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!"

Comments

Those futures aren't worth complaining

[Rocko Bonaparte]

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.

Re:Those futures aren't worth complaining

[samwhite_y]

One of the common mistakes when futurists try to make guesses about the nature of society a few decades from now is that they presume that trends that have been true will continue to be true. There are many examples of this.

During the 50s and 60s, there was a steep up ramp in energy consumption. Because of this, there were many dire predictions in the 70s that we would soon run out of energy. But the steep curve leveled off and the "energy crisis" never happened.

From the late 1800s to the 1960s, our ability to go faster and farther was also on a steep upward curve. Futurists naturally extending this trend assumed that travel to the planets would become commonplace and that personal air transport would soon become a cheaply available transport solution.

From the early 1900s to the 1960s there was great increase in leisure time. Some futurists postulated a future existence where only a few people worked and most just goofed off.

From the 1800s to the 1960s there was a tremendous improvement in using machines to replace humans when it came to various tasks. Again, it was natural to extend this trend to the point that robots manufactured most of the goods consumed by society. Also, during this period there was a large growth in household convenience devices. Extending this trend, it was natural to assume that there would soon be robots that performed all your housework,

Sometimes it is more interesting to examine what was missed. For most of the modern age up to the 1970s, there was not a great improvement in the speed (and quantity) in which written communication was delivered. It still took at least a few days for mail to arrive and international mail still could be a matter of weeks. In order to disseminate information (such as research), large mass printings had to be created and distributed in a very manual way. TV improved the communication process somewhat, but for information with a more limited audience, the basic infrastructure and approach for delivery had not changed for quite some time. That is why "email" and "website" was not on the minds of most futurists.

Also during this period, the mechanisms by which numeric and financial calculations were performed did not change much. It was both expensive to do the calculations and expensive to disseminate the results (My childhood was still in the era where we had to consult large logarithm tables to assist in doing simple arithmetic - something they were doing back in the 1700s). Thus it was not a natural presumption that computers could manage all the details of various financial transactions. In particular, EBay and PayPal were not envisioned.

So my challenge to futurists is to look a little deeper and try to anticipate changes that are not already occurring and extrapolate those. But that is not happening. Every futurist these days seems to be obsessed with small-computerized gadgets linked in high-speed communication networks that allow users to access broadband entertainment. A completely natural but probably mistaken prediction based on current trends.

What is it...

[Violet Null]

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?

Re:I wonder

[Guppy06]

"When did we start thinking about the future so much?"

The Industrial Revolution, because...

"Did people in the middle ages, for example, ever think much past the end of their own lives?"

... then started to have this thing called "free time," time that wasn't devoted to the task of living, and also...

"I'm guessing they did,"

... it wasn't until then that the common person could see the effect technological (and political, for that matter) innovation could have on a person and people within their lifetime. Before industrialization, nobody thought about the future that much because there was no reason to; their lives were just like their parents, whose were just like their parents, whose...

Re:Car Aerodynamics

[HermanZA]

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.

The Missing Element in all Futuristic Art

[ShortedOut]

.... 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.

Re:The Missing Element in all Futuristic Art

[goingincirclez]

Dang, if I'd had some mod points I would have bumped the parent up...

You raise an excellent point. Sometimes I wonder if the appearance of vast, open space is intentional, making an association with the idea of "utopia", or if it was a simple oversight. On the other hand, suppose a piece of "utopian" atrwork DID in fact show a crowded, modern (as we know it to be) society... would the very elements that make the illustration utopian be lost amongst the clutter, hidden in the background?

It's amazing how a pice of artwork's perspectives and presentation can totally warp reality. For instance, look at some conceptual drawings of planned communities, or even some overhead satellite images. They seem to have a vast, open quality that is most often fairly accurate... until you drive through these exact same communities. While they may look just like the sales brochure, and the streets and parks are exactly where the satellite map said they would be, they always seem more crowded when enveloping you in 360 degrees.

Conversly, consider artwork that accompanies visions of Distopian societies. I offer the comic series Transmetropolitan as an example. The cover and story artwork shows exactly what you pondered: A society with energy/matter replicators and communications devices and other technological advances galore, BUT replete with all the overcrowding and societal ills and technological misuses common to a typical urban setting. I've encountered a few other works where "distopia = overcrowding", but can't recall them to mind here.

(oh yah, FWIW, in Transmet they don't have flying cars, either...)

The 1950s Overemphasized Mechanical Developments

[Schlemphfer]

If you think about it, most 1950s guesses about the future centered around dreams of mechanical engineering. Jet-packs, personal helicopters, etc.

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.

Things we were promised, but didn't want

[Bonker]

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...

it is interesting to look back on...

[fermion]

It is interesting to look at past predictions of the future because they can tell us how difficult it is for us to truly think creatively. In most cases, we are so limited by out prejudices and assumptions, that we can't really predict anything past next Thursday. I really believe the value of these predictions is to remind us of who we were, rather than tell us who we are going to be. For instance in many mid 20th century science fiction, the 'simple' tasks of cooking and cleaning were handled by robots, but the 'complex' tasks of navigation still had to be done.

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.

Re: Read this essay by Bertrand Russell

[teorth]

Perhaps you read it, but for those out there who have not quite realized that the promise of technology, more free time, has not materialized, please read this essay.

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

Re:You mean?

[shadowbearer]

"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