Why Our "Amazing" Science Fiction Future Fizzled 499
An anonymous reader sends in a story at CNN about how our predictions for the future tend to be somewhat accurate (whether or not we can do a thing) yet often too optimistic (whether or not it's practical). Obvious example: jetpacks. Quoting:
"Joseph Corn, co-author of 'Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future,' found an inflated optimism about technology's impact on the future as far back as the 19th century, when writers like Jules Verne were creating wondrous versions of the future. Even then, people had a misplaced faith in the power of inventions to make life easier, Corn says. For example, the typical 19th-century American city was crowded and smelly. The problem was horses. They created traffic jams, filled the streets with their droppings and, when they died, their carcasses. But around the turn of the 20th century, Americans were predicting that another miraculous invention would deliver them from the burden of the horse and hurried urban life — the automobile, Corn says. 'There were a lot of predictions associated with early automobiles,' Corn says. 'They would help eliminate congestion in the city and the messy, unsanitary streets of the city.' Corn says Americans' faith in the power of technology to reshape the future is due in part to their history. Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future. They prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change."
The real reason. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Scaling is the future (Score:5, Interesting)
The future is not flying cars or gee wiz, it's about changes in productivity.
Cars did change things drastically. In particular they allowed both suburbs and concentration of commerce centers people could travel to. Trucks could now go to stores as well lessening the importance of trains and hubs. It impacted things you don't think about as well like farming.
so did steam boats. You have the whole development along the missiispi for example. It's worth noting that just before the revoluionary war with "america" in england there were two IPOs offered: one for steam troop transport development and the other for the development of a machine gun. Both IPOs failed due to the South Sea stock company (a ponzi scheme) offering better terms (leading to the first stock market crash later). But if there had been military steam ships in 1776, the queen would be on our money.
progress is about changing scales that create new organizational paradigms. eventually each new growth opportunity saturates and becomes yucky in a new way. look at coal polluted cities. at the start coal was a miracle comapred to wood heat or no heat. Look at the productivity created by assembly lines then think about the pre-union industrial working conditions that shortly followed.
Consider the height to which buildings could be built and how that has also led to crowding. instead of hobo housing for the poor we now have low cost housing in high rises--- and the stagnating socio economics that result from that.
basically progress is: innovation creates new paradigms for growth which then satrurate and become bad in new ways.
Re:I *am* living in the furture.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you've touched on the real problem... the rate of change is so fast now that no one even notices. In Future Shock Toffler talked about how there are people that just can't deal with the rate of change of the 1960s, and they suffer from a form of disconnection similar to Culture Shock - but with no way to escape from it except drop out of society.
But those people have dropped out of society; they're in their 80s and 90s. Devices that my father looks at in bewilderment and refuses to even think about are instantly picked up by my daughter who never gives it a second though.
Progress is so rapid and all-encompassing that we just don't even think about it any more. People talk about the missing future of flying cars, telling us about it in articles they wrote on a computer and uploaded to the internet. *sigh*
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Re:Cars *are* a great improvement. (Score:5, Interesting)
In cities roller skates are one of the fastest methods around. Followed by push bikes (even if you follow the laws exactly). Folding bikes are even better as you can also use public transport when needed.
Two words (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead of basing how rich we are on money alone, we would do far better to increase the levels of the one thing that really matters for all people, by experimenting, researching, and modifying various aspects of towns and cities the world over.
This way, we can expand and refine cities until they converge towards the ideal (whatever that may be).
Still one of the most interesting diagrams on the internet [wikipedia.org] ever.
Re:Flyin Cars (Score:3, Interesting)
Additionally,
- they'll have to know how much fuel they have and refuse to go anywhere out of range of a filling station.
- They'll have to know the weather everywhere along the route and refuse to fly in certain conditions, including many conditions you'd be OK to drive in. Any time it's near freezing or snowing, they'd have to know the temperature and humidity at all altitudes to be certain that ice buildup would not cause a crash.
- Every active system and instrument would have to be electronically monitored somehow, and any warning would have to be an automatic no-fly. And the instruments would have to self-calibrate somehow.
- And the car would also have to refuse to fly if regular maintenance hadn't been done on schedule.
.
We're a long, long way from flying cars. And, when you consider how much they're going to cost, the real-world advantages of a flying car might not be worthwhile. Do I really need to be stuck at home every time it snows (or is forecast to maybe snow)? Or every time any little mechanical problem occurs? My current car has a lot of little tiny, non-critical mechanical issues because it has 100,000 miles on it. It's still a good reliable car that should last me another year or three. If it was a flying car, every single problem would have to be fixed and the systems overhauled.
Re:Ego (Score:5, Interesting)
the 4 barriers to progress (Score:3, Interesting)
1. stupid people who can't figure out how to use technology. This is the cause of the "easy to use" revolution.
2. religious zealots who find technology to be "indistinguishable from magic" and therefore "against god".
3. government who chooses not to invest in new technologies and continues to utilize old technologies due to budgeting priorities.
4. industry as a whole who buys and buries new technologies until they can no longer sell old technologies.
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You'll need difference examples (Score:3, Interesting)
Twitter, Facebook, blogs, mobile devices allowing you to ...
They don't count until they've been around for 1 generation or more.
Until then, they either count as fads or don't count at all as they won't have or have had a lasting effect on the world.
As an example, 8-track stereo doesn't count as an "exciting (new) technology" except in the minds of the marketing departments as it had no effect on the world as a whole, and didn't change our society. A.M. radio, however did make changes and is still around 70, 80 years on.
The only thing that will move these toys from a historical footnote to really earth-shattering is when someone gives them a measurable IQ. It wouldn't have to be very high, provided it recognosed speech and had the ability to learn. until then - nah!
Ad-Execs (Score:2, Interesting)
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De-scaling is the future (Score:5, Interesting)
basically progress is: innovation creates new paradigms for growth which then saturate and become bad in new ways.
I take issue with this. There are two types of technological innovation, those which enable more efficient collectivization, and those which enable more efficient individualization of society.
All of your examples of things "becoming bad" involve the (over-)application of the former type, collective technological innovations. I would argue that the second type of individual technological innovation is immune to this type of obsolescence. Individual technological innovations merely involve a trade-off in labor for capital. Once a particular technology has improved to the point that this trade-off becomes acceptable to the individual, the technology finds widespread use. Since it is an individual trade-off, there is nothing but individual preference or resource exhaustion that will ever change this dynamic. Collective technologies, on the other hand, also involve a trade-off in individual rights to the rights of the collective. Given two equally efficient technologies, a person will always choose the individual technology over the collective one. As technologies improve, collective technologies will tend to be replaced with more individualist technologies due to this defect.
Laundromats, for instance, have "become bad" and been mostly replaced with individual washers, even though laundromats are more efficient. Suburbs, perhaps, you may argue, are an individualist technology that has "gone bad". But I think that is more due to a failure of (collective) energy production technologies. And I would argue that the same type of individualized technological innovation is currently under way in the energy field in order to make up for collective energy production having "gone bad". Barring complete breakdown of collective energy production and failure of more individualized technologies, I don't see automobiles ever being replaced by more collective transport methods. So I will concede that energy production will likely remain collectivized until Mr. Fusion is produced. Other than that, I believe all other production technologies will tend to follow the path I have outlined.
Ultimately, while you may see a cycle of boom and bust due to technological innovation, I only see a cycle of boom and bust in technological innovations that require collective ownership and use, such as high-rises, assembly-lines, and fossil fuels. These technologies are subject to monopolization and negative externalities that offset their benefits. In individual technological innovations, I believe there is more steady improvement.
Re:Scaling is the future (Score:5, Interesting)
But if there had been military steam ships in 1776, the queen would be on our money.
And if a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass a-hoppin'.
The state of the art for steam power in the 18th century was not adequate to significantly revolutionize travel. 19th century steam power was built upon advances in machine tools that simply did not exist in the 1700's. A workable machine gun also depends on similar manufacturing capability. Unless you can accurately machine the brass cartridges, you simply cannot build a useful machine gun. Unless you can accurately machine the cylinders and pistons, you cannot make a double-acting externally condensing steam engine. The existence of IPOs back then doesn't mean jack shit. The fact that the IPOs collapsed because of a Ponzi scheme isn't some unfortunate tragedy that delayed science--- it's evidence that the IPOs themselves were bullshit as well.
Top 10 reasons today is better. (Score:3, Interesting)
10) We did not destroy ourselves in a holocaust by 1960, by 1980, or by 2000, as many sci-fi writers have depicted.
9) In 'Future World" marketing shows, the man watched black and white TV or listened to the radio after he got home from work while the woman cleaned and made tv dinners. Now, men can play xbox 360 all day because the women cook and clean, AND have a job.
8) The biggest alien species we have possibly countered so far is a couple of dents on the size of a martian meteor.
7) Automation has made consumer products that we know better, and allowed for the use of new ones. Seriously, have you seen the documentary about the construction of an aluminum block for an engine? There's no way a human could cut with the tolerances and precision that these machines gave, and they didn't. Reliability is much, much better.
6) Materials are better. Man, they thought the future of everything was going to be stainless steel. Now, we can consumer products made from titanium. How cool is that?
5) Dual metal steak knives as seen on TV are frankly of a better quality than some of the finest japanese swords from the samurai era. The steel on the back is better, the forging is more consistent, the sharp end has a better grade of metal...
3) We have more and better food than we could have ever had before.
2) Our computers are hands down better than the computers depicted in the Star Trek, TOS, and in fact, are better than any computer depicted in any sci-fi medium or promise before then.
1) This is a great time for whiskey. American and Scottish producers are producing wonderful, wonderful spirits these days.
Re:I *am* living in the furture.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference is that your Father wanted to know how things work because he was used to fixing things.
your daughter is happy with being oblivious and treating technology like a magic box, and if it breaks, we throw it away.
THAT"S the big difference between luddites and the future embracing people.
Most of the time Ludddites see the disadvantages of the new "technology" that is being sneaked in under the radar.
iPhone? no thanks, I cant replace the battery.
New Hybrid car? no thanks I cant work on it as I cant buy the tools needed for the Electric side.
I Understand how an iPhone works, and I could fix it, but they intentionally design it to keep me from fixing it. That sends alarms to my luddite side.
My grandfather was a Genius for cars. He could do anything with them, he even embraced electronic ignition. He HATED the Computer controlled cars of the 80's because you could not buy the tools to work on them. GM and Ford refused to release info on how to tune the ECM in the early 80's cars so you were stuck. He hated computer control on cars and would rip it out and switch it to a simple Fuel injection system or even Carbeurated.
If progress is coupled with DRM or thing to block you from working on it fixing it, it's not progress.
Re:Pfft, give me a break (Score:4, Interesting)
I get so very tired of this canard. For centuries, if not millennia, before Columbus sailed to the Americas, educated people knew that the world was not round. The idea that folk in Medieval Europe believed that the world was flat is a misconception that was invented some time during the 19th century (Russell [asa3.org] blames Washington Irving).
Re:The real reason. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, wars, real wars, as opposed to "the war on terror (drugs, etc.)", is quite logical
How do you start from something so true, and then jump right into tin-foil hat country?
The neo-cons who started the Iraq war truly, honestly believed that Saddam was a threat. They were led by someone with a clear, honest reason not to like Saddam. And, they were collectively reeling from an attack on American soil, that happened on their watch, that the "democrat" president expressly warned them about.
You don't need to invent some fanciful theory of malicious corruption to explain Iraq. The plain incometence of the neo-cons is enough.
(Oh, and for you logic-freaks out there--the Iraq war was perfectly logical, once you get a neo-con's initial assumptions. Logic is like programming: garbage in, garbage out, but the logic is fine.)
Star Trek inspired someone (Score:2, Interesting)
Star Trek didn't do too bad predicting stuff from the 60's. I think one thing Roddenberry's crew took for granted was that the computer would just 'be there' for our bridge crew. And that was 1963 when personal computing was still not really thought of. People still used slide rules and mechanical adding machines and cash registers. I think it's simply a trickle of stuff that makes it, like the article hints. Things with the lowest effort to adapting present tech to new methods will make it arrive faster than the more difficult ideas. Like food created on the fly and matter transporters. And methods for which people pay a premium to embrace will surface the quickest. Think computers, cell phones and Walkman's. A minority of people paid the sky-high prices for the originals and encouraged the knock-offs to drive the price down fast. If the power of the peoples' pocketbooks wasn't so free on "have to have" stuff we wouldn't have tiny cell phones and iPods.
Star Trek had quite a few pointed predictions:
1. flash memory cards. Back when your recording media had to move at the correct speed to recreate sound this appeared too impossible. This stuff is now down to the size of a thumbnail.
2. medical scanners. For sure this is what is MRI today. Or the further development of ultrasound. And it's getting to the size of the tri-corder sooner or later. The room you have to put the unit it gets smaller every year.
3. Tablet PC/Palm computers/PDA/Kindle. (When they had to show a pretty girl, she came around for a signature with a tablet.) Only they actually got more compact than depicted in the show.
4. communicator. The cell phone. (Okay so you don't have to be on an away-team to have one... But the perk of getting a Blackberry from your job used to be a big thing.)
Stuff that hasn't made it:
1. the hand held phasers. These hint at power storage to size greater than even the smallest battery can bring today. Plus we still don't have the kind that would stay cool in the hand as it unleashed its charge. Stunner tech is almost there but hasn't 'gone wireless' to the distance they could zap someone on the show. There's a level of energy storage we still haven't reached.
2. matter transport and creation. A single photon across a room is hardly a start on this making you a turkey sandwich on the fly.
3. space craft/shuttles to space. The X-prize was an ambitious try to getting money behind the effort. We're almost there. But I still suspect someone will 'take the skies' from those ambitious folks in the name of regulating space for the good of the earth governments and not smacking willy-nilly into existing equipment up there in orbit. (And with NASA turning back to rocket technology of the 1970's to continue heavy lifting to the ISS a sleek little space ship bus not going to come from them. The tried and true is cheap enough for government work.)
4. warp drive/small fission/small fusion. Of course, we're going to have to wait for small-scale fusion or the space race developed fuel-cell tech because there's a level of danger.
The technology might be ready to adapt to the 'next greatest thing' but the ease of use still hasn't eliminated the 'idiot factor' in the design and operation. Like the article's jet pack example. You're putting a fuel on a person and directing the jet past their body. Someone is going to make a mistake sometime. Presently, there isn't a company out there which wants to face the class action court case for burns and accidents. There's a level of risk that businesses no longer take. I think there's not a lot of individuals that want to take on that level of risk. Great strides forward might be sitting on shelves all over America because of this.
Re:Greed (Score:5, Interesting)
Despite of what all the tree huggers would have you believe, automobiles
did infact achieve their promise. It's just that most people have no clue
what the alternatives are. They have no real frame of reference. They just
examine things in terms of their limited experiences. This whole current
whining is really nothing more than "taking things for granted" and is by
no means a thoughtful analysis.
For those of us that can, it's pretty easy for us to imagine the alternative
that motorcars saved us from. It could have been better. Although we never
need the internal combustion engine for that. That's rather the point. You
never needed cars for the sort of mass transit utopia people are whining
about now.
The real point of all this nonsense is how this stuff is more about
politics than technology. You can't have jetpacks, and robocars and
flying cars because people are idiots that can't even be trusted with
regular cars and lawsuits would follow the inevitable chaos.
Re:Flyin Cars (Score:2, Interesting)
Where are you getting that from?
Even after the most severe snowstorms, you'd be able to fly over the snow sooner than the roads would be ploughed.
-jcr
Just guessing, but...
Small aircraft are vulnerable to icing. During a snow storm, this is actually not an issue. But you don't want to be in wet clouds or rain with the temperature anywhere near 0c.
At greater cost de-icing is available. But even high-end systems can be overcome by a sufficient rate of accumulation.
Then there's the simple matter of wind and turbulence. Stuff about which cars don't care make life uncomfortable or dangerous for pilots. Is the usual automobile driver going to know the penalty in runway length caused by a 5kt tailwind?
Autopilots are great...until they fail. Or a sensor clogs. Or the alternator trips.
We'll have flying cars eventually, I suspect. But we're not likely to own many. They'll be taxis in the near future. Even once automation is sufficiently safe, they'll still be more efficient as a public utility than everyone owning one.
Re:Ego (Score:3, Interesting)
I can build this box, and have the future of media and news, but I'm breaking federal laws to have it work. Greeedy asshats want to keep their old business models so they fight the windows of change. My newspaper, last news broadcast, TV, music should all be 100% on demand on my TV. I'd even GLADLY pay for it. But I cant. The "free stuff" is either locked to being viewed on a PC, or so low resolution that it's not worth watching.
I've been watching my TV shows on a 32" LCD TV for about 3 years now powered by a Mac Mini hooked into the TV's DVI port. Quality of the SD programming was acceptable. The new HD versions look great. Even better than some of the expanded basic channels I had. I'm sure if I had an Apple TV it may even look better via HDMI, but the current quality is more than acceptable to me.
About a year ago I knew I'd be spending 15 hours days at work on a project pretty much 6 days a week. I was spending about $150 a month on Phone/Internet/TV from the cable company and I only really watched about 6 TV programs. All 6 were available on iTunes. So I canceled the bundle and my TV shows have cost me about $300 in the past year.
Re:An alternate theory (Score:5, Interesting)
Compared to what and when? The middle class of forty years ago would never have considered themselves to middle class if they had two cars, four televisions, mobile phones, fresh produce from Chile flown into their local grocery store every day, etc. If people today deliberately stuck to similarly scaled expectations and monthly overhead, they'd live far, far better than the middle class to which you seem to be comparing them. They're not vanishing - you're just changing the definition.
unemployment is high
This week. Of course this country has had it far, far worse, and for years on end. We are now - at the depths of a cyclical recsession - experience unemployment rates that are about what many countries live with permanently, and a fraction of what's found in many other places. With the typical upswing that (despite the current congress's and administration's seeming attempts to prevent it) inevitably comes, we'll be back to unemployment rates that are the envy of most industrialized countries.
It's not clear that it's sustainable
As opposed to what... Marxism? Yeah, that sure worked out.
Take a look at the biosphere
Indeed. The environment is at its most trashed in places where socialist governments run the show. See the train wreck that happened in eastern Europe under the helpful central control of the Soviets, or the rapidly worsening disaster that is China.
And forests (Score:2, Interesting)
We have a lot more heavy carbon sucking forests now since the advent of motorized transport. Back before then, we needed some millions (whatever, a huge number) acres of pastures and hayfields that were required to feed all the horses and mules, especially in the heavily populated new england and mid atlantic states. So in a way it became a tradeoff, dumping extra carbon from petroleum fuels, but we get to have our forests back that help to take that carbon back in and also provide a lot of shade and cooling over huge areas.
Re:easy solution (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like a -2 ForumPost variable. When I search for info I want articles, not snips.
What went wrong? Innovation slowed down. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's worth comparing 1909, 1959, and 2009.
Almost everything we have now existed in 1959, although more expensive and clunkier. Jet aircraft, nuclear power, rockets, transistors, computers, television, car mobile phones, solar cells, freeways, plastics, antibiotics, mass produced cars, shopping malls, and home appliances were all in existence by 1959. DNA had been figured out. Even e-mail [wikipedia.org] and computer networks [wikipedia.org] were starting to work. None of those things existed in 1909.
What we have today are mostly improvements on those technologies.
What didn't we get that was expected? Lots of things. A new source of energy. Strong AI. Antigravity. General purpose robots. Workable space travel.
If you look at 50 year intervals since 1759, there's been less fundamental change in the last 50 years than in any of the previous five periods.
This is a real problem, because we're stuck with a set of technologies that rely on depleting resources that won't last another 50 years.
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