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Honestly, I don't get what the article is about. Was probably expecting something deeper, e.g. why our vision of the future is always so wrong and dull and not

by mojuba 11y ago

Honestly, I don't get what the article is about. Was probably expecting something deeper, e.g. why our vision of the future is always so wrong and dull and not only in terms of cultural changes. Take any prediction from the 1960s for example and there will be a lot of food for ridicule. A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at 500mph and the passenger reading a newspaper in the meantime. Can it get any more wrong than this? "Radio has no future." -- Lord Kelvin, physicist, the father of thermodynamics. Our inability to predict the distant future only says one thing: things that we can imagine are already happening. The gap between an idea and its implementation is narrower compared to hundreds of years ago. With very few exceptions maybe: AI, "eternal" battery cells, easy space travel and a few others. So in terms of predictions, I think we will be getting only worse over time.

beobab 11y ago
To be fair, newspapers are still around...
coldtea 11y ago
>A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at 500mph and the passenger reading a newspaper in the meantime. Can it get any more wrong than this? I think those are trivial errors (got the car right, missed the tablet or internet). What can be more wrong is not predicting cultural and lifestyle changes affected by technology etc in the future.
- VLM 11y ago
  Also the temporary nature of some cultural/lifestyle issues. Just to make fun of the headline from the article, "We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace.", the failure was thinking giant buildings full of men tightening bolts on a non-automated assembly line was normal, progressive, and eternal. Men and women working side by side has been normal or at least not noteworthy for a couple hundred thousand years... a couple decades of men only manual labor factory buildings was the weird oddity. What I'm getting at is the innovation isn't "allowing" women to stop eating bonbons on the couch and go to work, the "innovation" is all male manual labor assembly line factories died out and blew away, so things are now back to more or less normal with men and women more or less working together more or less most of the time plus or minus geography and climate and individual worksite and individual instantaneous work task. Aside from fixations on imaginary pasts that never or rarely existed in the first place but fit a modern political axe to grind. Men and women not spending time together is really pretty weird on a long enough time scale. This also shows up in the car predictions. Burning basically all our fossil energy resources in a century or so is really weird behavior, so the results are going to be very weird and very temporary and very dependent at any instant on the trajectory of that very rapid burn rate and very rapid economically viable depletion rate. There's a classic graph that shows fossil fuel use over the history of our species as a flat line around zero with a crazy vertical line blip right about now. You can't make long term trend predictions about a random sized and located momentary blip. Finally an aspect of naming games. We have reasonably cheap extremely safe 500 mph self driving machines that we sit in while reading legacy newspapers just like we always claimed we'd have, we just call them jet airplanes instead of calling them cars. That doesn't mean the prediction the machines would exist was wrong, or that we don't sit in them and read newspapers today, it just means we insist on marketing them under a different name, not exactly a major miss for the prediction. So predictions of everyone having electric cars will basically be correct in that average peasants like us will use electricity in the daily grind of life, even if some marketing guy insists on calling it the electric minivan or the e-Bus or the Apple iStationWagon, OK whatever its still basically "everyone uses electric cars" in practice.
- wylee 11y ago
  It sounds like you and the person you responded to are saying that there were self-driving cars in the year 2000? There really aren't even self-driving cars now, in 2015. Sure, there are prototypes (which are really cool), but there's a big leap between a prototype and the average person owning/hailing a self-driving car. I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a social/cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so far as to predict it will never happen (at least, not for average people getting around town).
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >It sounds like you and the person you responded to are saying that there were self-driving cars in the year 2000? There really aren't even self-driving cars now, in 2015. No, I just dismissed it as close enough (the 15 year gap doesn't matter much if you predict in the 50's-60's -- it's just 20-30% off in the date, and they still got the technology right). Today, besides multiple projects (Google, Apple, Tesla, GM, for self driving cars being demonstrated etc) we have mass market self-parking cars. >I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a social/cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so far as to predict it will never happen If it's slowly introduced as a feature to new models, then as soon as people see how convenient it is, they'll enabled it. Some people will resist because they want to "have control" and are afraid, but most will use it. They might start using it 20% of the time or so, when in a traffic jam, when talking on the phone, when tired, etc. Soon they'll just leave it on most of the time. 15 years after they become mass market, small kids will have known them all their life, so even easier for them to adopt.
RodericDay 11y ago
The article is about how people into "futurism", like people over at /r/futurism or a large part of HN's userbase, keeps wishing people would stop "concerning" themselves with society and politics to bring technological future faster, have a big blind spot about what really matters and changes our lives. G.K. Chesterton points out, in reply to the original manifesto: Suffice it to say that Futurism has a gratifying dislike both of Liberal politics and Christian morals; I say gratifying because, however unfortunately the cross and the cap of liberty have quarrelled, they are always united in the feeble hatred of such silly megalomaniacs as these. They will "glorify war--the only true hygiene of the world--militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of Anarchism, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman." They will "destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice." The essay fleshes this out in a less combative way, making less assumptions about what Futurists are for, and merely critiquing their blind spots.
- stevejones 11y ago
  > The article is about how people into "futurism", like people over at /r/futurism or a large part of HN's userbase, keeps wishing people would stop "concerning" themselves with society and politics to bring technological future faster, have a big blind spot about what really matters and changes our lives. The article, and you, fail to make the case that this is anything more than a strawman.
  - RodericDay 11y ago
    r/futurism (https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurism/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurism/) sidebar: > The founder of Futurism and its most influential personality was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto, which he published for the first time on 5 February 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia, an article then reproduced in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and the composer Luigi Russolo. > Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past", he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality, "however daring, however violent", bore proudly "the smear of madness", dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and gloried in science. Notice in particular "admired [...] violence", and "however daring, however violent". The original article cites numerous examples, centrally the one about a futuristic workplace without women, and my post cites a GK Chesterton piece that directly criticizes, with quotes, Marinetti's manifesto. For HN, just consider that threads dealing with "women in tech" or "minorities in tech" or "gentrification" are routinely flagged down, with a share of the website being very vocal about wanting articles focused on technology and gadgets. Insofar this is hacker "news", about new and upcoming things, many users feel like these human topics do not qualify. They still make the front-page, proving that it's far from a universal opinion, but the contingent is there.
fennecfoxen 11y ago
I dunno, I'd could see myself reading a newspaper in that situation... probably on my tablet, but you never know. Pretty decent UI with tactile feedback, high-contrast display, lightweight, disposable.
- mojuba 11y ago
  Yep, with the only thing seriously missing being search.
  - sbmassey 11y ago
    Maybe we eventually get clever enough to print tablet functionality, including search, on a sheet of paper.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
>So in terms of predictions, I think we will be getting only worse over time. Are there any serious minds trying predictions? When we talk about futurism, in reality it just ends up being weirdos on the internet (hi /r/futurism which is always 10-15 years away from some tech revolution) or whatever sci-fi authors are doing today. Except sci-fi isn't futurism, its literature. These authors aren't trying to divine the future, they're trying to write sellable dramatic stories. There's a reason Star Wars has action-packed dogfighting and not boring over the horizon missile launches. Or up-close-and-personal lightsaber fights instead of drones attacks from miles away. Maybe getting the future right isn't that tough. Some investors seem to be able to do it. It just doesn't seem that anyone is seriously trying outside of the limited scope or very near future investing. I imagine there's a poor value proposition here. Maybe you can tell us that in 30 years some hot new tech will be common, but if it costs $50m to get to that conclusion, is it worth it? Especially if you can't monopolize that tech? I also think its a little foolish for the author to conflate technology and society. You can get a car or an iphone in Saudi Arabia with no problem, but if you're a woman, you can't drive the car, but you can use the iphone. Social advances don't propagate out like technological ones do. Or if you're gay you can run a powerful company and be influencial like Tim Cook or Peter Theil, but Tim Cook's equivalent in Russia would have been discriminated away from any position of power.

by mojuba 11y ago

beobab 11y ago

To be fair, newspapers are still around...

coldtea 11y ago

>A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at 500mph and the passenger reading a newspaper in the meantime. Can it get any more wrong than this? I think those are trivial errors (got the car right, missed the tablet or internet). What can be more wrong is not predicting cultural and lifestyle changes affected by technology etc in the future.

VLM 11y ago
Also the temporary nature of some cultural/lifestyle issues. Just to make fun of the headline from the article, "We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace.", the failure was thinking giant buildings full of men tightening bolts on a non-automated assembly line was normal, progressive, and eternal. Men and women working side by side has been normal or at least not noteworthy for a couple hundred thousand years... a couple decades of men only manual labor factory buildings was the weird oddity. What I'm getting at is the innovation isn't "allowing" women to stop eating bonbons on the couch and go to work, the "innovation" is all male manual labor assembly line factories died out and blew away, so things are now back to more or less normal with men and women more or less working together more or less most of the time plus or minus geography and climate and individual worksite and individual instantaneous work task. Aside from fixations on imaginary pasts that never or rarely existed in the first place but fit a modern political axe to grind. Men and women not spending time together is really pretty weird on a long enough time scale. This also shows up in the car predictions. Burning basically all our fossil energy resources in a century or so is really weird behavior, so the results are going to be very weird and very temporary and very dependent at any instant on the trajectory of that very rapid burn rate and very rapid economically viable depletion rate. There's a classic graph that shows fossil fuel use over the history of our species as a flat line around zero with a crazy vertical line blip right about now. You can't make long term trend predictions about a random sized and located momentary blip. Finally an aspect of naming games. We have reasonably cheap extremely safe 500 mph self driving machines that we sit in while reading legacy newspapers just like we always claimed we'd have, we just call them jet airplanes instead of calling them cars. That doesn't mean the prediction the machines would exist was wrong, or that we don't sit in them and read newspapers today, it just means we insist on marketing them under a different name, not exactly a major miss for the prediction. So predictions of everyone having electric cars will basically be correct in that average peasants like us will use electricity in the daily grind of life, even if some marketing guy insists on calling it the electric minivan or the e-Bus or the Apple iStationWagon, OK whatever its still basically "everyone uses electric cars" in practice.
wylee 11y ago
It sounds like you and the person you responded to are saying that there were self-driving cars in the year 2000? There really aren't even self-driving cars now, in 2015. Sure, there are prototypes (which are really cool), but there's a big leap between a prototype and the average person owning/hailing a self-driving car. I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a social/cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so far as to predict it will never happen (at least, not for average people getting around town).
- coldtea 11y ago
  >It sounds like you and the person you responded to are saying that there were self-driving cars in the year 2000? There really aren't even self-driving cars now, in 2015. No, I just dismissed it as close enough (the 15 year gap doesn't matter much if you predict in the 50's-60's -- it's just 20-30% off in the date, and they still got the technology right). Today, besides multiple projects (Google, Apple, Tesla, GM, for self driving cars being demonstrated etc) we have mass market self-parking cars. >I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a social/cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so far as to predict it will never happen If it's slowly introduced as a feature to new models, then as soon as people see how convenient it is, they'll enabled it. Some people will resist because they want to "have control" and are afraid, but most will use it. They might start using it 20% of the time or so, when in a traffic jam, when talking on the phone, when tired, etc. Soon they'll just leave it on most of the time. 15 years after they become mass market, small kids will have known them all their life, so even easier for them to adopt.

RodericDay 11y ago

The article is about how people into "futurism", like people over at /r/futurism or a large part of HN's userbase, keeps wishing people would stop "concerning" themselves with society and politics to bring technological future faster, have a big blind spot about what really matters and changes our lives. G.K. Chesterton points out, in reply to the original manifesto: Suffice it to say that Futurism has a gratifying dislike both of Liberal politics and Christian morals; I say gratifying because, however unfortunately the cross and the cap of liberty have quarrelled, they are always united in the feeble hatred of such silly megalomaniacs as these. They will "glorify war--the only true hygiene of the world--militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of Anarchism, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman." They will "destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice." The essay fleshes this out in a less combative way, making less assumptions about what Futurists are for, and merely critiquing their blind spots.

stevejones 11y ago
> The article is about how people into "futurism", like people over at /r/futurism or a large part of HN's userbase, keeps wishing people would stop "concerning" themselves with society and politics to bring technological future faster, have a big blind spot about what really matters and changes our lives. The article, and you, fail to make the case that this is anything more than a strawman.
- RodericDay 11y ago
  r/futurism (https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurism/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurism/) sidebar: > The founder of Futurism and its most influential personality was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto, which he published for the first time on 5 February 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia, an article then reproduced in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and the composer Luigi Russolo. > Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past", he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality, "however daring, however violent", bore proudly "the smear of madness", dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and gloried in science. Notice in particular "admired [...] violence", and "however daring, however violent". The original article cites numerous examples, centrally the one about a futuristic workplace without women, and my post cites a GK Chesterton piece that directly criticizes, with quotes, Marinetti's manifesto. For HN, just consider that threads dealing with "women in tech" or "minorities in tech" or "gentrification" are routinely flagged down, with a share of the website being very vocal about wanting articles focused on technology and gadgets. Insofar this is hacker "news", about new and upcoming things, many users feel like these human topics do not qualify. They still make the front-page, proving that it's far from a universal opinion, but the contingent is there.

fennecfoxen 11y ago

I dunno, I'd could see myself reading a newspaper in that situation... probably on my tablet, but you never know. Pretty decent UI with tactile feedback, high-contrast display, lightweight, disposable.

mojuba 11y ago
Yep, with the only thing seriously missing being search.
- sbmassey 11y ago
  Maybe we eventually get clever enough to print tablet functionality, including search, on a sheet of paper.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

>So in terms of predictions, I think we will be getting only worse over time. Are there any serious minds trying predictions? When we talk about futurism, in reality it just ends up being weirdos on the internet (hi /r/futurism which is always 10-15 years away from some tech revolution) or whatever sci-fi authors are doing today. Except sci-fi isn't futurism, its literature. These authors aren't trying to divine the future, they're trying to write sellable dramatic stories. There's a reason Star Wars has action-packed dogfighting and not boring over the horizon missile launches. Or up-close-and-personal lightsaber fights instead of drones attacks from miles away. Maybe getting the future right isn't that tough. Some investors seem to be able to do it. It just doesn't seem that anyone is seriously trying outside of the limited scope or very near future investing. I imagine there's a poor value proposition here. Maybe you can tell us that in 30 years some hot new tech will be common, but if it costs $50m to get to that conclusion, is it worth it? Especially if you can't monopolize that tech? I also think its a little foolish for the author to conflate technology and society. You can get a car or an iphone in Saudi Arabia with no problem, but if you're a woman, you can't drive the car, but you can use the iphone. Social advances don't propagate out like technological ones do. Or if you're gay you can run a powerful company and be influencial like Tim Cook or Peter Theil, but Tim Cook's equivalent in Russia would have been discriminated away from any position of power.