
“One Hundred Years Hence”: Victorians predicting future technological wonders - samclemens
http://www.ephemerasociety.org/blog/?p=6228
======
schoen
I'd be interested in seeing a list of how each of these was achieved, not
achieved, kinda achieved, or other (based on a major misconception?).

For example, for the first series:

Aerial navigation: achieved, but not as convenient and ubiquitous as suggested

City Improvements up to date: not achieved, although it's possible to move
individual homes and buildings at great expense, and you can buy deliberately-
portable ones for certain uses

Shopping made easy — moving sidewalks: achieved, but not as convenient and
ubiquitous as suggested

Summer excursions to the North Pole: marginally achieved, but not regularly
commercially available; also, the image's notion of "North Pole" seems to be
"inhabited Arctic regions" which are not, in fact, the North Pole

Concert and Opera at Home: achieved (and how!)

No more Droughts. Rainmaking machines at work: not achieved (unreliable and
expensive rainmaking technology doesn't prevent droughts)

Dispensing with Bridge and ferry: marginally achieved, but not convenient or
popular for most purposes; [http://hydrobikes.com/](http://hydrobikes.com/) is
really awesome but still expensive and most people don't have somewhere to
store one, and other waterwalking apparatus is generally in the same boat (if
you'll pardon the pun)

New uses for Roentgen rays: achieved (!!), though not all forms are routinely
available for civilian law enforcement use

Roofed cities, fine weather insured: not achieved

Submarine Excursions: achieved, but much less convenient and ubiquitous than
suggested

Cruisers evading an enemy: not achieved, but see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUKW](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUKW) (on a
much smaller scale)

It would be neat to see this kind of analysis for all of the other sets
they've collected.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
If I think of the scale of our buildings, combined with the protection of
automobiles, I feel like we've sort of achieved roofed cities.

You can drive your car from your garage to underground parking at your
enormous Apple spaceship campus where you work, eat, and exercise under one
roof. Then you can drive to the mall where you work, shop, and watch movies
under one roof. Then you drive home. You're never exposed to the rain.

Obviously this doesn't apply to most people but shopping malls is what got me
thinking.

~~~
inopinatus
With the aid of a guidebook ("Cities without Ground", ISBN 1935935321) I have
crossed central Hong Kong on foot, above street level, from rail station to
mall to office and hotel and residential building and been under cover the
whole distance. Similarly I've walked underground in Taipei and Tokyo for
kilometers, surfacing entirely out of choice for a glimpse of sky, to remind
myself this isn't Trantor after all.

These are cities where it is a common experience to arrive at the airport,
take the train into town, and never leave cover for the whole duration of a
stay.

It may not all the be same roof, but the permanently covered urban life is a
reality today.

~~~
BerislavLopac
+1 for comparing to Trantor rather than Coruscant

------
jaza
Aside from the main theme of what has / hasn't been realised technologically,
I also find it a fascinating lesson in how society has changed, that these
drawings almost exclusively feature families and extended groups of people
engaging with modern inventions together.

In contrast, a huge proportion of modern advertising, especially for consumer
technology products, depicts an individual interacting alone. It's not just
the funny tech predictions, nor just the quaint clothing, that provide for
anachronism and sober reflection in this collection.

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rayalez
Very interestig.

Though, let's not forget, these things probably weren't drawn by the smartest
people in the world. Many of them might look silly not because they were drawn
long ago, or because it's so impossible to predict the future, but because
they were created by an artist at an ad agency, not a scientist or an
engineer.

Right now, the future predicted by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, or Elon Musk
would probably be very different, and much more accurate, than the future
drawn for a magazine by an artist.

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zilchers
They missed it by 50 years, but sure, people will be summering in the North
Pole in no time.

------
gumby
I enjoyed this but found the word "Victorian" in the title (it appears once in
the article too) odd since I have only used that term to refer to mid-end 19th
century UK & Empire. This article had a wider and more interesting scope.

~~~
baobrien
Queen Victoria died in 1901 and most of the empire was still part of the
empire by then.

~~~
gumby
That's true but Belgium, Germany, USA etc which are most of the presentation
were not "victorian".

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QuantumRoar
Typically, when people think about the future, they think about what they're
doing today and how technology could transform that.

But when predicting the future, you need to figure out what we won't do
anymore because of technology.

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Animats
Nice. I hadn't seen the US ones before. The French series, "En L'An 2000", is
well-known, and Wikimedia Commons has most of those cards at high resolution.

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vtange
We've achieved a lot of things they couldn't possibly imagine. Here's hoping
we achieve things in 100 yrs we can't even dream of today.

~~~
acqq
[http://europe.newsweek.com/command-control-donald-trump-
nucl...](http://europe.newsweek.com/command-control-donald-trump-nuclear-
weapons-492743)

"Why any one of these incidents hasn’t ended in a mass disaster is “pure
luck,” Schlosser says in the film. “And the problem with luck is it eventually
runs out.” Think about your laptop or car, he suggests. “Nuclear weapons are
machines,” he says. “And every machine ever invented eventually goes wrong.”"

[http://thebulletin.org/press-release/doomsday-clock-hands-
re...](http://thebulletin.org/press-release/doomsday-clock-hands-remain-
unchanged-despite-iran-deal-and-paris-talks9122)

“Three minutes (to midnight) is too close. Far too close. We, the members of
the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,want
to be clear about our decision not to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock in
2016: That decision is not good news, but an expression of dismay that world
leaders continue to fail to focus their efforts and the world's attention on
reducing the extreme danger posed by nuclear weapons and climate change. When
we call these dangers existential, that is exactly what we mean: They threaten
the very existence of civilization and therefore should be the first order of
business for leaders who care about their constituents and their countries.”

I have personally started to worry always more about the catastrophic software
failures. At least here on HN there are people who react to my comments who
typically haven't even heard about the concept of developing with the goal of
the fault tolerance
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tolerance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tolerance)
advocating instead the beloved "fail early fail often" as the best default
even when the topic is actually controlling the rockets(!)

[http://thebulletin.org/who-would-destroy-
world10253](http://thebulletin.org/who-would-destroy-world10253)

" _An existential catastrophe could only happen once in our history._ This
raises the stakes immensely, and it means that reacting to existential risks
won’t work. Humanity must anticipate such risks to avoid them."

~~~
yhylord
Does "fail early fail often" necessarily lead to fault intolerance and non-
robustness?

~~~
acqq
Had you read my link you'd know that "fault tolerant" means the system which
continues to do its job even when some components of it already failed. The
system designed to "fail early" simply fails by default. There's simply no
attitude of "do as much of the work no matter how many components already
failed" or "making my part failing as seldom as possible." Not the mention
actually designing the active recovery process, the complete opposite of "fail
early":

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgTs8ywKQsI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgTs8ywKQsI)

Compare that approach with the handling of the water in the Fukushima
electrical generators, situated on the edge of the ocean.

But even with all the possible care, accidents do happen. Some possibility
will remain unaccounted.

So the only good approach is to have so little nuclear weapons that the
accidents, when they happen, and they surely will happen, still don't destroy
the humanity. The goal must be "fault tolerance" on the civilization level.

Or there won't be any civilization left.

The same stands for handling the global warming.

------
smegel
Dispensing with Bridge and ferry seems like a step (no pun intended)
backwards.

~~~
mncharity
This was during the buildout of US city transportation infrastructure,
including bridges, but still with compact commutes. So "I want to go just over
there. I can see it. If the river was frozen I could easily walk it. Instead,
time/expense/unpleasantness/hazard."

Modern equivalents might be "the door is right there... but I need to find
parking", "I'm going half a mile to shop on the other side of this Appalachian
hill... it's a half hour fast drive", "I'm going just across this bay... it's
a two hour commute", "I'm taking public transit from point A to nearby B...
but because of route topology and schedules, I'll travel 10 times as far, and
take longer than if I could go direct, crawling". Fast automotive
transportation has duck taped a lot of infrastructure gaps.

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fizzychicken
for all the foresight of technology, it strikes me most that the clothing
would remain the same.

