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Comment by 51Cards | Hacker News Reader

They weren't so wrong... sure their form factors were way off but they had all the ideas down...

1. Electronic Books 2. High speed aerodynamic trains 3. Computer aided manufacturing 4. Motorized personal transport 6&7. Ok no one is letting a robot cut their hair or do makeup, but we're using robots for surgery 9. Aerodynamic motorcycles 10. Webcams 11. Where's my flying car! 12. Tanks 13. Electronic news etc. etc.

If you look at the concept alone, for 100 years ago they weren't THAT far off. Personalized flight on the whole was really the only big miss.

Edit: I understand the horse one now. Back then horses were used for everything... but by 2000 they predicted everything would be machines, so seeing a horse would be a curiosity, not the daily norm. You would take your kids to see a horse, petting zoo anyone? Pretty prescient to me.

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The other big miss is that the outside scenes have one or two people and a lot of green, and the indoor scenes have a tiny amount of utilitarian furniture.

There's no sense of stuff and clutter, urbanisation and buildings everywhere and people people people.

( and the train is nothing like high speed and aerodynamic - it has balconies! )

This could be limitations of the artist and of the medium.

These images were produced by chromolithography, a many-staged process of chemical interactions. Adding lots and lots of details and tiny, realistic figures would be difficult. And perhaps expensive. I can imagine a situation where the cost of the process is an exponential function of the number of places different colours have to border each other without bleeding.

It's tricky enough to draw that kind of thing in any medium.

Personalized flight on the whole was really the only big miss.

I think the main reason that isn't more mainstream is that even with small planes, we chose to emphasize safety far more than with road vehicles. I don't know why that is; I'd gladly trade some amount of safety if it meant I could afford to own and operate a plane.

A Cessna 172 is no more complicated than an economy car. It costs $275,000 due to regulation and low volume, not because it's inherently more expensive to produce than a car.

A Cessna 172 is no more complicated than an economy car.

Not trying to sound snarky here, but have you ever piloted an airplane? The pre-takeoff checks take a little while, require a good bit of technical expertise, and are absolutely required if you want to be pretty damn sure that your airplane won't fall out of the sky. Safety is, at times, overemphasized, but then again your car won't fall from the sky when it stalls.

I read him as saying it's no more complicated to build; not that it's no more complicated to operate. This interpretation makes sense in view of his point that safety concerns (pre-takeoff checks) are what prevent widespread personal flight.

It does sound like someone who hasn't experienced flight training. You don't have to know how to drive a car by instruments alone.

You don't have to know how to fly an airplane by instruments alone, either, until you want to get an instrument rating.

As an example of a lower barrier to entry, the (relatively) new Sport Pilot certificate allows for the operation of smaller, lighter aircraft with training and testing requirements that are not dissimilar to those for getting a driver's license.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_certification_in_the_Unit...

Well, there was this time when I was two and I was sitting on the pilot's lap....

I've spent a lot of time as a passenger in small planes and I have a good idea of what's involved in a preflight. I'm not against safety in general, but I think lawsuits and government oversight have really held back general aviation. A plane should be more reliable and therefore expensive than a car with a similar level of sophistication, but it doesn't need to cost 15 times as much.

Edit: based on khafra's comment, a possible reading of my earlier comment is that it's no more complicated to fly a plane than drive a car. I intended to say that it's no more complicated to build a single-engine propeller-driven airplane than to build a car.

People often underestimate how important regular car maintenance is for safety. Just because it statically holds on ground or casual speed doesn't mean it'll grip in a quick wet corner or handle safely in an emergency situation. Hence (partly) car death+accident rate is abysmal compared to flying vehicles. In addition to weekly maintenance checks, I personally always run quick pre+post drive checklists on my car, but then that may be because I received flight education :)

Care to share your pre+post drive checklists?

Like the parent, I had an informal "pre-flight" inspection that I'd execute on my motor home on travel days. Hatches closed and locked, hoses and cables and steps and awning retracted and secured, ceiling vents closed, LP gas shut off, tires aired up, engine fluids nominal.

Righto...thanks for the explanation, and sorry for the confusion on my part.

All you need is an Airplane Parachute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a8cntPdRtk

172's were introduced in 1956. I'm certain if personal flight were more mainstream, flying could be quite as easy as hoping in your car. Further, it's easier to automate flight because of the vertical space available for traffic separation. The hard part is space for taking off and landing.

I personally don't agree that safety has held personal flight back. It's just not practical except for longer distances.

I actually agree with you, but I have also yet to see a relatively inexpensive autopilot system that can successfully navigate all of the many horrible scenarios that could arise. We're probably already (or nearly) there tech-wise, but in the current Cessnas, you still need to be able to land and take off, and if there's even a minor crosswind on landing, this requires a very good bit of training and understanding of the technical limitations of the airplane. Not impossible for people to learn, but certainly a lot more difficult than "gas = go, break = stop, wheel left = turn left, wheel right = turn right".

As far as safety goes...I agree that personal flight has a great track record. But it's difficult to say if this would continue (absent a beautiful autopilot system) if we gave out pilot's licenses to 90% of 17 year olds and filled the sky with millions of small aircraft.

with all this modern priority of safety over everything else, man on the Moon is impossible. Heck, even bringing an open fire into a cold dump cave full of people would be a grave safety violation.

I'm pretty sure that if we were that worried about health and safety we wouldn't send troops into war zones.

James May puts it very nicely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS0IxnxwJSU

Fly an ultralight instead? Then you don't have to deal with regulations and all that.

I think if people really wanted to fly, there would be mass-market ultralights. But the reality is that driving is just as good and feels safer and easier to understand. (What do you if you get lost flying? You can't just pull over and ask for directions.)

if you need directions you're kinda missing the point of flying...

I agree, and hence the unpopularity of being a private pilot. When you drive a car, the consequences and required training are minimal. If you don't know where you are, you follow the signs to the gas station and ask for directions. If you run out of gas, you put your hood up and wait for someone to stop and give you gas. The net intelligence required is about zero. Hence, the popularity.

When flying, not only are you responsible for getting yourself where you want to go, you are also responsible for not running out of fuel and crashing onto a family of four having a nice barbecue. This is beyond the risk that most people are willing to take. Learning about VORs and DMEs and NDBs and GPSes are not worth the ability to travel across the country 2x to 4x faster than driving, especially when the distances people want to cover are in th 2-6 hour range. 6 hours is not much time. Neither is 3h time. So why not drive the same vehicle you use every day to get to work? There is no risk involved and what are you going to do with the 3 hours flying you own plane got you? Drink beer? Meh. Much better than not accidentally murdering anyone.

(Not saying I'm happy with this, but it's the reality. If you want to fly an airplane, You Are Weird. I Am Weird, but I can't expect everyone else to be weird...)

Ultralights aren't very practical due to the government limitations placed upon them. There are few situations in which there's an advantage to flying an aircraft with a cruise speed lower than a freeway speed limit cross-country rather than driving.

I agree 100%. But if there were millions of people dying to fly, then the ultralight could be a very lucrative market. If you lived in the middle of nowhere, an airplane could be more practical than an SUV for commuting.

Instead, cars and commercial airlines are where Society Has Decided that their limits are. Everyone can understand paying $500 a month for a car, and everyone can understand paying $159 to sit in a chair and be levitated to Phoenix for the weekend. So that's where the land / air tradeoff currently is.

(Do I like this? Nope. I fly 100,000 miles a year and am willing to pay $10,000 to $20,000 to become a private pilot, with the expected benefit of saying "I'll rent a plane and fly us to Door County this weekend" to some girl I like. Economically sensible? Absolutely not. Hence, not very many people do it. Flying is magic. The general public is not ready to harness magic in the form of throttle, elevator, aileron, and rudder.)

Ok no one is letting a robot cut their hair

Although we are using a electric mechanical device to do so. In particular with shaving we have devices that do all the cutting and make it virtually impossible to cut yourself. So kind of similar even there.

Flobee. Enough said.

http://www.flowbee.com

And there are electric hair driers, hair irons, shavers and various chemical products allowing one to change hair shape and color at will.

the hair perming helmets or whatever they are called still seem futuristic to me, but hair irons and hair dye have been around for a few millennia

It really depends on how literal you take these pictures to be. You could say that picture three suggests "we will have computer aided manufacturing," but you could also say it suggests "robots will build our houses." I think what these pictures show more than anything, is the kind of tangential predictions people seem to make about the future. "Everything will be automated with lots of tiny mechanical arms and levers. Everything will fly (because flight is really hot right now." This is a great example of zeerust (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust). Though interpreted vaguely these predictions are for the most part pretty good IMO.

Ok no one is letting a robot cut their hair

Oh, but how close we are!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bgRszdUdhQ

The robot surgeon is just an interface for the real surgeon, providing some smooth, precise motion and access into small places (where a human surgeon would have to cut his way through). Hair is on the outside of the body and quite accessible. There is yet no technology that can replace the human hand (yet).

I think the true wisdom in past future predictions is something that people didn't get right. For example another (my) take on the three first predictions, that you listed as successes, are: no practical text-to-speech(1), no truly intercontinental trains(2), no robots on construction sites(3)

If you look it from that perspecive, there's something to be learned. It's easy to vision, but it's difficult to understand what things are truly hard or things that surprisingly worked against all odds.

For example, people have been waiting for practical home robots for decades, but operating autonomously in the real world is really difficult problem, much harder that it intuitively feels (because we are so good at it).

On the otherhand, I think very few people predicted something like Wikipedia (or HN, Quora etc): free, quality information, produced by volunteers. It's hard problem too, but it just worked.

My gut feeling is that it's the social phenomena that we underestimate in our future predictions.

"no practical text-to-speech"

Huh? How do you figure? I use text-to-speech all the time and besides sounding distinctly robotic, it works extremely well. And the current state-of-the-art stuff is damn near as good as HAL9000.

EDIT: and we do have practical home robots, they're called roombas and programmable microwaves. They just don't look like something out of the Jetsons, and we've seen the technology improve over time, so we don't think of it as anything special.

Ok, granted, text-to-speech works, but it's still not good enough for main stream adoption.

Roomba, on the otherhand, is a pathetic, if you compare it to visions.

I'm not sure what your definition of mainstream is, but I commonly see text-to-speech listed as an advertised feature of mainstream consumer products.

TTS's dirty little is that it's actually much faster to read something yourself than have something read to you, assuming you are fluent in the language. It's not a failing of TTS, it's just people not properly considering the use of technology. The same goes for the roomba and the programmable microwave. It makes much more sense to have small single-purpose robots that function well, than a single multipurpose humanoid robot.

I'd be interested to see what percentage of random dialed phone numbers end up connected to text-to-speech "if you want sales, press 1 now. If you want support, press 2 now, for all other queries, press pound or just wait." type of responses.

(Hmmm, a free $30 credit Twilio account and their "detect answering machine" API call could generate a sample of 3000 random phone numbers pretty quickly...)

Not only is it good enough for mainstream adoption, it is mainstream. It's available in cars and practically every GPS device these days. Any time you call your credit card company, you deal with TTS (plus a fair bit of speech-recognition).

As for robots, sure we don't have robots of the kind in the images shown, but the machinery we use to build skyscrapers in a fraction of the time it took 100 years ago is quite amazing. The heavy-earth machinery, cranes, railway-track building machines etc don't look like robots, but they do the same stuff.

The future is definitely here :)

People still see horses in that way -- Horse racing anyone?

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