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What ‘The Jetsons’ predicted right – and wrong – about the future
- krapp 4y agoI remember one episode where George Jetson did something to make one of the robots mad and all of the robots in the show rebelled against him. For some reason my cynical adult brain misremembered it as an episode about the robots being unionized and going on strike and George crossing the line or something but I just rewatched it and there's no social or political commentary to be found, literally just some random robot gets him cancelled as revenge for getting him fired and now I'm kind of sad about it. But still, imagine living in a fully AI run world where you depend on automation for even basic needs and it can all just decide you don't exist one day, because everything around you is not only fully sentient, but also sometimes kind of an asshole. Also UNIBLAB was scary. I really like the design now but geez that towering three-eyed monster was creepy when I was a kid.
- thebiglebrewski 4y agothey lied to us this was supposed to be the future where is my jetpack, where is my robotic companion, where is my dinner in pill form, where is my hydrogen fueled automobile, where is my nuclear-powered levitating home, where is my cure for this disease
- Joker_vD 4y ago> my dinner in pill form "What the man of the future will look like? He will have small, atrophied arms because machines will do everything for him. He will have small, atrophied legs because machines will transport him everywhere. He will have small torso due to having atrophied digestive system because his diet will consist exclusively of nutrient pills. He will, however, have a large head because his brain will enlarge due to him constantly thinking... thinking how to earn more of those damned pills!" Man, the future used to be so bright! They don't make it like they used to any more...
- nemo44x 4y agoI enjoy restoring old windows and it makes me think of this a lot. It’s also refreshing to work on something “real” rather than a simulation of something. Simulated muntins (called grills now), simulated weight box moulding, etc. It’s sad the window industry decided to treat windows like a regular disposable appliance with a 10-20 year life. But that’s how it goes.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoIs it possible to restore multiple pane windows?
- ghaff 4y agoSure. You can replace broken window panes (essentially cut out old caulk) and presumably any rotted wood as well. (As sibling notes though, newer cheaper windows may not be worth trying to repair.)
- nemo44x 4y agoSure but it's probably cheaper in many cases to toss them and get a new cheap window. A lot of windows today are made of vinyl and they're absolute garbage. A higher end window from Marvin like their ultimate line. But even then I'm not sure. The spring based systems with proprietary parts will make it hard in the future when those parts aren't available anymore. It's hard to beat a rope, pulley, and weight for longevity.
- Joker_vD 4y ago> It's hard to beat a rope, pulley, and weight for longevity. What about a butterfly hinge?
- lotsofpulp 4y agoInteresting. I neglected to mention it, but I was actually thinking about the difficulty of replacing the inert gas as the reason servicing multiple pane windows would be difficult, but I forgot there are non inert gas filled multiple pane windows too.
- ansible 4y ago> they lied to us this was supposed to be the future where is my jetpack, https://gravity.co/ https://gravity.co/ - expensive and takes some training to fly > where is my robotic companion, https://www.bostondynamics.com https://www.bostondynamics.com > where is my dinner in pill form, https://mealsquares.com/ https://mealsquares.com/ It's not really a pill though. > where is my hydrogen fueled automobile, https://www.toyota.com/mirai/2022/ https://www.toyota.com/mirai/2022/ But only if you live near a refueling station in CA. > where is my nuclear-powered levitating home, OK, that one we're no where close to yet. > where is my cure for this disease https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/index.html?s_cid=11759:cdc%20gov%20vaccines:sem.ga:p:RG:GM:gen:PTN:FY22 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/index.htm...
- kristopolous 4y agoThe Jetsons were meant to be as predictive of the future as the Flintstones were meant to be historically accurate. It's part of the golden era of high concept situational comedy: The Beverly Hillbillies, Bewitched, The Adams Family, Car 54, Where Are You?, Flipper, Gilligan's Island, The Munsters, My Mother the Car, My Favorite Martian and the Flintstones. It's a strategy like the western was (Bonanza, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Rawhide), to make decent consistent content easier to produce. See also detective shows. What's much more interesting to me, take SE01E01, Jane goes to get a maid and there's 2 auditions beforehand. The first is a British maid the second is a French, so then what's Rosie? The mammy stereotype. Maybe it's too obvious to mention but I would have assumed many to find that objectionable these days. Once something gets novelly abstracted, it looks like you can punch down all you want and nobody notices.
- causi 4y agoso then what's Rosie? The mammy southern bell stereotype. What? Have you ever watched The Jetsons? Rosie is a stereotype but it's the Jewish New Yorker, not the mammy. She's sarcastic and constantly insults everyone above her station, including her owners and their bosses.
- willcipriano 4y agoI always saw Rosie as a stalwart of the working class. She's the audience surrogate. The grounded character that brings things back to earth.
- mbg721 4y agoThe working-class everyman in that era of TV comedy often happens to be a Jewish New-Yorker; I think it's a holdover from the influence of vaudeville.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoEventually these things take on a life of their own as the "industry standard" If you need an average Joe character for your content and aren't interested in making a statement with the character or expending a lot of effort rolling your own just to be different you just use the Jewish New-Yorker. Easy, done, on to the next thing.
- Poppys 4y agoGeorge is a late thirties corporate worker, so we still have 30 something years to reach the future The Jetsons envisaged.
- jackvalentine 4y agoGeorge was born this year! He’s a pandemic baby. https://www.snopes.com/articles/352023/was-george-jetson-born-in-2022/ https://www.snopes.com/articles/352023/was-george-jetson-bor...
- ComputerCat 4y agoOmg, that's hilarious!
- Groxx 4y agoThey absolutely nailed the "pushing buttons as a job" part.
- ansible 4y ago> They absolutely nailed the "pushing buttons as a job" part. And in one episode, George's button-pushing finger is sore. Long before we talked about carpal tunnel syndrome.
- Maf1 4y agoDid the Jetsons predict the future or did we just take inspiration from it?
- krapp 4y agoNeither.
- JPLeRouzic 4y ago> To 1960s audiences, the Jetsons’ videophone — a big piece of hardware whose staticky screen gives way to an image of the person trying to reach you — seemed like a dream. In early 1936, in Germany there was the first public video telephone service, Gegensehn-Fernsprechanlagen [1] I think there were experiments in Russia and France about videophones in the 1960', and indeed in US in 1964 there was the ATT picture phone [0] And in the 1960' if you had access to a copper leased line you could send data at 2Mbits/sec, that what was in Telecoms trunks between digital PBX. And repeaters were made without any ICs, on pure twisted copper lines, without any transformers, only with a few transistors, capacitors, inductance and resistances! I taught about those lines and their equipment, early in 1980 in France. It was boring old stuff at the time, I was much more interested by microprocessors! Something funny is that in 1989 there were ISDN experiments in France and business customers (in Rennes) were surprised that it was possible to send data at 2MBits/sec on copper links. Indeed this was not possible on customers/subscribers phone lines because of transformers and PCM modulation (for the lucky ones), which limited bandwidth from ~300-3400 Hertz. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony#AT&T_Picturephone_Mod_I:_1964%E2%80%931970 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony#AT&T... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony#Closed-circuit_videophone_systems:_1936%E2%80%931940 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony#Clos...
- StrictDabbler 4y agoYou have to admit, though, that it seemed like a dream that the market would ever shift to videophones. New videophones came out every few years in the 80's and 90's and failed, time and again. I saw them in Popular Mechanics, I saw them in Omni Magazine, I saw them in the bargain bin at Circuit City, still overpriced. Why would you buy this thing? What's the point of spending all the extra money on seeing the other person? Chicken and egg, most people don't have one. Won't you have to do your makeup before making a phone call? It didn't occur to many of us that your phone would be your only computer and that it would have two to six cameras so it would be a videophone by default and especially it was hard to believe the phone companies would ever let such functionality be accessed with an ordinary phone number. On its own, the videophone could never have succeeded. It had to be in a convergence device. It also never occurred to me that people would like a videophone so they can hold it at waist level and shout at it in a doctor's waiting room instead of holding it up to their ear, despite the unflattering angle of neck fat tucked loosely under a chin. </bitter>
- rsynnott 4y ago> cameras that can look inside your body I'm not sure which they're referring to, but they had x-ray machines and endoscopes in the 60s, too. > Now, savvy audiences would demand to know what the world looks like beyond the Jetsons’ space-age home. There's the implication that this is some sort of new cynicism, but the surface-utopia-with-something-nasty-behind-it was already a common sci-fi trope long before the Jetsons. People didn't really go there with the Jetsons because it was a _sitcom for children_, not because it wouldn't have occurred to a cynical adult viewer.
- maxcan 4y agoI'd love to see The Jetsons but in the Expanse universe where hard futurism is at least decently respected.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dctoedt 4y agoNit: TFA refers to "Matriarch Judy Jetson" — Judy was the teenaged daughter; Jane was the wife/mom. (I'm old enough to have watched religiously during the original run ....)
- as_bntd 4y agoPerhaps the author was confused by her white hair?
- zackmorris 4y agoCapitalism still exists in the future, though George Jetson only works a three-hour, three-day workweek, pushing a button at the sprockets factory. We could have had this too if it wasn't for 40+ years of trickle-down economics :-(