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Many future predictions from the 1950s were based on the promise of unlimited electricity. Once this comes to pass, we can have hovercars and whatnot. Instead,
by Nav_Panel 9y ago
Many future predictions from the 1950s were based on the promise of unlimited electricity. Once this comes to pass, we can have hovercars and whatnot.
Instead, we got "unlimited" information. Although this doesn't translate as well into physical products, the world still looks/feels wildly futuristic if you orient your perspective correctly.
- melling 9y agoThe world feels wildly futuristic? Can you explain? I was born in 1966. Computer games and the special effects in movies look better, but to claim the world looks wildly futuristic is an exaggeration.
- Danihan 9y agoYou're an example of not orienting your perspective properly.. ;) The internet, a global communications network that everyone carries with them in their pocket on a mini touchscreen PC, is fucking incredible. Even prisoners who go away for 10-15 years have been blown away by the advancements in cell phone technology and adoption when they get out.
- melling 9y agoThe Internet is about 5 decades old. I shot the shit almost exactly like this on Usenet decades ago. Cell phones? They’re smaller, great. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2010/09/23/gordon_gekko_s_cell_phone.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2010/09/23/gordon_gekko_... Everyone expects the world to change, and advance. It’s not fucking incredible. Even John Sculley saw it coming. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cultofmac.com/120716/apple-knowledge-navigator-video-from-1987-predicts-siri-ipad-and-more/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cultofmac.com/120716/apple-...
- aidenn0 9y agoCell phones were still futuristic in the 80s, and they were science fiction in the 60s.
- melling 9y agoNo one is that progress hasn’t been made. We expect progress. Moore’s Law. What is being said is that the world is not wildly futuristic.
- dtech 9y agoBut now you're just placing an arbitrary bar on how much progress can be made without it being futuristic.
- goatlover 9y agoBut it's not _wildley_ futuristic. I'm not taking a flying car to a space elevator to visit my relatives on Mars while my house and pets are left in the care of my android maid. Wasn't it Buzz Aldrin who said he was promised Mars colonies but got Facebook instead? For some of us, that tradeoff doesn't seem terribly futuristic.
- Danihan 9y agoI get your point, but space exploration and robots everywhere aren't the only types of "wildly different" futures. People just have latched onto those two things as facile benchmarks.
- aidenn0 9y agoWe carry supercomputers in our pockets for the primary purpose of broadcasting pictures of food we are about to eat. If that's not wildy futuristic (and perhaps a bit dystopian), I'm not sure what is.
- varjag 9y agoIf anything, my cellphone was tiniest around 2004 and gradually bloated back to mid-1990s sizes.
- goatlover 9y agoIt is incredible, and most people didn't see it coming, but compared to the scifi stuff I read and watched as a kid, the future doesn't feel all that mind-blowing, at least so far. Part of it is living through it and adjusting to the changes, but I was also born into a world that had TVs, telephones, microwaves, VCRs, satellites, space programs, and personal computers. Computer networks and games existed back then. Miniaturization and Moore's law was known about. I think living through the early 20th century might have been more mind blowing.
- ako 9y agoThat's the problem: living through it and adjusting to changes. How do you feel about the chance of living twice as long as your current life expectancy? Sounds great right? Does it also feel just as great that you already have twice the life expectancy of 140 years ago? https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/die-another-day/309541/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/die-ano...
- goatlover 9y agoDoes that double life expectancy take into account infant mortality rates? It's not like people living into their 70s was that unheard of back then, it's just that it was easier to die younger. And yeah, I'm living through it, but it still feels largely like the world I was born into with some additional advances in computing. A huge part of the world is based on incremental improvements on stuff that has existed since the earlier 20th century.
- greenhouse_gas 9y agoIt's because there's a difference between cool and usable. For example - compare a Virtual Reality 3D city you can scroll around on your computer, visiting different houses, "chatting" with them, then reading what they posted on their public refrigerator door, then maybe reading some books from their shelf, watch a movie together then you "walk" to a library ... To the internet (Facebook + Wikipedia). What's cooler? Obviously #1. What's more usable? #2. If you could go back in time to the 70s, what would you show on a futuristic movie? #1, since the you want to "wow" your audience, who won't have to deal with such mundane issues as vertigo, or rapid navigability, or searchability. But it's not that we can't do #1. We not only could do it, but there were many tries (VRML was supposed to be the "next big thing" since the 90's). It's just that our current UI is better.
- aidenn0 9y agoWhen was the last time you used a paper map? When was the last time you used the yellow pages? How much money have you spent buying encyclopedias in the last 20 years? How much time searching for someone who has a mediocre copy-of-a-copy of bootleg tapes of that one amazing concert by the band you liked? How many hours have you spent on the phone with a company because you lost the user's manual to their product? How big is your rolodex? When was the last time you had a conversation to the effect of "what was the name of that actor in that movie" and you were unable to get the answer? When was the last time you had to spend 15 minutes planning out where and when you would meet when because your group is splitting up when on a trip?
- melling 9y ago“When was the last time you used a paper map?” We need to define “wildly futuristic”. I think we have “wildly” different definitions.
- ghkso 9y agoDo you think the people of the 1960's wouldn't find wildly futuristic this: http://www.mobileshop.eu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/google-maps-on-mobile-phone.jpg http://www.mobileshop.eu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/goo... ? This is almost like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was sci-fi in 1978.
- planteen 9y ago"When was the last time you used a paper map?" "When was the last time you had to spend 15 minutes planning out where and when you would meet when because your group is splitting up when on a trip?" I do these things all the time as many of my hobbies are outdoor activities. For example, at Arapahoe Basin, a ski area in Colorado near Denver, cell reception is non-existent. So you need to have a plan for people to meet up when we get on the mountain, where to meet for lunch, where at the end of the day. And even at ski resorts with cell coverage, it is far easier in a group to discuss how you are going to meet after the run because people will invariably get separated. E.g., if I'm at Vail, "Meet on the skier's left side of Northwoods, do not go all the way to the base." I always bring paper maps when backpacking and hiking. Sometimes when you are going camping, you have to have this all planned ahead of time since once again cell coverage may be non-existent. And someone always knows where I am going and when I should be back in case I need a rescue. I also go caving as a hobby, and all of these things are especially important there.
- daanlo 9y agoHow about a "robot" beating the world's best chess player after 1/2 days worth of training or the ability to virtually cure HIV/AIDS (that certainly seemed impossible in the eighties) or music without instruments or singers and only wildly flashing lights (the value of EDM is debatable, but it would certainly feel futuristic to someone from the 60ies) or the ability to speak in real time video to someone on the other side of the world while taking a stroll through the park (star wars had holigrams, but they were pre-recorded material and not real time)
- Jedi72 9y agoYour music example is a great one for shpwcasing how little things change. Sure the sound is different but everyones still bopping along to a 4/4 rock beat
- ako 9y agoI got a big scifi moment when i received a video-call from my dad while driving on the highway because he wanted to show me the vacuum robot driving around his house.
- Nav_Panel 9y agoWhat dictates our experience, our "feelings" about the world? One could argue our experience is primarily dictated by the physical objects surrounding us. This viewpoint wouldn't see a vast difference between 1966 and today. Another viewpoint is that our experience is construed mostly _socially_, i.e. that we build our world based on our interactions with others. From this perspective, the world today would feel vastly different. I'm 24. Many of my "meatspace" friends I first met online, often as a result of being in similar online communities, and then we progressed to a real-life friendship. Much of my social experience is based around circles of people living thousands of miles away from me, who I likely will never spend an extended period of physical time with. Although our physical reality still seems similar, social reality has shifted dramatically beneath our feet. Venkatesh Rao, a writer of one of my favorite blogs, Ribbonfarm, has a (rather complex) essay[1] explaining this idea of "feeling like the future" -- he argues that technologists, in fact, work very hard to make new technologies feeling _normal_, and that we don't _want_ to feel like we're living in the future, as it's, well, uncomfortable: > we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak. To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea. Rao, in another essay[2], also argues more specifically for my idea posed above: that the internet as a social technology has had novel, futuristic implications for our experience of life. > When you first explore the online world, with your feet firmly planted offline, it can seem ephemeral and insubstantial. But once you tentatively and gingerly plant your feet online, it is the offline world that starts to seem ephemeral and insubstantial. The world of offline-first people (or worse, offline-only) seems like a world of people living lives without real views. Lives full of unacknowledged and unprocessed yearnings. I don't know how much sense this'll make to you, given my parents are around the same age and they still struggle to understand how Twitter, chatroom technology, online dating, Yelp, etc. has changed the feeling/experience of reality. At times, I resent the technological changes, as they seem fundamentally dehumanizing. But sitting from our present-day vantage point, these technologies seem like inevitable results of the Internet as it continues to change how we interact with our fellow human beings. The current political moment in the USA is already the sort of futuristic Thing driven by these technological changes, and I expect that, at the very least, politics will continue feeling more Weird (i.e. futuristic?) before it feels Normal again. 1: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-nauseous/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-... 2: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/16/a-life-with-a-view/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/16/a-life-with-a-view/
- lazerpants 9y agoThe world of medicine and scientific research has undeniably improved. Transplants, medical imaging (MRI or CT), almost any drug you will probably take, genomic science, disease diagnosis, cancer immunotherapies, electron-microscopy, and a lot more were either non-existent or crude in 1966. You are much better off getting sick today (assuming you can afford it).
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- philipkglass 9y agoYou don't get hovercars just from too-cheap-to-meter electricity. If energy cost were the main obstacle, upper-income people would already have hovercars, because spending 4x more on fuel than people driving wheeled vehicles would be fine for them. Some 1968 futurology predictions seem like they might have come to pass had energy remained as relatively cheap as it was in 1968. Others of them were frankly ridiculous regardless of the price of energy. According to the Amazon review, disintegrator rays and anti-gravity belts were a couple of the predicted developments from "Toward the Year 2018." There was no scientific phenomenon known in 1968 by which either of these could be implemented. It's like the predictors reasoned "science fiction was prescient in predicting artificial satellites and travel to the moon, therefore its other popular tropes will eventually come to pass too." There's a lot still to explain about the universe: dark matter, baryon asymmetry, dark energy... But I'm not convinced that new insights into these problems, if/when they arrive, will unlock significant new technological capabilities, any more than the discovery of neutron stars led to new superhard/superdense materials for human use. I think it's quite likely that humans never tame a more energetic primary energy source than nuclear fusion[1], nor send messages or vessels faster than light, nor manipulate gravity with the facility that we manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum. The engineering permitted by classical and quantum mechanics, modulo additional limits imposed by relativity, is vast. But it can't deliver everything that science fiction imagines. Inertial compensators, gravity manipulation, tractor beams, teleporters, disintegration rays, time travel, FTL: nope, probably not. [1] Storage and use of antimatter for compact power sources seems like it may be eventually plausible, but it would function more as a super-energetic "battery" charged by other primary energy sources.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]