Why our 'amazing' science fiction future fizzled | Hacker News Reader

Why our 'amazing' science fiction future fizzled

cnn.com

19 pointsmshafrir24 comments

I don't think the future really has fizzled. Did anyone predict that I could be talking with people around the globe who share my interests, instantaneously, without leaving my bedroom? Or that I could find information on nearly any topic just by typing a couple words into a search box?

Heck, I'd much rather have cars, with their noise and pollution and gas-guzzling, than horses with their shit.

I think the problem is that we quickly become habituated to any real increases in standard of living and think they're no longer remarkable anymore. It's more a problem with human brains than with technology. I'd be pretty pissed off if I lost my computer, Internet, cell phone, car, dishwasher, and cushy job where I type code into a computer all day instead of having to do actual physical labor. They don't really register as amazing achievements on a day-to-day basis, but when you look at 1964 and what you'd have to give up to live back then, they look pretty darn good.

I think you’re missing the basic premise of the article. He’s saying there was a future that was “promised” which involved jet packs, flying cars, et al. That future never materialized and that is the topic of the article.

That doesn’t downplay what we have accomplished. In fact the author’s primary point seems to be a lot of these things didn’t materialize because people simply weren’t really interested in them. Where as they are interested in say...an iPhone.

It's a 50/50. I quite agree that the internet is a mind-blowing thing, and I had to smile when I went to see Star Trek last week and couldn't help thinking that my phone is smaller and more functional than the Starfleet communicators (although I imagine the latter have better signal quality and the battery doesn't go flat every day).

But our physical environment changes a lot more slowly than our digital one. I don't get a 'woah' moment as often as I'd like, but things are improving slowly. Certainly, some of this is down to my individual design sensibility. As context, I felt 'disappointed in the future' a lot during the 1990s, until one day I opened a magazine and saw a picture of the new VW beetle. Actually, 10 years on I still think it looks futuristic.

"Did anyone predict that I could be talking with people around the globe who share my interests, instantaneously, without leaving my bedroom?"

They had tablet PC's and the equivalent of internet blogs and forums in "Ender's Game," so I assume other authors had similar ideas.

Writers began "predicting" this sort of thing about the same time they started signing up for online services in the early 80s.

Indeed; Jerry Pournelle somewhat famously predicted in _Byte_ that by 2000, anyone in the Western world would be able to ask a question and get the answer, if the answer was known by anyone.

We've pretty much had that since 1998 or so. :)

See, I'd credit Heinlein with predicting the internet back in the fifties and sixties.

What works are you thinking of? When I think of Heinlein in that period, I remember a protagonist talking with a trucker about the truck's antigrav propulsion, then whipping out a slip-stick to figure out how far down it would be pushed under load. (Citizen of the Galaxy, I think.)

Stranger in a Strange Land had some "news nets" or somesuch that seemed pretty close to me. That's sixty-one. I poked through though, and everything that I was thinking of specifically turned out to be much later.

Well, "network" had a different meaning back in 1961. :)

Stranger is one of the few (only?) Heinlein things I haven't read, mind. Need to get around to it.

I agree with some of the authors points but not with others. For example, I don't think you can say "people weren't interested in the Jetpack because it only had enough fuel for half a minute." But the future that was promised had Jetpacks that lasted longer than half a minute so that answer's kind of a cop out.

That said I do agree that a lot of the "future" that these visionaries put out there was impractical. Whenever anyone talks to me about a flying car I ask them if they've ever seen someone driving around in a broken down car that obviously needs maintenance. Then I ask them to imagine what the world would be like if that unmaintained car could fall out of the sky onto their house.

That alone is why I think flying cars will never be an option. Because even if you make a law that requires people to keep their flying cars maintained there will be those that will ignore it (see smog laws).

Forget maintenance, what about flying drunk, or tired, or without years of training? You say "flying cars" and people think "driving in the sky," but it's not like that at all.

Basically, there are many different reasons why flying cars would be unlikely to be as common as normal ones.

NASA has been working for years on aviation-for-everybody concepts. The basic idea is that the vehicles will self-navigate. See "Highway in the Sky" (HITS)

I disagree entirely. Who would have thought that the blackberry or iPhone would ever be possible back in the late 70's... I can get traffic information overlayed on a route from anywhere to anywhere by foot, car, train, bus, I can instantly talk or type messages to anyone on the planet, I can look up any piece of the worlds collective knowledge instantly all while walking down the street with a cup of coffee in the other hand...

The present is pretty darn amazing to me.

"Who would have thought that the blackberry or iPhone would ever be possible back in the late 70's..."

The TV show Life on Mars was about a present day cop who somehow finds himself back in the 70s. In one episode he tries to talk a suicidal inventor off a ledge, who is ready to kill himself because his latest idea of a phone you can carry around with you failed to get any interest. The cop tries to convince him that one day everyone will use such devices, with no luck. The other cops keep asking each other "Who would want to carry a phone around with them?"

I agree. Who knows what is ahead. I'm very hopeful Teleportation will be invented in our life time. If not that, thn hopefully at least a Hoverboard :)

Hoverboard. 2015.

The one thing I've noticed about comparing sci-fi future to the actual thing is the degree that humanity is changing, not technology.

It used to be you'd think of some future tech of a hundred years from now as being some normal guy, like you, except he'd have a jetpack, a phaser, or a cool flying car. But what really happened was that we didn't get all those cool external things, instead we got things that plugged into our minds and bodies more. So instead of flying around in a jetpack, you can imagine flying around in a jetpack. Instead of using your phaser to fight Klingons, you can imagine fighting all kinds of creatures. Instead of tooling around in your flying car, we're getting more and more realistic environments where you can pretend to pilot just about anything.

It's a rehash to say we're entertaining ourselves to death, but there's no doubt that as far as impact on everyday lives, technology is moving from big, cool, sleek external gadgets to small, integrated, multi-sensory ones.

That was unexpected.

Perhaps, too, there's an awareness that we're running out of land and (most) resources have already been claimed/ allocated, so it's harder and harder to suspend disbelief in muscular external technology, at least for the near future. I noticed the most recent Bond movies focus on villains' ability to manipulate the commercial and legal environment rather than building improbably powerful hardware.

I find it interesting that no comments (as of writing this) touch on the other intersting issue the article brought up: that Americans "prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change." I think that's an interesting point, especially given the focus of the HN crowd. We often look to technology and innovation as the disruptive element in society, and one can find many examples in history of how it has been exactly that. But in these modern times, I'd be inclined to think that true change doesn't happen until the politics catch up to the technology and accept its disruption as the norm. Historically, it seems to me that change always flows from technology => social/cultural => political. When it reaches that last stage, that's when the change really takes hold.

No, this is why:

http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html

Minus the political connotations, I'd agree. Clinton was indeed a lawyer, but then so was Nixon. Carter came from an engineering background; one could argue that Reagan's shift to personality politics was an elevation of style over substance. So my point is not that his politics are wrong, but that they were of the moment and plenty of competing or complementary interpretations exist.

We have painted ourselves into an unproductive corner with too much litigation and an over-emphasis on economic productivity where groundbreaking ideas which don't have meaningful analytics yet are considered too risky due to lack of quantifiability. One man's political effeteness is another's tyranny of the market.

Warning: it discusses the finale of Battlestar Galactica so I'd avoid reading it if you haven't finished watching the series yet.

Even if flying cars were cheap and easy to make, would we want them? They're cool and amazing, but in real life they might be impractical.

So generally when talking about the future, maybe we predict inventions that make for cool easily understandable stories, instead useful or plausible inventions. That's why flying cars were predicted but the internet wasn't.

If you're not even going to be alive when the time of your prediction comes, why would you bother to think hard about it and make an odd, abstract, unfashionable prediction instead of a cool story about flying cars?

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