
Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot - snake117
http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/why-futurism-has-a-cultural-blindspot?utm_source=frontpage&utm_medium=mview&utm_campaign=why-futurism-has-a-cultural-blindspot
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SRasch
I feel that the author bases the hypothesis on what journalists say sci-fi
predicts (flying cars) not what they actually predict.

Most sci-fi deals with pretty radical views of culture in the future. Look no
further than Banks' Culture-series, which deals a lot with the power-
structures, norms and rules of a post-scarcity society.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series)

In one aspect futurism often looks like an extreme expression of contemporary
culture when seen in retrospect is in futuristic architecture and design. E.g.
[http://vintageindustrialstyle.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08...](http://vintageindustrialstyle.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/60s.jpg)

~~~
cstross
Planet Earth calling: _science fiction is not a predictive medium_.

It's a literary form -- a subcategory of fiction. Yes, some works of SF are
set in a plausibly-imagined future. Yes, some of these works may make
projections/extrapolations about technologies around us. But the authors are
writing in the social context of the present, and what they write about
reflects the present day's concerns and perspectives, unless they are _really_
hardcore about their futurism.

Upshot: the vast bulk of SF _isn 't_ predictive, and isn't intended to be. As
a field we sometimes get something right -- but there's an element of the
thousand monkeys eventually emitting a Shakespearean sonnet to this: we also
get a whole lot more wrong.

Source: I do this for a living.

~~~
ideonexus
Ah! I recognize you! I consider "Accelerando" futurist/transhumanist cannon.
Thank you for such a wonderful book!

~~~
patal
Do you maybe mean "canon" as in:
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canon](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canon) ?

------
mojuba
Honestly, I don't get what the article is about. Was probably expecting
something deeper, e.g. why our vision of the future is always so wrong and
dull and not only in terms of cultural changes. Take any prediction from the
1960s for example and there will be a lot of food for ridicule. A self driving
car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at _500mph_ and the passenger
reading a _newspaper_ in the meantime. Can it get any more wrong than this?

"Radio has no future." \-- Lord Kelvin, physicist, the father of
thermodynamics.

Our inability to predict the distant future only says one thing: things that
we can imagine are already happening. The gap between an idea and its
implementation is narrower compared to hundreds of years ago. With very few
exceptions maybe: AI, "eternal" battery cells, easy space travel and a few
others. So in terms of predictions, I think we will be getting only worse over
time.

~~~
coldtea
> _A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at 500mph and
> the passenger reading a newspaper in the meantime. Can it get any more wrong
> than this?_

I think those are trivial errors (got the car right, missed the tablet or
internet).

What can be more wrong is not predicting cultural and lifestyle changes
affected by technology etc in the future.

~~~
wylee
It sounds like you and the person you responded to are saying that there were
self-driving cars in the year 2000? There really aren't even self-driving cars
now, in 2015. Sure, there are prototypes (which are really cool), but there's
a big leap between a prototype and the average person owning/hailing a self-
driving car.

I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a
social/cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so
far as to predict it will never happen (at least, not for average people
getting around town).

~~~
coldtea
> _It sounds like you and the person you responded to are saying that there
> were self-driving cars in the year 2000? There really aren 't even self-
> driving cars now, in 2015._

No, I just dismissed it as close enough (the 15 year gap doesn't matter much
if you predict in the 50's-60's -- it's just 20-30% off in the date, and they
still got the technology right).

Today, besides multiple projects (Google, Apple, Tesla, GM, for self driving
cars being demonstrated etc) we have mass market self-parking cars.

> _I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a social
> /cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so far
> as to predict it will never happen_

If it's slowly introduced as a feature to new models, then as soon as people
see how convenient it is, they'll enabled it. Some people will resist because
they want to "have control" and are afraid, but most will use it. They might
start using it 20% of the time or so, when in a traffic jam, when talking on
the phone, when tired, etc. Soon they'll just leave it on most of the time. 15
years after they become mass market, small kids will have known them all their
life, so even easier for them to adopt.

------
astazangasta
A few non sequiturs:

1) 'Futurism' is the early twentieth century philosophy created by Marinetti,
launched with this enchanting essay:
[http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/marinetti....](http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/marinetti.html)

2) "Instagram began life as a Yelp-style app called Burbn, with photos an
afterthought (photos on your phone, is that a thing?)."

Is this somehow implying that Instagram invented phones on your camera, or
indeed anything at all? This seems a common sort of confusion, along the same
category as believing Apple invented smart phones, Google invented search
engines or Facebook invented social networking, rather than popularizing a
particular form of a preexisting technology.

~~~
detaro
re 2)

I'd read it as that the makers of Instagram initially didn't believe in people
actually using cameras in their phones, so the opposite of your
interpretation.

How many people did have camera feature-phones/early smartphones and did
really use the camera? Granted, I was still in high-school, but tons of my
peers had phones with cameras, but they were only used very seldomly and not
in any phone-specific way (take picture with phone if you didn't have a
digital camera with you, send to computer, treat as if it came of a crappy
digital camera)

~~~
astazangasta
The innovation that allowed this was really faster wireless networks with
internet. My first cell (2005) was a feature phone, had a camera, I used it,
but transferring it over the network was slow and painful, so sharing of any
kind was impossible. Once it was, it of course required no great leap of
imagination to start moving things to the cloud.

~~~
TorKlingberg
Also phones with WiFi, and everyone having WiFi in their home.

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Fede_V
A bit of a pet peeve, but futurism already has a meaningful definition - it
refers to an art movement at the start of the 20th century. Just because you
like how the word sounds, it's pretty poor form to recycle it to indicate a
particular trend you've 'identified'.

~~~
mcguire
Unfortunately, that ship sailed[1] in the early 1980s.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Naisbitt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Naisbitt)

------
mastazi
Futurism is this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism)
And the article is not related at all, despite the (misleading) title.

~~~
TheEzEzz
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_(disambiguation)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_\(disambiguation\))

Futurists (from future studies) refer to the field as futurism, futurology,
and future study. See usages
[https://www.google.com/search?q=futurism&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&h...](https://www.google.com/search?q=futurism&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari#hl=en&q=futurism+science)

------
gambler
The thing about futurology is that there are tons of people engaged in
"predicting". Most of them are notoriously bad at it. Most tech journalists,
for example, are so bad that they can't even "predict" the present - their
descriptions of cutting-edge technologies used today often have glaring
mistakes.

So you have to read the right people. Nearly every time I open a book from
Stanislav Lem, I am thinking: "My god, was this really written in the 70s?!".
_That_ is predictive power.

------
stillsut
Dystopian anticipations have been 180 degrees wrong:

    
    
      1.Genetic Testing -
         Anticpated: GATTACA
         What we got: A bunch of innocent people freed from jail. Who, today, would want to live in a world without genetic forensics?
    
      2. Pacifying Narcotics -
          Anticipated: Brave New World
          What we got:War on Drugs, 80's crack epidemic. Huxley foresaw the gov't forcing people to take drugs. The real problem was the gov't trying to stop people from willingly taking drugs.

~~~
onion2k
GATTACA is about genetic design rather than genetic testing.

~~~
stillsut
The protagonist doesn't wish his brother was born with his same gene for heart
failure, he wishes companies would stop using genetic tests to filter out
candidates.

Most of the movie deals with bad guys trying to find trace hair and DNA from
imposters. Genetic testing.

~~~
caskance
He wishes it the way modern antivaxxers wish big pharma would stop giving kids
autism.

~~~
Dylan16807
What? In the movie he wishes for the companies to stop doing something they
are _actually doing_. They are overzealously testing for any possible problem
and marking people as unclean.

It's unsubtle textbook discrimination, removing perfectly good candidates from
consideration. The company is hardly affected, there are plenty of candidates,
but since these people are shunned by most companies they suffer terribly.

How in the world does that related to people with imaginary causes of autism.

~~~
caskance
From his perspective it certainly must seem that way. He can probably even
point to a paper published by a legitimate researcher to show that it does
happen. Even if it was written by someone who was paid to do so and all his
coauthors later retracted their support.

~~~
Dylan16807
You're actually arguing that it is a fringe opinion that the companies in
Gattaca are discriminating based on genes?

~~~
caskance
They discriminate in the same sense that that real companies today
discriminate based on candidates' skills and experience. Selecting the most
qualified candidates and filtering out candidates because they trip certain
flags are procedurally very different.

~~~
Dylan16807
Sure, when the qualifications have anything to do with the job. When you apply
a test to applicants, if it happens to have a bias that touches protected
groups you had better have a very good argument that it relates directly to
core job requirements or you are leaving yourself open to a massive lawsuit.
Which might happen anyway.

Plus all the circumstances where you must make reasonable accommodations even
if it has some impact, as long as they can still _do_ the job.

~~~
caskance
Applying real-life ideas about what is protected to a eugenicist utopia really
makes sense to you?

~~~
Dylan16807
When we're looking at how its use of genetic testing acts as a prediction of
the future? Makes total sense to me.

~~~
caskance
But changing laws when there are radical shifts to society doesn't?

~~~
Dylan16807
Laws do not change the concept of discrimination.

There is a big difference between picking qualified individuals vs.
systematically picking certain groups over others.

He's not imagining the tests. The evidence of tests is not one guy lying in a
tiny study.

~~~
caskance
Laws are the entirety of the concept of discrimination.

------
curious_slinky
Beware: The more you understand about how inaccurate futuristic predictions
are, the harder modern sci-fis get to watch.

Especially so if you've seen a lot of older sci-fis about our present time.

~~~
mojuba
Or not necessarily about the present time. For example a long time ago in a
galaxy far, far away they had very advanced AIs but no computers or mobile
communication (in any practical form) :)

~~~
VLM
Another example, the universe of Dune had pretty impressive engineering for a
universe without computation. Yeah yeah I read the series, don't correct me
about the pre Butlerian Jihad era, etc. Dune was mostly a fantasy not sci fi
anyway.

Note there's hard sci fi and soft sci fi, and a soap opera / action flick
which happens to be "in the future" like B5 is not really predictive. I'm just
saying that very soft sci fi is indistinguishable from copy and paste style
fantasy or historical fiction. Hard sci fi like KSRs Mars Trilogy ages much
better than "80s soap opera, on a space ship".

------
jkot
> _One futurist noted that a 1960s film of the “office of the future” made on-
> par technological predictions (fax machines and the like), but had a glaring
> omission: The office had no women._

To be fair, most futurist thought work will be fully automated by now, and
there would be NO people needed in the office or factory.

~~~
Spooky23
I work in IT, in an office with about 60 people. Two women.

That prediction came true.

~~~
danharaj
It's a prediction in the sense that they didn't even consider the fact that
women are capable of working in an office. It was a lack of prediction, an
unspoken assumption that an aspect of the status quo would never be upended.

But it's ok, feminism won the fight for equality 30 years ago /s

------
andyidsinga
"The crowd promptly erupted into boos. One student declared the items “dumb.”"

wow - tough crowd. I would have been interesting just to be there and
experience the reaction.

was worth skimming just to learn about the mercury dime :
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_dime](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_dime)

------
scorchio
Culture is made up of many abstract ideas ranging from values and customs that
combine to make an interdependent complex system, prediction is impossible.
And as the norms and values were shaped by situations that were random and or
completely different to the situation we currently experience, we get another
layer of complexity.

------
legulere
I wonder if it's not more that we're ignoring the cultural aspects because
many of them didn't turn out as good as the predictions (less working hours,
more equality for instance)

------
TazeTSchnitzel
One problem is what demographics futurists tend to be. White men are less
likely to imagine a future with full gender equality and black liberation than
black women are, I would imagine. People living in the West will think less
about the rise of the rest of the world.

~~~
klagermkii
Or perhaps it's the reverse. If you ask "white men" about the liberation
status of women/minorities, you're probably going to find them MORE likely to
say that equality has already been achieved. So when they write stories,
they'll write them as if everyone is equal and living the same utopian dream
they are.

On the other hand if someone comes from a background where they feel
oppressed, they're going to write that into their work.

That's part of the point of the article. People continue to extrapolate from
what they view culture currently is, as if it continues indefinitely into the
future. I think based on that "white men" are going to view it as being more
pleasant and fair (i.e. their own experience) than minorities.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
That's true. People from oppressed groups are more pessimistic about the
future.

Or, well, pessimistic at all. One of the weird things about the post-war West
is most people honestly expect the future to be better.

