
Why our 'amazing' science fiction future fizzled  - mshafrir
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/05/29/jetpack/index.html
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nostrademons
I don't think the future really has fizzled. Did anyone predict that I could
be talking with people around the globe who share my interests,
instantaneously, without leaving my bedroom? Or that I could find information
on nearly any topic just by typing a couple words into a search box?

Heck, I'd much rather have cars, with their noise and pollution and gas-
guzzling, than horses with their shit.

I think the problem is that we quickly become habituated to any real increases
in standard of living and think they're no longer remarkable anymore. It's
more a problem with human brains than with technology. I'd be pretty pissed
off if I lost my computer, Internet, cell phone, car, dishwasher, and cushy
job where I type code into a computer all day instead of having to do actual
physical labor. They don't really register as amazing achievements on a day-
to-day basis, but when you look at 1964 and what you'd have to give up to live
back then, they look pretty darn good.

~~~
coglethorpe
"Did anyone predict that I could be talking with people around the globe who
share my interests, instantaneously, without leaving my bedroom?"

They had tablet PC's and the equivalent of internet blogs and forums in
"Ender's Game," so I assume other authors had similar ideas.

~~~
Semiapies
Writers began "predicting" this sort of thing about the same time they started
signing up for online services in the early 80s.

~~~
stavrianos
See, I'd credit Heinlein with predicting the internet back in the fifties and
sixties.

~~~
Semiapies
What works are you thinking of? When I think of Heinlein in that period, I
remember a protagonist talking with a trucker about the truck's antigrav
propulsion, then whipping out a slip-stick to figure out how far down it would
be pushed under load. ( _Citizen of the Galaxy_ , I think.)

~~~
stavrianos
Stranger in a Strange Land had some "news nets" or somesuch that seemed pretty
close to me. That's sixty-one. I poked through though, and everything that I
was thinking of specifically turned out to be much later.

~~~
Semiapies
Well, "network" had a different meaning back in 1961. :)

 _Stranger_ is one of the few (only?) Heinlein things I haven't read, mind.
Need to get around to it.

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TomOfTTB
I agree with some of the authors points but not with others. For example, I
don't think you can say "people weren't interested in the Jetpack because it
only had enough fuel for half a minute." But the future that was promised had
Jetpacks that lasted longer than half a minute so that answer's kind of a cop
out.

That said I do agree that a lot of the "future" that these visionaries put out
there was impractical. Whenever anyone talks to me about a flying car I ask
them if they've ever seen someone driving around in a broken down car that
obviously needs maintenance. Then I ask them to imagine what the world would
be like if that unmaintained car could fall out of the sky onto their house.

That alone is why I think flying cars will never be an option. Because even if
you make a law that requires people to keep their flying cars maintained there
will be those that will ignore it (see smog laws).

~~~
arakyd
Forget maintenance, what about flying drunk, or tired, or without years of
training? You say "flying cars" and people think "driving in the sky," but
it's not like that at all.

Basically, there are many different reasons why flying cars would be unlikely
to be as common as normal ones.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
NASA has been working for years on aviation-for-everybody concepts. The basic
idea is that the vehicles will self-navigate. See "Highway in the Sky" (HITS)

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sfphotoarts
I disagree entirely. Who would have thought that the blackberry or iPhone
would ever be possible back in the late 70's... I can get traffic information
overlayed on a route from anywhere to anywhere by foot, car, train, bus, I can
instantly talk or type messages to anyone on the planet, I can look up any
piece of the worlds collective knowledge instantly all while walking down the
street with a cup of coffee in the other hand...

The present is pretty darn amazing to me.

~~~
keltecp11
I agree. Who knows what is ahead. I'm very hopeful Teleportation will be
invented in our life time. If not that, thn hopefully at least a Hoverboard :)

~~~
mrbgty
Hoverboard. 2015.

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DanielBMarkham
The one thing I've noticed about comparing sci-fi future to the actual thing
is the degree that humanity is changing, not technology.

It used to be you'd think of some future tech of a hundred years from now as
being some normal guy, like you, except he'd have a jetpack, a phaser, or a
cool flying car. But what really happened was that we didn't get all those
cool external things, instead we got things that plugged into our minds and
bodies more. So instead of flying around in a jetpack, you can _imagine_
flying around in a jetpack. Instead of using your phaser to fight Klingons,
you can _imagine_ fighting all kinds of creatures. Instead of tooling around
in your flying car, we're getting more and more realistic environments where
you can pretend to pilot just about anything.

It's a rehash to say we're entertaining ourselves to death, but there's no
doubt that as far as impact on everyday lives, technology is moving from big,
cool, sleek external gadgets to small, integrated, multi-sensory ones.

That was unexpected.

~~~
anigbrowl
Perhaps, too, there's an awareness that we're running out of land and (most)
resources have already been claimed/ allocated, so it's harder and harder to
suspend disbelief in muscular external technology, at least for the near
future. I noticed the most recent Bond movies focus on villains' ability to
manipulate the commercial and legal environment rather than building
improbably powerful hardware.

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swernli
I find it interesting that no comments (as of writing this) touch on the other
intersting issue the article brought up: that Americans "prefer technology,
not radical politics, to propel social change." I think that's an interesting
point, especially given the focus of the HN crowd. We often look to technology
and innovation as the disruptive element in society, and one can find many
examples in history of how it has been exactly that. But in these modern
times, I'd be inclined to think that true change doesn't happen until the
politics catch up to the technology and accept its disruption as the norm.
Historically, it seems to me that change always flows from technology =>
social/cultural => political. When it reaches that last stage, that's when the
change really takes hold.

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asciilifeform
No, _this_ is why:

<http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html>

~~~
anigbrowl
Minus the political connotations, I'd agree. Clinton was indeed a lawyer, but
then so was Nixon. Carter came from an engineering background; one could argue
that Reagan's shift to personality politics was an elevation of style over
substance. So my point is not that his politics are wrong, but that they were
of the moment and plenty of competing or complementary interpretations exist.

We have painted ourselves into an unproductive corner with too much litigation
and an over-emphasis on economic productivity where groundbreaking ideas which
don't have meaningful analytics yet are considered too risky due to lack of
quantifiability. One man's political effeteness is another's tyranny of the
market.

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calvin
Warning: it discusses the finale of Battlestar Galactica so I'd avoid reading
it if you haven't finished watching the series yet.

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Boxer
Even if flying cars were cheap and easy to make, would we want them? They're
cool and amazing, but in real life they might be impractical.

So generally when talking about the future, maybe we predict inventions that
make for cool easily understandable stories, instead useful or plausible
inventions. That's why flying cars were predicted but the internet wasn't.

If you're not even going to be alive when the time of your prediction comes,
why would you bother to think hard about it and make an odd, abstract,
unfashionable prediction instead of a cool story about flying cars?

