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The Future That Hasn't Arrived
jonerik writes "MSNBC has this article on an exhibit starting this week at Philadelphia's Lost Highways Archive and Research Library. Entitled Radebaugh: The Future We Were Promised, the exhibit focuses on the artwork of the elusive A.C. Radebaugh, a commercial illustrator whose works promised us a glittering, shiny tomorrow from the '30s to the '50s; a helicopter in every garage, massive streamlined cars, vacations on Mars - in short, pretty much everything we didn't get. The exhibit collects examples from Radebaugh's portfolio, auto designs for Chrysler, DoSoto, and Dodge, ads, and 'Closer Than We Think!,' a syndicated weekly comic strip drawn by Radebaugh. I want my jetpack, dammit!"
I thought the future is always arriving... And the present keeps slipping into the past.
Huh?
You want a flying car with gas prices where they are?
They just auctioned one on eBay. The Moller M400 SkyCar.
"The future we were promised."
How can anyone promise a future that is certain? I mean, in almost any case there are more than 1 possible outcomes in a situation...
I am assuming the root of the matter is the disparity between what was predicted in art (science fiction) and what actually happened. I always felt there was too much of a preoccupation with space travel in the past. I guess this makes sense, given the Space Race took up a good amount of people's attention. However, there were two areas that were overlooked: The Internet and advancements in genetics. Both caught the forward-thinkers of the past by surprise.
There were many assumptions of huge talking robots, but not as many about the computers we have today. Our computers are not as powerful, but they're a commodity, available to everybody. Also, cloning was a pipe dream; something to happen in the year 2500 or whatever. And here we are, playing around with cloning cats.
It's not so bad, really, though I could use a good mail-order robobabe right about now.
No I'm not trolling.
With the pessimism? Sure, we don't have flying cars or jetpacks or vacations to Mars.
Instead, we have computers literally millions of times faster than anyone imagined we'd have. Read some old sci-fi, and notice how the authors tend to make reference to people plotting the navigations by hand because it'd be too complicated for a computer?
We've got our personal communicaters, in the way of cell phones. Hell, with cell phones with cameras and video screens on them, we've already got our Dick Tracy wrist geenees, too.
We can genetically modify animals.
And, perhaps most importantly of all for the writers of the early sci-fi, we haven't destroyed ourselves as a species yet.
So why all the bitching about flying cars?
Well said - here in the US, we tolerate rolling heaps of trash on our roads, unlike many other countries. I remember hearing something about how in Japan, they have tax incentives in place to encourage consumers to replace their cars with newer ones regularly. An artificial stimulant to the market, sure, but it certainly strengthened their position in the worldwide marketplace...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
The Industrial Revolution, because...
"Did people in the middle ages, for example, ever think much past the end of their own lives?"
"I'm guessing they did,"
First off, companies have to invest in and develop such shiny stuff, and then the public has to lay down their hard earned cash. That is the biggest reason we don't all have jetpacks and personal helicopters.
On the upside, a lot of these fantastic visions do come to some level of fruition. When car companies make concept cars, some features may trickle down into production cars.
As a public, I don't think we typically want to change how we live drastically. Few people want to embrace something like the Kyoto accord to reduce pollution because it hits them in the wallet.
A lot of Dot.Bombs went this way because they were counting on investors and the public to embrace new technology because it was COOL and drastically would change how we manage our lives. Didn't work.
But we weren't "lied to" or "promised" something that didn't happen. It was just a wonderful utopian vision, and like all those, it never quite happens. Tragedy of the Commons, yada yada yada.
Cars travel so slowly most of the time, that aerodynamics simply isn't important. What is important, is to reduce turbulance noise - wind hiss. The importance of reduced drag on cars is mostly advertizing hype. As a case in point: Look at the bottom side of a sleek looking car. The manufacturers clearly are only interested in 'visible' aerodynamics and don't care about the other half that is not visible. So it is just about looks, not drag. Those big spoilers on the back of Hondas are not to reduce drag. They increase drag. If anything, their main purpose is to provide a handlebar to push them with.
.... is they focus on technology but forget one thing... Population... everyone conveniently forgets that the future holds TONS more people in it than now. What will that population want as far as technology goes? Futuristic cars? Pfft. Please, Houston/Dallas/LA, etc are parking lots as it is... imagine when there's twice as many people living there.
Know that empty lot next door? Wave bye bye.
That field of wildflowers? It's an apartment complex now.
I'd just like to see some fanciful futuristic art that depicts technology that looks like it was designed with a large population in mind.
It turns out that complex mechanical stuff is harder to design and mass-manufacture than formerly believed. So today's reality in terms of mechanically oriented consumer items in no way measures up to 1950s hopes.
At the same time, while 1950s soothsayers dreamt too big in regard to mechanical developments, they dreamt way too small in regard to communications developments. And, if given the choice, I'd much rather have email and web broadband access for $45/month than my own personal $20,000 helicopter. I suppose I'd rather fly to Mars than own a cell phone, but the technology behind a cell phone is in many ways more miraculous than anything that's been developed for affordable space flight.
The future we live in is in some respects a disappointment compared to 1950s hopes, but in other respects it's infinitely cooler than anyone could have dreamed of.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Promise - What we Got
EngSoc from Orwell's '1984' - Department of Homeland Security
Doublespeak, also from '1984' - Politically Correct Speech
Debate over Human Cloning from 'Brave New World' - Current debate over Human Cloning and Stem Cell Research.
All-Powerful CIA/FBI from 'Snow Crash' - Patriot Act enchanced federal bureaus.
I could go one for quite some time...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The sooner corporate greed and lack of compassionate visionary leadership go the way of the steam engine, the better we all will be. And folks, that time will come soon, as world opinion on the oil war is proving. The Hydrogen Economy is the future. And flying cars will arrive soon too. Only one problem to solve on that, an affordable, effficient, safe and quiet engine. But humanking will do it, we always do!
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
OTOH, exhibits like this speak to the great optimism of human nature. Though it took Europe five hundred years from the time of Marco Polo to the time that they colonized a new continent, we were in the mid 20th century certain that we could conquer the solar system in fifty years. The same holds true for helicopters, jet packs, and everything else.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I want my jetpack, dammit!
And tens of thousands of children want just enough food so that today isn't the day they starve to death.
Think about it.
Actually "free time" was greatest when everyone was a hunter/gatherer, was reduced somewhat when society was driven by agriculture, and was reduced more during the Industrial Revolution. Basically, standard of living, health, and opportunity have increased, but you gotta work for it.
Look at the second picture in his portfolio (The Exhibit --> Portfolio) of the "subway" hanging above the highway. This is pretty similar to a monorail. Look at the vehicles in the picture, they all still have drivers and wheels. The "subway" has an air intake, meaning that it uses an engine to locomote, not electricity. The cars have honkin' big attenae, but that's a small oversight. All the car bodies are curved, not boxy; anyone noticed a trend in automobile design today? Heck, Radebaugh wasn't that far off...
Did anybody predict that you could carry your phone in a pocket and send instant messages (SMS) to the people who are on the other side of the world? What about Internet?
This just shows how hard future prediction is. We overestimate progress in many field, but ignore completely some possibilities.
If people fly as bad as they drive then it would be a deathtrap. At least you can make roads and drivers have an incentive for driving on the road because most cars don't travel off road very well. Imagine some of these idiots flying out of approved lanes and doing all kinds of aerial acrobatics to shave a few minutes off their commute.
Which hunting and gathering tribes are you thinking of, here? The "rich pantheon[s] of gods" that I can think of all came from agricultural societies. Examples: the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and so forth.
I admit I haven't studied a lot of hunting and gathering tribes. All I really know came from reading "The Forest People," about the Bambuti pygmies. The extent of their religion was some nebulous notion of "the forest" as being some kind of benevolent entity.
There's much more reason to believe that agricultural societies would have more developed (as in more complex) religions, because they could support religious specialists. In hunting and gathering tribes, everyone had to do everything. Agricultural societies has some artisans, some priests, some administrators, etc.
Back to the original topic, one reason to expect that people in the Middle Ages wouldn't have thought much about the future is that there was no reason to expect things to change! Your father could no doubt tell you that things had been exactly the same when he was your age (okay, colored slightly by "back in the good old days" memory). Today, how many of our parents had computers when they were our age? How many had flown in an airplane? We went from Kitty Hawk to Apollo in less than 100 years! There are good reasons for us to expect the future to be different from the present. This was not true in the Middle Ages.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
However, there was another occurence during the rise of Industrialization (and Modernity) that can be traced back to Martin Luther's challenge against the Catholic Church. The Protestant Reformation lead to people being able to question the authority of the church, and to be able to interpret the words of God in the bible on their own. This in turn gave rise to science, and everything associated with it as well. Now, instead of having one monolithic interpretation of the Universe presented by the Catholic Church (which was unquestionable, because it came from God), a number of competing explainations of the Universe came to be, all claiming equal legitimacy.
Now, you're probably wondering why the hell I'm talking about this, but there's a very good reason. A big part of the middle age religious institution was harping on the fact that God was going to come back any day now and destroy everything, as was foretold in the book of revelations. Thus, why on earth should you care about the future if God is coming down tomorrow and killing everyone? There's no point in trying to progress if everything you're going to do is going to be destroyed by God. It wasn't until people stopped believing that God was coming really soon to destroy everything that they could develop notions of improving things within their life time.
Certainly the development of free time and money to spend on toys encouraged people to think about space ships. But thinking about actually making them isn't possible when you constantly have the threat of the end of the world seeming very real, from the unassailable Catholic Church.
Very true, to which i would like to add one thing: The Future Is Now. The infrastructure and technology is there to allow someone to develop jetpacks or flying cars if they decided to do it.
I think we are so surrounded by new developments that we tend to ignore the most important ones because we are searching for that wow factor. If we sit down with an objective, lets say, starting a business, it is relatively simple to put ideas in motion and successfully manage the operation without even having to physically meet or talk to another person. Not only can you put the ideas in motion you don't even have to utter any words to make these things happen. All that is required are certain keystrokes, in a certain sequence and bang, you've changed the world. I only realised this after starting an independant record label. Everything from making the music on a standard PC and home studio , promoting and making contacts, ordering and pressing the CDs, to distributing them throughout the world was done without even leaving my PC. I'm not talking about small time contacts either, but being able to personally e-mail the heads of several major record labels with an idea. All this has happened in the span of three months of inital conception of the idea. It has even got to the point where I have the opportunity to quit my current tech job and move overseas and do this full-time in an untapped market where our particular music is the most profitable.
All this in three months. The technology is there, the future is now.
// The fastest Alt-Tab in the West
I think that in certain respects what really occured was a domination of introverted technologies. The _personal_ computer for instance. Yes, now with the World Wide Web we can connect with one another - but do we really? A great many technologies that have taken off are largely introverted in nature; even when they seem to make it easier for us to communicate.
Genetic engineering is another inward facing technology. I'm not saying it won't open doors to us, but it largely focused on exploring inward frontiers. This is a very personal technology - one which with augment or change us in very intimate ways.
With extroverted technology (exploring boundaries outside ourselves and immediate surroundings) taking a back seat, what do you expect to happen. Personal transport hasn't evolved too much in the last 20 years. Cars today aren't so much different than they were - and when was the Concorde designed and built? How about the Shuttle?
This probably has a lot to do with market forces. It's a lot easier to build and sell small personal things - not to mention more profitable.
This is just the Gernsback Continuum effect. Just ignore it, and it will fade out, like a bad dream...
Did people in the middle ages, for example, ever think much past the end of their own lives?
While most common (European) Medieaval people may not have been able to imagine a future different from their present, they certainly did think past the end of their lives. Remember that Mediaeval Christianity emphasized the afterlife (heaven or hell) as the central aspect of human existence, physical life being a brief, painful trial of the soul. Only after the Renaissance and then Enlightenment did the Western memepool's focus shift to the human being and its needs in the real world: the "pursuit of happiness".
Quite possibly this was the time where the entire concept of "progress" and indeed "the future" originated. It is no coincidence that timekeeping beyond the counting of seasons and ruler's reigns did virtually not exist in the aptly named Dark Age. There are historians who theorize that several decades of history (at around the time of Charlemagne) did not in fact take place! Such theories are possible only because the documents of that time are few and seldom are dated at all.
Amen!
Would you want to live in the future of 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Sure they had a moon colony, but they also had a Cold War and no Google.
I see the biggest shift from the old visions of the future as the increase in chaos and decentralization. 2001 showed a Bell System videophone. Today we have anarchic WiFi hotspots. The flying cars would have been built by General Motors if they'd made it big. Instead today we have networks of volunteers self-assembling to create complex and useful products like Linux and Apache.
...and along came this little thing called the Renaissance, or Rebirth, and people started thinking for themselves. Focus shifted from the power of an unattainable God to the power of humanity (hence the term, "humanist") who believed that God was indeed attainable, and the future began to be conceived. Have you forgotten the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci? He can be credited with conceiving, if not sucessfully constructing, the helicopter, the airplane, and the tank, among others.
The Americas were discovered, and with that opened a vast new frontier. People realized that there were new lands to explore, and that the world was much bigger than they'd ever imagined (well, the Greeks had actually accurately calculated the circumference within a few thousand miles over 800 years before that, but what do Greeks know?) ;)
With expanding horizons comes expansion of the mind. There's a reason that the West was referred to as the New World.
Note that all this took place at least 400 years before the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
You have to know where you've been before you can know where you're going. People of any given age always arrogantly assume that their civilization is the cusp of human development, and that their world is the greatest thing since sliced bread. There are many civilizations outside of the standard Judeo-Christian post-Roman West that developed - and dreamt - in different directions than our own. In their eyes, ours is a very young culture indeed.
As C.S. Lewis once wrote, "What do they teach them in these schools nowadays?"
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Well, it has, in absolute terms, but not in relative terms. The problem is that human psychology makes us view things using relative metrics instead of absolute ones. If you earn a 20% raise this year, but all your friends earn 100% raises, do you feel richer or poorer compared to last year?
If you want to have a 1950s comfortable standard of living regarding possessions, health care, entertainment, food, etc. you can do so by working far fewer hours than a 1950s human had to. But if you want a 2000s standard of living... ah, then you still have to work, or otherwise procure income. But at least work tends to be less menial and physically taxing than it did in the 1950s, on the average at least.
It's a question of whether you measure standard of living by absolute standards or relative ones. No matter what the technology level, it will be always true (in capitalist societies, anyway) that someone who works hard will, on the average, earn more than someone who works little at the same level of technology. So of course the idle will never win ... in relative terms. But if you view things in absolute terms, the idle American today can live far more comfortably than the average hard-working American in the 1950s. (The same is even true of the third world; a citizen of country X today has a more comfortable existence than a citizen of X in the 1950s, in almost all cases - calorie intake has more or less doubled, for instance, and life expectancy extended by a decade or more. Again, in relative terms the poor countries of 2000 will be behind the rich countries of 2000, but they can certainly be comparable with the rich countries of 1950 in many absolute, objective metrics.).
Nevertheless, I do agree with you on one point - there is more to life than the rat race. But you are free at any time to downshift and live a comfortable and leisuirely life, and viewed in absolute terms one has far more capability to do so now than in the past. It's only the relative viewpoint which seems to suggest that one cannot "afford" to be idle.
Terry
I'm so happy to be a Beta....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"A courteous, polite cabbie that speaks English"
;-)) )
Hah! I resemble that remark. LOL Or at least I did....
You have no idea....
"How come it's taking so long? Drive *faster*" - while you're backed up in rush hour traffic on the shortest-time route thru town.
"I can't *believe* this fare!" - After you've run them miles around the city seeking their bar buddies, waiting for 10 minutes plus outside each bar while they fight their way thru crowds...and they're exhorting you to go *faster* so they don't miss their friends...while the dispatcher keeps wondering if you've dropped them off...
"Can I share this fare with my friends/buddies" - Ok, there's 14 of you, some will have to ride on top, and one or two in the trunk.
"What do you mean I can't put the 4x8s of plywood on top?"
"I'll pay you when I get my paycheck. Here's my address." - Yeah, right, dude. That's why I dropped you off somewhere else and you entered with the key...
"What do you mean you won't drive me out of town, it's only 20 inches of snow! Plowed? No, I don't know if they've plowed..."
"I have to go 60 miles in 40 minutes....what do you mean you can't?! I'm LATE!!"
Ad nauseum
(not intended as a troll, just an ex-cabbie's rant
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Ever get passed by a truck while driving a Volkswagen Beetle on the interstate? That's where lifting becomes a problem.
Circular argument! Of course this is something the average consumer doesn't have to worry about. The reason nobody does lift off is precisely *because* everybody's car has a rough underside.
Anyway, I don't think any car would actually fly. I do think it helps with maintaining traction, however. At high speed, traction is important for maintaining both forward momentum and for steering/braking/acceleration control.