5 ms·

Reading this litany of technologically-enabled consumer achievements, I thought of David Graeber who visited the disappointment we sometimes feel for how things

Reading this litany of technologically-enabled consumer achievements, I thought of David Graeber who visited the disappointment we sometimes feel for how things actually went from mid-century to now. "[...]Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?" (https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...) Kinda makes your list seem like an indictment. Today's world is the world capital wants to make. When you do open your awareness to the scale of effort and the broadest results, technological optimism in the future is deflated.

vikramkr 6y ago
I think its nonsensical to condemn the rate of progress because we didn't achieve a vision of science fantasy grounded in what people thought in the 1950s. A lot of those ideas are "thing that exists, but more magic." We have helicopters, but it turns out zoom calls work just as good to meet people, without the air traffic control nightmare. We have the internet at our fingers, an advance so monumental that its nearly impossible to imagine life before this. Teleportation and antigravity - I mean - at a point- thats just plain magic. I will grant the space stuff though, we should have been way further along there. But this willfully ignores the mind bending amount of technological progress that we've made in the most rapidly technologically changing period in human history in computation, biotech, nanotechnology, etc etc just because we didn't achieve some of the magic that soft sci-fi or science fantasy writers envisioned.
- nescioquid 6y ago
  > its nonsensical to condemn the rate of progress because we didn't achieve a vision of science fantasy grounded in what people thought in the 1950s That wasn't really the claim. The idea is that the ends of technology have been chosen by corporations, rather than what would have been most generally useful to humankind. Hardly an earth-shattering observation.
  - vikramkr 6y ago
    Sure, but those examples that you gave seriously undercut that. Antigravity, teleportation, those would be wildly profitable. And we've got an entire anti-aging industry investing billions into immortality drugs. In fact, the investments into immortality drugs right now is a perfect example of your statement that the ends of technology are chosen by corporations instead of what is most useful to mankind. Curing neglected tropical diseases and investing in equitable healthcare availability is what would have one of the (if not the) biggest impacts on humankind's health. Right now, what is most generally useful to humankind isn't science fantasy, we've got a few rungs to go up the hierarchy of needs before we get there. In fact, something like flying cars would absolutely be a net negative - more pollution, a new type of congestion, more types of accidents, all to solve a problem that would be solved better by functioning public transit. And in terms of usefulness to humankind - since when are innovations that are profitable orthogonal to human benefit? There are cases where its either or, but does it really make sense to go and tell someone with a disease that the treatment for the disease can't help them because it was developed by profit motives? Setting aside questions of logistics/funding models/regulations (since if we started bringing in those real world aspects then all of those sci-fi technologies fall apart) - looking purely at the technology, commercial motives developed things that are a net good for the world. There is overlap, and an overly cynical view ends up making no sense. We have it so much better than people did 100 years ago because of technology.
    - nescioquid 6y ago
      Read the Graeber article I linked earlier in case you haven't and are interested. Bio-tech is one of the industries he specifically mentions as being somewhat a degenerate case with regard to this argument. In his essay, the the particulars of technological achievement (e.g. flying cars) are rhetorical. If it isn't our current economic system with for-profit corporations driving the direction of technological evolution, what is? The question that interests me, however, is how should we, as a society, make those kinds of decisions?
baddox 6y ago
I don’t really see it as an indictment that we don’t yet have a short list of things from science fiction. The reason authors wrote about those things is because the are so beyond our technological capabilities—that’s why they make for interesting science fiction!
Defenestresque 6y ago
>Might the cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as postmodernism best be seen as a prolonged meditation on all the technological changes that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.” >That last word—simulate—is key. The technologies that have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information technologies—largely, technologies of simulation. They are technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the “hyper-real,” the ability to make imitations that are more realistic than originals. The postmodern sensibility, the feeling that we had somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation, and pastiche—all this makes sense in a technological environment in which the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things that either already existed, or, we came to realize, never would. Surely, if we were vacationing in geodesic domes on Mars or toting about pocket-size nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices no one would ever have been talking like this. The postmodern moment was a desperate way to take what could otherwise only be felt as a bitter disappointment and to dress it up as something epochal, exciting, and new. This occasionally strikes me as true when reading some of the comments in this thread about how it's easier than ever to deploy because of a new tool, easier to create a website or app because of a new framework, easier to order a car, easier to buy an airplane ticket.. I can't help but consider that we expected so, so much more.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  I think a lot of HN in general is made up of programmers at big tech companies working on what seem like small problems, but from the perspective of someone working in the biotech sector, let me assure you there's a lot going on outside of silicon valley's open offices. I mean first, lets appreciate that tech companies have actually majorly impacted the world in ways sci-fi authors couldn't have imagined, and for all the negatives, there's a reason the tech sector was (prior to recent times) so widely loved - the fact that I can reconnect through facebook with a friend I haven't seen in a decade that I may never have meet again otherwise is straight up magic and that matters. And google search and smartphones - don't underestimate them! But yeah, the valley seems to have this "hardware is hard" mentality (even though it's built off of the semiconductor industry...), but just look around. We've got for the first time ever a potentially sustainable spaceflight industry blossoming, biotech is making strides like you wouldn't believe in tackling some of the most complex diseases, your inkjet printer is a marvel of microfluidics, green energy sources are becoming cost competitive to the fuels that have fueled our entire development as a species from an agrarian to an industrialized civilization, we've got vaccines that might be ready to defeat a global pandemic within a couple years of the first case recorded. I do work in the printing and inks space. There, just recently, there's been a transition away from using UV cured or dried inks that release volatile organic compounds into new inks that are cured with electron beams - i mean, the amount of technological complexity and innovation that goes into making the packaged product you pick off the shelf have the color that it does! And these have real impacts - eliminating huge sources of pollutants and improving health and the planet. There could and should be more, especially more investment into R&D, but don't underestimate what's happening outside the Silicon Valley bubble, and don't underestimate what's happening inside the bubble either.
samatman 6y ago
Half of those things are simply impossible, as far as our model of physics is concerned. The other half mostly exist in a century after the 21st, in most Sci Fi. The nonexistence of tractor beams is no cause for pessimism about immortality drugs, since even when the trope of tractor beams was invented, we knew that physics as we know it allows for no such animal. By the same token, we know of no hard reason why effective immortality isn't in reach. I don't expect to see it before entropy takes me. But that's just realism, not pessimism.
chpmrc 6y ago
How about a counterexample? Drones? Human flying (Zapata Flyboard Air, Gravity's jetpack)? Life expectancy increasing steadily? And we do have cryogenics. The answer to "what happened to them" is the same as "what happened to curing cancer?": those things are hard. And assuming that we would have solved them by now if people had spent their valuable time on those problems instead of making ads better is just wishful thinking. Throwing more brains at a problem won't solve it more quickly, especially if those brains weren't interested in solving that particular problem in the first place (if they were they would be working on it).

vikramkr 6y ago

I think its nonsensical to condemn the rate of progress because we didn't achieve a vision of science fantasy grounded in what people thought in the 1950s. A lot of those ideas are "thing that exists, but more magic." We have helicopters, but it turns out zoom calls work just as good to meet people, without the air traffic control nightmare. We have the internet at our fingers, an advance so monumental that its nearly impossible to imagine life before this. Teleportation and antigravity - I mean - at a point- thats just plain magic. I will grant the space stuff though, we should have been way further along there. But this willfully ignores the mind bending amount of technological progress that we've made in the most rapidly technologically changing period in human history in computation, biotech, nanotechnology, etc etc just because we didn't achieve some of the magic that soft sci-fi or science fantasy writers envisioned.

nescioquid 6y ago
> its nonsensical to condemn the rate of progress because we didn't achieve a vision of science fantasy grounded in what people thought in the 1950s That wasn't really the claim. The idea is that the ends of technology have been chosen by corporations, rather than what would have been most generally useful to humankind. Hardly an earth-shattering observation.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  Sure, but those examples that you gave seriously undercut that. Antigravity, teleportation, those would be wildly profitable. And we've got an entire anti-aging industry investing billions into immortality drugs. In fact, the investments into immortality drugs right now is a perfect example of your statement that the ends of technology are chosen by corporations instead of what is most useful to mankind. Curing neglected tropical diseases and investing in equitable healthcare availability is what would have one of the (if not the) biggest impacts on humankind's health. Right now, what is most generally useful to humankind isn't science fantasy, we've got a few rungs to go up the hierarchy of needs before we get there. In fact, something like flying cars would absolutely be a net negative - more pollution, a new type of congestion, more types of accidents, all to solve a problem that would be solved better by functioning public transit. And in terms of usefulness to humankind - since when are innovations that are profitable orthogonal to human benefit? There are cases where its either or, but does it really make sense to go and tell someone with a disease that the treatment for the disease can't help them because it was developed by profit motives? Setting aside questions of logistics/funding models/regulations (since if we started bringing in those real world aspects then all of those sci-fi technologies fall apart) - looking purely at the technology, commercial motives developed things that are a net good for the world. There is overlap, and an overly cynical view ends up making no sense. We have it so much better than people did 100 years ago because of technology.
  - nescioquid 6y ago
    Read the Graeber article I linked earlier in case you haven't and are interested. Bio-tech is one of the industries he specifically mentions as being somewhat a degenerate case with regard to this argument. In his essay, the the particulars of technological achievement (e.g. flying cars) are rhetorical. If it isn't our current economic system with for-profit corporations driving the direction of technological evolution, what is? The question that interests me, however, is how should we, as a society, make those kinds of decisions?

baddox 6y ago

I don’t really see it as an indictment that we don’t yet have a short list of things from science fiction. The reason authors wrote about those things is because the are so beyond our technological capabilities—that’s why they make for interesting science fiction!

Defenestresque 6y ago

>Might the cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as postmodernism best be seen as a prolonged meditation on all the technological changes that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.” >That last word—simulate—is key. The technologies that have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information technologies—largely, technologies of simulation. They are technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the “hyper-real,” the ability to make imitations that are more realistic than originals. The postmodern sensibility, the feeling that we had somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation, and pastiche—all this makes sense in a technological environment in which the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things that either already existed, or, we came to realize, never would. Surely, if we were vacationing in geodesic domes on Mars or toting about pocket-size nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices no one would ever have been talking like this. The postmodern moment was a desperate way to take what could otherwise only be felt as a bitter disappointment and to dress it up as something epochal, exciting, and new. This occasionally strikes me as true when reading some of the comments in this thread about how it's easier than ever to deploy because of a new tool, easier to create a website or app because of a new framework, easier to order a car, easier to buy an airplane ticket.. I can't help but consider that we expected so, so much more.

vikramkr 6y ago
I think a lot of HN in general is made up of programmers at big tech companies working on what seem like small problems, but from the perspective of someone working in the biotech sector, let me assure you there's a lot going on outside of silicon valley's open offices. I mean first, lets appreciate that tech companies have actually majorly impacted the world in ways sci-fi authors couldn't have imagined, and for all the negatives, there's a reason the tech sector was (prior to recent times) so widely loved - the fact that I can reconnect through facebook with a friend I haven't seen in a decade that I may never have meet again otherwise is straight up magic and that matters. And google search and smartphones - don't underestimate them! But yeah, the valley seems to have this "hardware is hard" mentality (even though it's built off of the semiconductor industry...), but just look around. We've got for the first time ever a potentially sustainable spaceflight industry blossoming, biotech is making strides like you wouldn't believe in tackling some of the most complex diseases, your inkjet printer is a marvel of microfluidics, green energy sources are becoming cost competitive to the fuels that have fueled our entire development as a species from an agrarian to an industrialized civilization, we've got vaccines that might be ready to defeat a global pandemic within a couple years of the first case recorded. I do work in the printing and inks space. There, just recently, there's been a transition away from using UV cured or dried inks that release volatile organic compounds into new inks that are cured with electron beams - i mean, the amount of technological complexity and innovation that goes into making the packaged product you pick off the shelf have the color that it does! And these have real impacts - eliminating huge sources of pollutants and improving health and the planet. There could and should be more, especially more investment into R&D, but don't underestimate what's happening outside the Silicon Valley bubble, and don't underestimate what's happening inside the bubble either.

samatman 6y ago

Half of those things are simply impossible, as far as our model of physics is concerned. The other half mostly exist in a century after the 21st, in most Sci Fi. The nonexistence of tractor beams is no cause for pessimism about immortality drugs, since even when the trope of tractor beams was invented, we knew that physics as we know it allows for no such animal. By the same token, we know of no hard reason why effective immortality isn't in reach. I don't expect to see it before entropy takes me. But that's just realism, not pessimism.

chpmrc 6y ago

How about a counterexample? Drones? Human flying (Zapata Flyboard Air, Gravity's jetpack)? Life expectancy increasing steadily? And we do have cryogenics. The answer to "what happened to them" is the same as "what happened to curing cancer?": those things are hard. And assuming that we would have solved them by now if people had spent their valuable time on those problems instead of making ads better is just wishful thinking. Throwing more brains at a problem won't solve it more quickly, especially if those brains weren't interested in solving that particular problem in the first place (if they were they would be working on it).