“Toward the Year 2018”, a speculative book from 1968

Literal antigravity that doesn't take an enormous amount of energy or do anything hard to control even.

The closest thing we have to a real jetpack runs on nearly pure hydrogen peroxide. For about 30 seconds.

It's possible that he was predicting, and that those ideas were common at that time - Clarke's Childhood's End came out just one year after City (1953) and also features personal flying transport and lots of rural life (even though cities still exist).

The internet, a global communications network that everyone carries with them in their pocket on a mini touchscreen PC, is fucking incredible.

Even prisoners who go away for 10-15 years have been blown away by the advancements in cell phone technology and adoption when they get out.

When was the last time you used the yellow pages?

How much money have you spent buying encyclopedias in the last 20 years?

How much time searching for someone who has a mediocre copy-of-a-copy of bootleg tapes of that one amazing concert by the band you liked?

How many hours have you spent on the phone with a company because you lost the user's manual to their product?

How big is your rolodex?

When was the last time you had a conversation to the effect of "what was the name of that actor in that movie" and you were unable to get the answer?

When was the last time you had to spend 15 minutes planning out where and when you would meet when because your group is splitting up when on a trip?

One could argue our experience is primarily dictated by the physical objects surrounding us. This viewpoint wouldn't see a vast difference between 1966 and today.

Another viewpoint is that our experience is construed mostly _socially_, i.e. that we build our world based on our interactions with others. From this perspective, the world today would feel vastly different.

I'm 24. Many of my "meatspace" friends I first met online, often as a result of being in similar online communities, and then we progressed to a real-life friendship. Much of my social experience is based around circles of people living thousands of miles away from me, who I likely will never spend an extended period of physical time with.

Although our physical reality still seems similar, social reality has shifted dramatically beneath our feet.

Venkatesh Rao, a writer of one of my favorite blogs, Ribbonfarm, has a (rather complex) essay[1] explaining this idea of "feeling like the future" -- he argues that technologists, in fact, work very hard to make new technologies feeling _normal_, and that we don't _want_ to feel like we're living in the future, as it's, well, uncomfortable:

> we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak. To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea.

Rao, in another essay[2], also argues more specifically for my idea posed above: that the internet as a social technology has had novel, futuristic implications for our experience of life.

> When you first explore the online world, with your feet firmly planted offline, it can seem ephemeral and insubstantial. But once you tentatively and gingerly plant your feet online, it is the offline world that starts to seem ephemeral and insubstantial. The world of offline-first people (or worse, offline-only) seems like a world of people living lives without real views. Lives full of unacknowledged and unprocessed yearnings.

I don't know how much sense this'll make to you, given my parents are around the same age and they still struggle to understand how Twitter, chatroom technology, online dating, Yelp, etc. has changed the feeling/experience of reality.

At times, I resent the technological changes, as they seem fundamentally dehumanizing. But sitting from our present-day vantage point, these technologies seem like inevitable results of the Internet as it continues to change how we interact with our fellow human beings. The current political moment in the USA is already the sort of futuristic Thing driven by these technological changes, and I expect that, at the very least, politics will continue feeling more Weird (i.e. futuristic?) before it feels Normal again.

1: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-...

2: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/04/16/a-life-with-a-view/

They do, they’re just called “helicopters”.

The links you provided are very good but they deal more with theory than actual observations by a normal person.

There is one specific concrete example given in those articles - Moore's law. This is a very good example of exponential development, but only to a point. Someone correct me if I am wrong, but Moore's law was helped because its very existence affected the result. To some extent industry even scheduled their advances. If someone lied to Intel and said a competitor was getting much better speeds, I bet you we would have seen some faster improvements.