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The last really prophetic world's fair was New York, 1939. That's famous for GM's vision of the future of 1960, the original "Futurerama" . Freeways everywhere. RCA had television. AT&T let you make free long distance calls. All that stuff happened.

The 1964 World's Fair had another GM exhibit. Colonization of the Moon. Underwater cities. None of that happened.

What could we have in a World's Fair now that looks ahead? Colonization of Mars? Mars sucks as real estate. There may be research bases there someday, but as a self-sufficient area, it would be tougher than Antarctica or a continental shelf. Robots may some day be a thing, but they still don't work well in unstructured environments.

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My mom went to the ‘64 worlds fair almost every day (according to her, she had an uncle that worked there.) She told us stories about various exhibits when we were kids, but the thing she remembered the most was the video phone- that she should see as well here someone across the planet.

Fast forward to 2020 and she is spending hours every day on video calls with her grandchildren.

We might have missed on some of our dreams from 1964, but not all of them. We’ll miss more in the future if we don’t articulate them.

Video phone was not new at that point, though. Germany had commercial installations, though fixed point to point, in 1936. The first descriptions of it date to just two years after the telephone was invented. The exhibit may have made more people aware it was possible, but the idea was already out there, and had been for a long time.

Do you have a link about these German video phones from 1936? That sounds very interesting.

You can find some info here [1],[2]

Of course this was far technically simpler than "proper" video telephony, as they required dedicated point to point circuits rather than function over a regular phone line. Most of the effort to popularise video-telephony was not the concept itself, but solving the engineering challenges of making it work over the regular phone network and making the devices small and cheap enough. In that respect the booths at the '64 World's Fair would have been impressive demonstrations of progress toward that goal.

[1] https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/nazis-introduc...

[2] https://www.mirror.co.uk/usvsth3m/before-second-world-war-na...

The Early Television Foundation has many links. [1] There's a sizable history of rotating-machinery mechanical television. It's not hard to do, but it never got very good. You can only light up one pixel at a time, so you're stuck with dim, flickering images.

Scophony and Eidiphor, though, were clever pre-CRT systems with more potential. Eidiphor big-screen television projectors were patented in 1939, and were in use into the 1990s.

[1] http://earlytelevision.org/mechanical_gallery.html

> What could we have in a World's Fair now that looks ahead?

I want a roboticized home that cleans itself, that is able to do autorepairs, rooms reconfiguration. I want an auto-laundry and an auto-kitchen. I want it smart enough to manage air flow, temperature and humidity efficiently. I want all that to be voice activated. Please make it offline to not depend on some cloud thingies.

I want a powerwall and solar panels, I want an automated herbs garden. I want things to be upgradable and fixable without destroying walls.

If you give me room on the exhibit, I'll throw in an automated greenhouse to produce a lot of the food and maybe an automated workshop that would be able to produce/repair small items.

That's doable, that's not here yet, but we have most of the tech.

The next frontier is not space, it is automation. I would go to a World's Fair that showed a future where we would have less work to do.

Only 1/2 joking but there was an automation exhibit at the 64 world's fair. It was by Disney and then moved to Disneyland for years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney%27s_Carousel_of_Pr...

It showed the progress of the kitchen over the years and ended with a push button kitchen like The Jetsons

I agree with you though. I want all of the things you listed. In particular, I want something that can dust (clean all the dust from my shelves, tables, books, etc..). I wonder if it could be done with small drones that can fly into the shelves with tiny dusters.

I want my walls and ceiling to be displays like from Total Recall for cheap (say under $500 per wall)

I want sound proofing between apartments, also cheap so there's no excuse for an apartment not to have it.

> I want my walls and ceiling to be displays like from Total Recall for cheap (say under $500 per wall)

Fun remark I heard in a startup's pitch: "If you have a hole in your wall, it is cheaper to buy a TV to hide it than to order a repair".

In college, two of my roommates were tussling and knocked a hole low in the wall between the kitchen bar and the hallway. As the only one with much craftsmanship ability, I took the roomie who was to pay for it down to the home center to buy drywall, tape, mud, and paint to fix the hole. Going to check out, we passed the air intake grills and the light bulb went on - we swapped the repair stuff for a grill and filter, went home to hack out a rectangular hole, and installed a new bogus air intake in the wall in just a few minutes. (The real intake was in the hall ceiling a few feet away, so it wasn't noticeable.)

Way quicker, cheaper, and easier than actually patching the wall and trying to match paint, and it got our deposit back, which was important since we were all broke seniors with no money coming in until we started our jobs. I've often wondered if anyone ever changed that filter! (My wife won't go for this method, so I've gotten pretty decent at matching drywall texture since then...)

I believe that is the basic setup to a few horror movies and episodes in TV shows.

Even so, I'm in, if it comes with an option to not be voice activated. Nothing about modern computing is more frustrating than voice interfaces, except perhaps windows updates.

Any evolution can be used as an horror movie device. Freeways, ubiquitous televisions, in a world that did not have that, you could make scary fictions about it.

I find it sad that nowadays dystopias have become the only depictions of futures.

May I introduce you to the "hopepunk" genre? https://www.google.com/search?q=hopepunk&oq=hopepunk&aqs=chr...

Kim Robinson's Mars series stands out as a seminal example. Also one of his Three Californias triptych is a classic hopepunk story.

Looking over https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/hopepunk there's a lot I'm not familiar with, but can attest to the fundamentally optimistic takes in Andy Weir's The Martian and Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries.

Have a watch at the classic "The Glass-Bottom Boat" from 1966 - it has a decent view of what they expected would be near-future automation, much of which we're just now seeing as cost-effective.

That sounds like a lot of technology for something you could hire someone to do for you at a fraction of the cost. The main downside of that is that you'd have to deal with a person.

That’s not how automation works.

Actually it is. 40-50 years ago we hit a point where growth stopped absorbing productivity gains. So all future automation also contributes to under employment, lowering the price of labor, reducing the need for further automation.

To try to bring back growth to pre 1970 leavels alone would cause horrific environmental destruction we cannot afford. In addition to taxing the environmental externalities, we also need to shrink the workweek and disburse UBI to the point where labor is in demand again. Only then will future automation work the way we want it to, and the way it did in the past.

In pre-COVID times we used a cleaning service. I would much rather have a house that stays clean than one that needs cleaning. You're not setting your sights high enough.

We have a lot of environmental challenges ahead of us. A forward-thinking World's Fair could paint a picture of how we get from here to a carbon-negative economy: solar & wind, battery tech, autonomous cars and less car-oriented cities, better telepresence, carbon sequestering, architecture, etc.

For me the concept of Solarpunk(as opposed to cyberpunk) is leaning in the right direction that way.

Solarpunk needs a lot of development though. One issue seems to be it too often coincides with someone's idea of a futuristic Utopia.

Hence it is conflict free, rather boring and doesn't do much to stir interest.

I like the term solarpunk! I'm gonna describe myself that way from now on.

Certainly it's harder to get to Mars, but is the environment more hostile than on the moon?

Mars has something of a CO2 atmosphere, and might have more accessible water. The soil may be more usable as well.

It's not physically more hostile than the moon, but we've never colonized the moon for the same reason. It's really hard to live there for not much benefit. There are plenty of sparsely-inhabited deserts on Earth that are much nicer places to live.

Don't forget that you don't have an electric ground

That’s why in non-American English it’s called earth. :)

I had no idea. Hackaday explains as well as some other things I’d not though about.

https://hackaday.com/2017/08/17/living-on-mars-the-stuff-you...

Crazy. I just presumed the planet acts as a ground. Presumably same challenge on the moon?

> Presumably same challenge on the moon?

Yes. It will be true for any planetary body that does not have a magnetosphere. But Venus has a magnetosphere. So you can do the old "stick a fucking metal rod into the ground" trick as long as your metal rod doesn't melt... because Venus.

Like you call the ground earth or you call ground earth? I fail to see how earth is less ambiguous.

Presumably every (non-gaseous) planet is covered with ground. Whereas Earth isn't Mars.

Electric ground? Can you expand on this?

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. The core on Mars stopped spinning so there is no longer the electric dynamo and thus there isn't a potential. So everything has to be a floating potential. That isn't to say that you can't make reference grounds, but it is much more convoluted than "sticking a fucking metal rod into the ground".

Actually if you pay attention to HI-SEAS[0] this has been a cause of an accident (since they replicate Mars habitat.

This problem also, obviously, applies to any planetary body which does not have a magnetosphere. So you don't have magnetic north and you don't have a safe potential ground.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HI-SEAS

Martian soil is poisonous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_soil

    We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard (...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon

> What could we have in a World's Fair now that looks ahead?

With a few more years of AI, I want software that can automate engineering - so, I can say “figure out a factorio layout that makes 1 rocket per minute”. Then “play factorio from scratch to liftoff”.

Translated into the real world, I want to a robot that can build a brick wall, and an AI that can design and manufacture the brick wall building robot. I think this is structurally the same problem as “play factorio” - the only difference being a few orders of magnitude of complexity.

Ultimately I want to be able to take a few minimal pieces of robotics and drones and stuff into the wilderness (or Mars) and say “build me a house like this with working solar panels and plumbing”, and it can gather resources, design and assemble intermediate machines (Eg sawmills) and bootstrap the manufacturing needed to arrange atoms in any specifically described way.

This is both a utopian and dystopian technology. At scale the same technology could be used to both clean up the great pacific garbage patch, and convert the Amazon rainforest into a massive industrial wasteland. I don’t think this is as far away from our current technology as we imagine it to be. (Decades not centuries)

> With a few more years of AI, I want software that can automate engineering.

"Ok, AlexaDev. I want you to build a SaaS with the following product requirements ..."

[after a half-hour chat]

"Alright Dave, the MVP is in your shopping cart at a price of $5,000. If you host on AWS then I will be your product development team and evolve your service based on usage statistics and customer feedback for an additional $2,000 monthly subscription fee."

(Of course things will be different, as source code will be proprietary walled garden stuff besides some OSS config scripts, there'll be no fixed-price, and AWS is abstracted away behind the AI services)

half-/s

I would attribute the prediction failure of the 1964 World's Fair to the pace of change. It seems reasonable that predictability decreases as the pace of societal and technological change increase. The changes from 1939 to 1964 (25 years) pale in comparison to the changes from 1964 to 1989 (gene sequencing in 72, Vietnam war protests and ambiguous end in 73, mass-market cell phones in 73, Internet in 74, PCs in 77, disillusionment with nuclear energy in the 70s, the fall of the soviet union, and much more).

I think the pace of change is such that we can't predict what will be with much certainty, but we can imagine and capture the public's imagination. That may help drive change toward what we want to see, and I think that in itself might be a good reason for a World's Fair - not to predict a future, but to collectively imagine the future we want so that we have a more clear cut vision to strive for.

Seems like computers were woven into many of the exhibits (Search a date and get what happened on that day for example). Also the picturephone was just one part of the bell exhibit which envisioned expansive high speed data networks. I think looking back, it may be easy to overlook these, but the certainly seem pretty significant.

GM was at least a little bit right. Their moon base had a moon car and some sort of silvery structure. Five years after the exhibition, we had some guys walking around on the moon and returning to a silvery structure, and two years after that, we had a lunar rover.

> Colonization of the Moon. Underwater cities. None of that happened.

Moon missions had been suspended until last year or so. If NASA had kept at it, I'm sure some level of colonization, at least rotating manned missions a la ISS would have happened by now.

In 2021, We are tired of cars, freeways, traffic, sitting in the car for long hours. Same goes for internet. Same applies to mobile phones. People are looking for less technology, more time with nature, family, friends etc.

Build a dome over New Orleans or York; Call it the New Palace. Or to be more optimistic a nuclear plant, maybe Governor's island? or recommission Indian Point, along with district heating.

Agreed with most but finish Shoreham? With all those no show jobs and failed, touched up x-rays, that sounds like a very bad idea.

Finish being putting it to some productive use like turning it into a battery given the solar farm going up nearby and the substation hub is there.

Snake Plisskin? I heard you were dead...

Free healthcare and post-secondary education, maybe?

A world without war, where laws were enforced equally on the mighty and the weak alike?

It'd be basically like the CES I think, showing a lot of near-future tech like transparent roll-up screens.

> What could we have in a World's Fair now that looks ahead?

Well, to start with, the massive restructuring of industry and everyday life needed to mitigate or begin reversing the effects of climate change.

Underwater cities seems to be happening more and more, actually

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