 year old Americans have seen. And the main technological advances--phones, internet, social media, and recently AI--seem somehow subtler and easier to ignore, even though they have an objectively large effect on people's experience of life and on how society functions.

I think that people of the past might have reacted with more credulity to some of our claims about transformative AI.

I often feel like people I'm talking to are demonstrating an embarrassing lack of historical context when they implicitly imagine that states will be stable and that technology won't drastically change the world. (Or sometimes they say "usually it works better to trade with people than to overpower them", and my response is "that is really not a historical universal!")

Eliezer sometimes talks about how people are ruined by modern culture, in a way only fixable by reading 1950s sci-fi (or something like this, I don't remember). I wonder how much of what he's talking about is related to this.