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What's Always Next?
bettiwettiwoo writes "In its 'What's Next' issue, Time has a charmingly silly piece called What's Always Next? , in which is provided '[a] sampling of the future that wasn't': things that have been predicted since day dot, but have somehow never materialized. The examples they give are: videophones; moon colonies; food in pills; cars that drive themselves; jet packs; and moving sidewalks.
... There are, after all, so many and varied things -- ranging from the very serious to the down-right silly -- that are predicted time and again, yet seem curiously absent in our daily lives. Examples: global catastrophies of the Armageddon kind (be they population overload, total environmental disasters, plagues, asteroids, or nuclear wars); a secure and bug-free Windows; the end of Madonna's singing career (her 'acting' career was, I believe, still-born)." So what are you waiting for?
Remember Y2K? Me neither. Guess I'm still waiting for those missiles to accidentally launch.
All of these assertions were based upon their immediate operationality.
Now, for each of the civilization advances, we knew some drawbacks : every occidental now has (or could have) a car, but the level of pollution has grown to a serious level, hence the priority change.
At this moment, most of these researches may have had their priorities lowered to face the consequences of the previous inventions...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I wouldn't buy a car that could drive itself unless that was all there was - I just like driving too much. I imagine they'll happen eventually, but I think that if it does, then amateur racing (like SCCA autocross and such) will become hugely popular for people who still love to drive. On a side note, I'm still waiting for the flying DeLorean with the Mr. Fusion machine. Aren't vidphones already here, or at least making their way into common usage?? I say give them a few years - seems like the tech is there, and its getting cheap enough.
this is about the best I can find
But I wore the juice
Videophones have been available for decades. It's a pretty safe bet to predict something that's available off the shelf. Marketing does it all the time. You could even say it's their job.
Weren't they just "predicting" that recorded media is a thing of the past?
When they "predict" things like this it's a clear indication of the direction they're trying to push us in.
In the case of videophones it's a direction that it turns out we weren't willing to be pushed in.
Bottom line is that most of us don't want the damned things and wouldn't use them if they were given to us for free.
KFG
Actually not. Imagine you have to run around your 3D screen standing in the middle of your living room to get the right point of view ...
No, I want a professional cameraman do it for me.
It might be popular to dis Madonna, but she has more singing and dancing talent than 99.999% of the people out there.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Unless there is a radical change in monitor design (or some other method), the paperless office will never work for me.
Im quite the enviromentalist and Im all for the paperless office in theory, but if Im proof reading, making changes to documents, reading a manual etc. etc. I just have to have it printed out and infront of me. It never looks the same on screen as printed out, and my eyes tend to go "snow blind" after staring at a screen of text after a while.
Many of these are viable from a technology pooint of view. They just lack a market:
VIDEOPHONES: People want to communicate more information more quickly. I get the feeling that the image of the person you're talking to simply isn't a piece of information people need.
A MOON COLONY: Suffers from being slightly useless in itself, and only worthwhile as a means to an end. People don;t want to spend billions in setting on eof these up.
FOOD IN PILLS: This simply isn't possible. You could have something like an energy bar or a thick shake of course. I guess people like eating proper food.
CARS THAT DRIVE THEMSELVES: Technologically possible with a bit of R&D involved. I have seen a car that can drive along German autobahns, and overtake safely. The basic technology exists. Getting the things to obey all traffic rules is feasable. The thing is, where's the market? People do not want their cars to take over control. It's simply not safe for them to do say. Computers can't deal with the unexpected. I seriously doubt that legislators will allow cars to drive themselves without having someone qualified to drive behind the wheel. Since you have a driver, why bother with self driving?
JET PACKS: I guess the 20 second flight time makes them too limitted to be a lot of use
MOVING SIDEWALKS: Yeah, what is it with these? It can't cost a lot more to run and maintain than a light rail network or underground system. We only see travellators in airports.
When you can roam from Europe into the US and have your 3G video cell phone work, then it can be struck off my list.
That's because few really want them. The videophone seems like the next evolution of the telephone (nearly common-sense), but who wants to look at someone right after they got up in the morning (or in some other awkward position). I don't. . .
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
An economy not entirely dependent on oil? Depending on who you ask - and, oh boy, does it depend - we've already passed the global midpoint where we're using it up faster than we can possibly find it.
No, I'm not screaming that we're going to run dry in ten years, I'm saying that oil prices are only going one way, and that it's a risky strategy to rely on a supply of new oil from Arab countries.
How about just for once we plan further ahead than the next election and begin the wholesale switch to renewable energy sources now? We put man on the moon in under eight years from declaring it. If we had eight years warning, could we we build and drive a vehicle through every mainland US state without using a drop of oil, directly or indirectly? Oh, sure we could, we'd just use solar. And, uh, no plastics. And, um, build it in a plant powered by wind turbines. And ship the parts by, uh, yuh, we'll come back to that one. And our factory workers will use geothermal power to heat their homes, and they'll, erm, cycle to work. You see how it goes? Sure, in theory we could do it, and sooner or later, we'll have to. Are we going to wait until the last possible moment to put that theory to the test?
Oil is a one off bonanza in human history. We should be investing that wealth in our childrens' future, not blowing it on wide screen TVs and leaving them to clean up the mess.
While I'm ranting, sooner or later China is going to get rich enough to support an unhealthy population of lawyers, and then we can forget shipping our toxic garbage there to be melted down. Again, we can keep building the tire mountains and circuit board cities higher and higher and leave our kids to work out what to do with them. I just hope they're not such selfish short sighted bastards when it comes to looking after us in our collective old age.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Hmm where do you work? My office isn't exactly 100% paperless, but I'm lucky if I need to use the printer once a month. Code, documentation, presentations, memos are all stored and transmitted via computer, and never really need to be printed. On a related note, I visited some friends out of town recently (computer geeks all), and not one of them owned a printer at home, even though they had multiple computers. Just never had the need for a printer any more.
What we do have are huge conglomerations, or some moron ranting on his blog. There really isn't a whole lot in between.
Philadelphia has 2 newspapers. One reads like an AP and Reuters news feed. The other borders on tabloid. It doesn't help that both are owned by Knight Ridder, the same folks who run USA Today. The little free weekly that someone in our neighborhood puts together has a lot more useful information in it.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
e-Paper. I remember reading an article in 1995 or so, about the MIT Media Lab e-Ink/e-Paper project, and how it would be out in "2 to 3 years". It's now 2003, and electronic paper is still 2 to 3 years away.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Articles like these always confuse the role of science in society -- anything futuristic or techie is lumped under the rubric of science. Yet science really has so little to do with any of this. Scientists discover the laws, engineers develop products that make use of the laws, and businesses/governments/consumers invest in those products to adopt the fruits of the laws.
Science was done with the laws that underpin videophones, moving sidewalks, and fly cars several decades ago -- how many articles on flying cars make it into scholarly science journals these days? Engineers have been using those laws to make prototypes of the products or (more importantly) low cost approaches to manufacturing and deploying these products for quite a while.
Its the people that invest and adopt that hold up most "scientific" inventions long after science to done with the topic. Until the product is cheap enough and perceived as useful enough, all the science and engineering in the world is irrelevant. This is where marketing to cosnumers or lobbying to governments comes into play.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I agree. That's the biggest problem with so called "innovations"... they don't help you do anything better. How does seeing someone increase the effiency of using a telephone? Now, it makes sense if your loved one is being needlessly deployed in some third world country because your current president is a nitwit. Then it makes sense that you want to see the person. However, if your just calling your wife to ask her if she needs you to pick anything up from the store, there's no point in a video phone. As for the flying car, they'll happen eventually, just not in the US. This is the reason why. Currently, if I went out and bought a single engine piper cub and popped open the engine cowling, do you know what I'd find... dynamos. Now, there are companies that make electroic ignition systems for airplanes, but because of the current rules, you can only use them if you declare your plane an experimental. However, after thousands and thousands of hours of people flying on electronic ignition, the FAA still isn't convinced it's safe. Now just imagine what some poor bastard would have to go through to even get the FAA to look at a flying car. For it to be even practical to the general public, it would have to have an obsurdly computer controlled, fly by computer control system that would prevent the thousands of possible knuckleheaded things a person could do in a flying car, otherwise, it wouldn't be flying car, it would be a flying plane. Your average person can just barely sort out drivers ed. Just imagine your crazy cubemate behind the stick of a flying car. Yeah, that would be frightening.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
and what, pray tell, is so special about the number 30?
That was classic intercourse!
Very prescient comments about China. I think the dark horse in terms of countries unexpectedly upsetting our western fat cat society has got to be India, however. China will get there sooner than most people expect, but India is within a few years of seriously kicking our rumps. Just look at those software jobs flying off to the subcontinent...
Basically, we are in very big trouble, because the mathematics of having a billion Indians and a billion Chinese means that they need a much lower percentage of educated people in their countries to have a vastly larger actual number of educated people. If China or India can achieve a 10% university education rate, that's 200 million well educated Chinese and Indians - the equivalent of every person in the US having such a degree. There is a lot of complacence, because we look at those countries and see a high poverty rate, unemployment, lots of people living in poor conditions... but they are both nations on the rise and because of their immense sizes they will be hugely powerful before we know it.
Right now we can see this with IT jobs going to India... but how soon until there are hordes of Chinese accountants? Indian engineers? One only has to look at the speed with which the high-tech industry took off in SE Asia, where most of the manufacturing is still done, to see how quickly such sectors could be taken overseas with great speed. We won't just be wearing shirts made in China, our knowledge work will be done there too. Unfortunately we won't be able to afford any of it because we will all be unemployed.
IMHO you are absolutely correct in your assertion that we should be moving now, with great rapidity, to build a new set of ideals for our societies. We need to really migrate from the industrial, oil-swilling, third-world-will-pick-up-the-pieces mentality to an information age, high-tech, renewable, sustainable future. We have all the technology, we just need to put it into practice. If we don't, the west will become a hideous, decayed place full of social problems and memories of the era when we ruled the world.
Read Pynchon.
> Well, I'll stick to my point. We can do this now. So, why aren't we? Why are we going to suck oil until we go blue in the face and leave nothing in reserve?
The obvious answer is that it's cheaper than the alternatives. It's not really rational to expect that we'll stop using a resource that's available now, with an already-exisiting distribution infrastructure, for no reason other than that we need to stretch it out over some indeterminate length of time in the future.
> I'm thinking of my kids, but longer term, we're due another ice age real soon now. Failing that, god will drop a rock on us sooner or later. Our descendants are going to have to bootstrap themselves from wood burning stoves to nuclear power. Good luck to them.
What? Why would you think that they'd have to do this? By the time that next ice age rolls around, or the big rock falls, how can you know what we'll use for energy? Besides, why would they progress from wood to nuclear power at all? I can personally think of several options better than that, and I can't predict the future any better than you. You seem to think that we need to move away from fossil fuels right away, and I don't see anything in your argument to explain why. Yes, they're running out, but what's the point to having a huge world reserve of oil by moving away from oil entirely? Doesn't that defeat the use of having the reserves, if nothing you do requires that reserve? As the supply gets harder to provide, the price will rise, and when it rises high enough, we'll move to a different source of energy. Expecting the human race to do anything else is irrationally Utopian.
Virg
do you really thi8nk that engineers wouldn't consider these issues?
Don't be dense. When people say 'I want my flying car' it is implied that they want it to be safe. Thats really the interesting technology anyways, making it safe.
When I say 'I want my flying car' I'm not thinking Fixed wing carcraft. I'm thinking ala 'Fifth element'. minus the anoyying automated ticket giver.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The paperless off is nearly achievable right now. I say nearly because stick notes are so damn usefull.
However it is a social issue, not a technology one. Any company that puts iyts mind to it in a serious way, could reduce paperwork by 50%, easy.
I think if the person who is in charge of supplies had the power to say, "You are not allowed to print emails" would be a good use of empowerment. espcially if they got a bonus tied to cost savings.
I worked with a team of 10 people and we all committed to a 'less paper' office. We never had any hard paperwork with anything that was involved within the group. It was all digital, which was a pain in the ass sometime, but we got over the hurdles. there were 2 problems.
1)other group or departments always wanted us to print stuff, but we would only send electronic forms.'
2)stick notes are so damn usefull.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It'll be flamebait when the US has a healthcare system like every civilized first-world country.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
1. Does it start with a few letters, followed by // or ://?
2. Is there additional text after the material from #1 before the first space?
If you answered yes to these two questions, CONGRATULATIONS. You've probably found an URL. Proceed to the end of the word, If not, you might have found a Bob or Fred. Better luck next time.
As always, thanks for playing the slashgame "Hurl the URL".... Sheesh.
"Your average person can just barely sort out drivers ed. Just imagine your crazy cubemate behind the stick of a flying car. Yeah, that would be frightening."
Just need stronger roofs. Buildings have all sorts of defenses against errant cars. Look at government buildings with their setbacks and concrete barriers. Even civilian buildings have some barriers to prevent accidents. If larger numbers of people had flying machines, then we would just see the equivalent vertical barriers being put into place to protect property on the ground.
I've not seen a good comparison between flying safety and car safety made, but tens of thousands of people die in car crashes each year, while well under a thousand people die in light aircraft per year. So, the question really becomes one of risk and perception. It is clear that no major relaxation of flying rules will be allowed as long as people view aircraft as terrorist weapons or just an object of the liesure class. But light aircraft are far less dangerous as a weapon than a car, since they can't carry very much weight. And light aircraft are reserved to the liesure classes primarily because the required training is very expensive. That the actual aircraft is expensive is only because of the low volume and the certification requirements. A car by comparison would be much more expensive than an aircraft if it needed to go through the same legal process and was produced in as low a volume.
All that said aircraft won't be practical as "flying cars" until they are made to be end-to-end forms of transportation, but here also new regulations would be required to allow machines like the "Skycar" to land in residential and business areas legally. But the discussion has been so corrupted by irrational fear rather than practical concerns, that no one will be allowed to do much more than jump off the ground without fifty years of development and hundreds of billions of dollars spent on systems of control to make us perfectly "safe" even when it should be clear to any thinking person that to accept the risk and allow flying "cars" to take off without such onerous and impractical rules as are now proposed would be another economic revolution akin to the development of the Model T.
Here I don't think the effects of practical personal end-to-end air transportation could be exagerated. Openning up vaste areas of land to economic development. Substantially reducing resources spent on transportation infrastructure. Indeed, space is more than just an abstract contruct, we need it to prosper, and as we reach certain density as population grows it is hard to imagine greater economic growth without openning up the skies to transportation and commerce. Free skies mean prosperity.
Over the years we have had many new things come and go. It seems to me that the ones that stick around are the ones that are more productive in nature. The CB radio didn't exactly stick around but the cel-phone has. The digital watch is okay but it sure hasn't replaced the analog watch. The 8-track tape lost out to the cassette and VHS beat Beta-max (still don't quite understand that). Technologies have changed and replaced other things that seemed that they would be around forever, the LP is all but gone, replaced by the CD.
For new tech to work, the consumer seems to need to see an obvious benefit but the manufacturer has to see an obvious profit. Without buy-in from both sides, a new tech will not fly. It is pretty simple. In some cases, the manufacturers have enough clout to throw a technology down our throats. This pretty much happened with the CD.
Another thing that I have noticed is that a lot of what they said would free us has acted more as a chain. The cel phone and pager are two obvious examples. I can no longer really get away from work and I can not get away from my personal things either. There is no such thing as getting away anymore. Sure it is nice bing available but I have been called into work while I was in the boat fishing. I've been camping and had my mother-in-law call me with computer questions. In the eveing at home, I can pull out the laptop and do some work... We no longer have the clear work/home family/profession lines that used to divide our time and responsibilities. This has the effect of attaching us rather than freeing us.
While there is something to be said for the above, one must also point out that some of those fears were justified.
While overpopulation of the world didn't happen, it didn't happen in part due to everyone controlling the number of children they had when they got rich. In places of poverty overpopulation was a reality. At it did have dire consequences. One might say that nature is compensating with various plagues (i.e. HIV) and starvation/war (i.e. Somalia/Ethiopia). But anyone with a portion of humanity would be horrified at that strong of a social Darwinist approach to human populations.
Nuclear war was a real threat and it really was a miracle it never happened -- although with terrorists and the nature of the technology of bio-weapons and nuclear weapons, it will remain a threat to humanity until we start having off-planet colonies.
A secure and bug free windows? Well there is OSX or Linux. They have Windows. (grin)
I think that global warming is still to be reckoned with. While I'm not convinced regarding the degree technology causes it the phenomena itself is real. Glaciers are rapidly melting and I think we're starting to see weather changes. If something happens with say the gulf current be prepared for major problems in the world.