I'd say we're in many ways less future-obsessed than we used to be, at least when it comes to the distant future.
You can see numerous examples ranging from magazines dating back to the 1800's (and before) of all the wacky inventions they pictured denizens of the year 2000 using (rocket packs! nuclear-powered cars! pneumatic transport!), and what life might be like (through the lens of the time). Readerships enjoyed and appreciated reading about the future and giving their imaginations fertile ground to romp.
Futurist was actually a job title.
I think now we're too busy or easily distracted to care much about the possibilities of the distant future. Most of our thoughts on the subject are now doom scenarios involving climate change, collision with an asteroid, running -out- of atmospheric CO2, or the Sun eventually encompassing the Earth.
Then again, maybe there's just a big opening for someone with the right marketing skills to fill an unmet need. I think I could be a futurist.
I was old enough to have been a young teenager when Netscape was released and connected to the web via a BBS (already had Usenet) and Trumpet Winsock. I would say up until 1998 the Internet boom was met with scepticism by the general public. Most people weren't even chatting on AOL. It wasn't until broadband became more commonplace (2000?) that I think the general public became obsessed with the Internet.
As to smartphones the iPhone (specifically the 3G) was the device I had been waiting most of a decade for after seeing my friend's Palm Pilot with Internet access in 1999 or 2000. I'm probably old enough that I discount the "smartphone boom" as I viewed it as the natural progression of existing technology. Also am slightly disappointed that the original premise of the iPhone was web apps on the phone through the browser but that quickly was replaced with native phone apps.
tldr: I think a very small percentage of people are future obsessed about the AI revolution. In the HN echo chamber it might be more but the majority of people don't give it a second thought outside of, "NO SIRI! I SAID WHERE IS..."
I'm not old enough to say but I imagine the magic behind the beginning of space exploration and the race to the moon could have been the peak of future obsession.
> I think a very small percentage of people are future obsessed about the AI revolution. In the HN echo chamber it might be more but the majority of people don't give it a second thought outside of, "NO SIRI! I SAID WHERE IS..."
Ditto. Outside of HN, I barely ever hear people talking seriously about AI. Perhaps the OP is more farseeing than I am, but to describe the world as "on the cusp of an AI revolution" still seems a little farfetched to me.
We were always this future-obsessed. Take electricity, for example, arguably the most significant innovation of the late 1800s. In 1883 Darmstadt University of Technology, MIT, and Cornell started teaching Electrical Engineering as a distinct field of study. In 1889 at the expo in Paris (now-famous for the Eiffel Tower which debuted at this fair), there was a large pavilion with various machines [1][2] including electrically-powered moving platforms suspended from the ceiling that shuttled visitors across from the mezzanines [3]. Two years later in 1891 there was an expo held in Frankfurt specifically on electrical technology [4], where several electrical innovations were demonstrated, and two years later at the 1893 Chicago world's fair, there was even more electric features, including motors, generators, lamps, spotlights, and the whole fair was illuminated by electricity [5].
This is, of course, the same time period featured in the xkcd titled 'The Pace of Modern Life' [6], which takes contemporary newspaper quotes lamenting that people are always in a hurry and rarely stop to greet strangers and instead spend their commutes on the trains with their noses buried in newspapers, showing that today's critiques about people lost in their smartphones are more than a century old.
So yeah, I'd say we've always been obsessed with the future.
There's always something to anticipate around the corner, because the future is actively marketed to you. Oftentimes this marketing precedes the actual goods being of value - for example, VR went through a hype cycle circa 1990-1995, then disappeared for a while, because it really just wasn't doing very much yet, back then - and the headset and motion sensing tech was conflated into the onrush of CGI imagery, interactive 3D scenes, digital video, and internet technology. Most of that stuck around and consequently became ordinary. When the technology is actually the future, it becomes pervasive and ordinary very quickly. When it's a hype bubble, it crashes after a while and a bunch of companies fail.
That was the dot-com bubble: even though the internet was a big deal, pets.com and Webvan were not viable internet companies as they took on something the ecosystem wasn't ready for. They did, however, anticipate, and market to, a future where their business became viable, in the form of today's Amazon. 1990's Amazon was purely a bookseller, and perpetually viewed as sitting on a knife-edge.
Now we have a second hype cycle for VR, and while it's much better stuff this time, that doesn't mean it's actually the future. The hype around AI is similar. There was hype over previous AI techniques, too: expert systems, for example, had a period in the 80's where they were promised to do everything, assuming "everything" meant encoding a huge decision tree. Now it's the neural networks that will do "everything". NN also had a hype cycle in the 90's, but without the data and computational power, they weren't able to achieve the results we're getting today.
Developments in AI today are enumerated in achievements that become banal moments after you first hear of them: Watson beat a Jeopardy! champion. AlphaGo beat a top-level Go player. We can detect cats in images. Cars can self-drive a course better than trained race-car drivers. And so on.
It's good to be excited about the future. The marketing hype is not evil, it's necessary - it creates a dialogue, focusing people to think in terms of new technology. It's not the same as its realization, which tends to be more of a "one morning I woke up and realized I was in the future" self-reflection.
> Our most important breakthroughs happened at a time of little marketing hype.
I think what he meant was that a marketing hype pushes more people to get to grips with a new technology, and thus speeds up its development. The actual technology obviously has to have been invented (the breakthrough was there) but the hype pushes it further towards maturity.
Late thirties here, I expected we'd be in flying cars and live in big glass bubbles by now. Technology is moving fast but still too slow for my taste.
And basically I feel like that's it for my lifetime. There will be incremental changes from here on out. I really hope I'm wrong though and some huge breakthrough in energy or astrophysics or biology or whatever knocks me on my ass.
The average driver having access to flying cars sounds like a nightmare. Let's perfect self driving cars first before my klutz of a niece has access to flying missiles.
Yes. However, airplanes also need help from a multi-billion dollar agency, schedules planned far in advance, propogation of delayed or early arriving flights throughout the whole system, scores of ground and tower air traffic controllers to assist in taking off, landing, taxiing, and mid-air collisions, and the pilots, I imagine, need to learn a voluminous amount of laws, regulations, signals, etc.
Assuming flying cars travel at the roughly same altitude as helicopters, even if I didn't take all of the above into account, I have serious doubts as to whether autopilot could handle flying through Manhattan by itself.
There do exist personal flying devices for the ultra-rich. But if you look at how inefficient our current system is and try to put as many planes in the sky as there are cars on the ground....not looking good.
Plus, imagine you live in NYC or LA. You'd barely get any sunlight on the ground with all the planes in the air. I thought flying cars would be cool too. Then I looked at traffic conditions in LA and said "If this is the best we can do on the ground, then I don't want to see flying cars in my lifetime. The Futurama tube looks much more practical."
I was thinking about something like antigravity..So cars can have six degrees of freedom...So no need to take off/land in the conventional sense...I believe movies like Blade Runner and Fifth element featured cars like that.
In that case, manual driving will be mostly like sailing a ship. Equipped with a gps, the car can maintain a course. And with a radar with a sufficient range, it can alert incoming bogies so that user can take proper action...
I think more reasonable would be a system of 'power-line-like zipcords that fly high, and fast but are fully controlled by a transit authority, and automated' -- they'd all have better organization and the same system could deliver mail and packages.
William Gibson stated his famous maxim about the future already being here way back in 1990. Just last week, Lagos, Nigeria celebrated its own "Startup Week". Currently there are over 2000 technology accelerators spanning the globe. But the "future" you and I are living in barely appears in the halcyon dreams of the vast majority of Earth's citizens!
Stanford economist Paul Romer once theorized that breakthrough technologies don't really become productive for a generation. That lag time has shrunk to about a decade.
So instead of obsessing over the "vertical" invention, think about what it means to solve the "horizontal" problem. That in less than ten years time, something you take for granted today could be at the fingertips of 4B+ people ;)
The future as depicted in various fictional sci-fi works is more or less here. Rail guns, check. Autonomous killing machines are not quite there, but the unmanned ones are becoming ubiquitous. VR, check. New, synthetic drugs appearing with increased frequency, check. Self driving cars, check. Advanced gene editing techniques, check. Elon Musk promised us interplanetary spaceships by 2020. The only staples of sci-fi missing are aliens, AGI, and sustainable fusion.
Gibson said it best. "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."
I make no predictions around AI, although I'm skeptical it will work well outside of specialized, rules-heavy environments. Been wrong before, happy to be wrong again.
My sense is we are less future-obsessed than people were in the 1950's, during the blow-off top of the atomic age. People seem more concerned with the environment, sustainability and so forth, Moore's law is slowly grinding to a halt and technical innovation, in general, has slowed down.
Culture churn has definitely increased since the 90's, however. I attribute this to us finding ourselves at the end of modernism and post-modernism, with nothing left to deconstruct, strip away, transgress or mock. This, coupled with the internet, is leading to a blow off top in culturally combinatorial attempts to avoid a return to tradition (unthinkable) or facing up to end-state nihilism (unbearable).
I feel like now is a the first time in a long time where the emerging technologies of today are looking to have a dramatic impact in the near future, and this probably gives birth to a lot of people thinking about tomorrow. I think this is a good thing.
Peter Thiel talks about this in his book, which was published in 2014, saying the 60's was the last time people were optimistic about tomorrow, illustrated by the professions people were getting into.
That was two years ago and I feel like two years later we're just starting to see the proverbial jet packs at the end of the tunnel. To start I'm sure that's bound to have more people entering machine learning rather than web development
Look at the movie 2001 released in 1968. Commercial space flights. A full AI. Living on the moon. And people pretty much thought all that was inevitable (so disappointed it didn't happen). To me this point in time seems less future obsessed.
I think in general, as a society, we are. Although as other posters have pointed out, our "future" has shrunk from trying to predict the next 100 years to predicting the next 10.
Its better to live with a solid grasp and understanding of the past and evaluate things on that basis, than to exist with a short term memory and perpetual fantasy of the future...
But the latter helps to exploit you more...So I guess that is where the big shot entrepreneurs/corporations/governments want you..
You can see numerous examples ranging from magazines dating back to the 1800's (and before) of all the wacky inventions they pictured denizens of the year 2000 using (rocket packs! nuclear-powered cars! pneumatic transport!), and what life might be like (through the lens of the time). Readerships enjoyed and appreciated reading about the future and giving their imaginations fertile ground to romp.
Futurist was actually a job title.
I think now we're too busy or easily distracted to care much about the possibilities of the distant future. Most of our thoughts on the subject are now doom scenarios involving climate change, collision with an asteroid, running -out- of atmospheric CO2, or the Sun eventually encompassing the Earth.
Then again, maybe there's just a big opening for someone with the right marketing skills to fill an unmet need. I think I could be a futurist.