Why The Jetsons still matters (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Why The Jetsons still matters (2012)

smithsonianmag.com

48 pointsfortran7734 comments

From 2012 so AI doesn't factor in which would be more interesting in comparison.

Having watched the Jetsons as a kid I remember that George Jetson worked for Spaceley Sprockets where his only job was to push a single button. He worked with a computer personality called Rudy (an AI) who from memory was always depressed and had a crush on a female computer personality of rival company Cogsworth Cogs.

It would be interesting to revisit this with a focus on the relationship and interactions between humans and their AI/robotics.

Frankly? I personally think that would be boring. The fun part is IMHO the retro futurism, what people tried to extrapolate about physical automation and aesthetic.

On the contrary, it being published in 2012 makes it feel a little closer to 20th century mode of traditional media cultural criticism which felt a little more grounded than it is now in established media.

It’s also interesting for me because it’s a small slice of insight into the cultural consciousness of people’s perceptions of the trajectory of technology and its ills & promises at the time. It may sound like I’m exaggerating how long ago this was, but it really does feel like 2015 onwards was a large disruption from the expected status quo in the West in both good and bad ways. Not just in politics (Cambridge analytica?)but also in the way the general public perceived the technology industry and the nature of the kind of force it is at large in society.

I wonder if that was part of the original 1-season canon or a later episode from the 70's.

> the relationship and interactions between humans and their AI/robotics

Are you familiar with Questionable Content[0]? He sort of takes it "all the way."

[0] https://questionablecontent.net

RUDI was a typical "lights blink and wheels spin" 1960s computer in the original series. In the 1980s revival, he became intelligent. RUDI was sympathetic to George, became sad when he was fired, and at one point refused to work until George was re-hired—which is something we could stand to teach our AIs today.

> but today “The Jetsons” stands as the single most important piece of 20th century futurism.

Only a single, off-hand mention of Star Trek in the whole article?

Yeah this is wild. Someone grew up watching old cartoons and not much else?

Yeah that's a pretty blanket statement, although the day-to-day life aspect helps a lot.

Yeah, I agree with that. Star Trek did invent some iconic tech, but they were always more aspirational in the sense of "this is what we'd like society to be" instead of showing how the day-to-day life of average families would actually work.

Star Trek is “aspirational” but not in the way that you’re making it to be. Plenty of devices that are common to us today were pretty much “predicted” by Star Trek in way or another (PADDs, Tricorders, to name a couple). And yes, while it is almost always depicted in a productivity/workplace sense, these devices are all integral to the function of a Federation starship as much as their real-life counterparts are also very much integral to people’s day-to-day lives today.

The author’s claim is ridiculously short-sighted not only for discounting Star Trek, but plenty of other shows and movies with visionary concepts that eventually came to be.

The point isn’t about the tech, there’s a different balance of tech vs society in Star Trek and The Jetsons. You see, in Star Trek only a selected group travel far and beyond. The rest sits on this planet. You don’t watch Kirk speaking to his robot cleaner, sending kids to school, and flying shopping.

> As Graydon points out, “The Jetsons” was a projection of the model American family into the future.

This is a completely different setting than Star Trek Fleet Command thing.

What’s really funny is they avoided futuristic AI computers in Star Trek Enterprise - a prequel to the original Star Trek series - to show that computers hadn’t advanced that far. Even though we have that technology today.

I did not expect it so soon, but generative AI has the potential to become the holodeck: where you can tell the computer what kind of fictional adventure you'd like to experience in virtual reality, and it would bring it to life.

"1975 and the Changes to Come" [1], a book from 1962 that was mentioned as inspirational to the creator of the show.

[1] https://archive.org/details/1975changestocom0000arno/page/32...

>Public approval of funding for the Apollo program peaked at 53 percent (around the first moon landing) but pretty much hovered between 35-45 percent for most of the 1960s

I had no idea. The article is right in saying that if you were a kid at that time (and I was just old enough to be aware of the moon landing as it was happening, although I was surprised at the time that it hadn't happened before), of course you approved. But if you were an adult, you didn't necessarily see the value.

“Whitey on the moon”

https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4?si=OvDXYlFWnHg1VXOK

https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-whitey-on-the-moon-annota...

The Jetsons was honored by the Power Puff girls with a number of Easter egg appearances. Just search ‘power puff firms and jetsons’ for examples.

I always wondered what the earth looked like below? Were the Jetson's part of a breakaway civilization like in the movie Elysium?

I used to think, as a kid, that's a colonized planet. Nothing down there but rainforest.

A common joke is that it was the flintstones.

It's arguably canon, even, if you consider the cross-over specials meaningfully "canon" as works designed not to hold up to storytelling scrutiny but simply bring in TV viewers.

Interestingly, if we could do floating orbital platforms above Venus, it could perhaps look a little like the Jetsons.

Maybe I was stupid or maybe it just doesn’t hit the same way if you don’t grow up in the US, but I remember not being terribly fascinated by it as a 90s kid. In fact, I found it kind of uncanny that the world felt so… disconnected. I later learned this was called “modernist architecture”.

Apparently it was Googie architecture from southern California.

I am not sure if the 1980s version of the show also used that architecture.

It's actually Googie architecture:

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

And it's glorious! I wish we would go back to this.

Reminds me of a Rosenfeld book "Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction." Sci-fi is able to push interface design because they're unconstrained... It's been a while, so I need to dust off.

Caring about jetpacks, flying cars, or robot maids is such modern-day capitalist brain rot. George is the family's breadwinner and works only two days a week for one hour a day in the show.

It’s a show. The characters in Friends barely work at all and have huge manhattan apartments.

On Friends it's implicit, on The Jetsons is explicit.

>George is the family's breadwinner and works only two days a week for one hour a day in the show.

That really seems to go against the premise of the show as shown on the opening (typically modern day 1960s nuclear family but in the future).

I looked into this and Wikipedia cites this fact as being from the 1985 version not the original cartoon.

I suspect taking a joke about George's workday from the 85 version as "canon" kind of misses the point of the show.

> “The Jetsons” stands as the single most important piece of 20th century futurism.

LOL. Perhaps it's important to Americans.

I'm not sure I've seen a single episode, I certainly didn't see it when it was broadcast.

Not even that. The author’s claim is just plain over-exaggeration even to American audiences—and such a blatant one that makes me wonder if it was included solely for engagement purposes.

I don’t know, was there a more important TV series that could be considered “futurist” ?

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