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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?
Since the 1930s, effective anti-aging treatments (making us effectively immortal) have been predicted. So far, nothing. (Not that this would be a good thing for overpopulation but...)
-Brendan
I'm still waiting for my paperless office. It hasn't happened yet: no matter how much I cut back, my coworkers always want to print repeated drafts of documents to review interim versions, print emails and notes for archiving where they can find them, and so on.
food in pill form - well any moron could have told you that was pure science fiction - it's all a matter of density and quantity. we -could- do it, but you'd need a plate-full of pills.
jetpacks - just like flying cars, it's primarily a safety issue. we have the tech - but no-one wants the cast of Friends crashing their hover-porsche into people's homes. on the ground there are trees, and curbs and bushes to slow them down when they leave the road. not so above.
cars that drive themselves - well honda's already park themselves. darpa is holding an unmanned vehicle race through the desert - i can't imagine commercial applications will take too much longer.
videophones - are already here. videoconference much? just because the consumers have decided that thus-far, the cost outweighs the benefit doesn't mean science is holding anything back.
it's simply a matter of consumer adoption.
moving sidewalks - already here - in malls, in airports. why aren't they in manhatten? because who pays for that? who benefits from a moving sidewalk downtown? when there's a business case for them, they exist. when it's left to the public sector, and there's no tangible benefit to outweigh the cost - the just don't exist.
once again, a problem of business, not of science.
plague - hello, HIV/AIDS, cancer ?
now how about the things we have that we never thought to ask for?
the internet, gps, multivitamins, the ISS, remote surgery, the genome map, cellphones, tazers, velcro, stain resistant dockers, nano-tube-spun ropes, teflon, sunscreen, moores law, p2p networks, etc?
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
As for videophones, well general interactivity on the Internet took over from that really. People do much prefer to hide behind an electronic persona and too high a proportion of people don't like being in posed photographs, let alone on video. Those who do like it have webcams, and webcam conversations are in general between lovers and family. SciFi Movies still feature videophone communications though, although realtime one to one video communication may never really become popular to the point of replacing the telephone.
As for jetpacks, moving sidewalks, moonbases and whatnot, I don't think a lot of people even believed those at the time. Better predictions are those which really do look at current trends and technology, seeing the barriers properly, and going for it.
Like the Segway... what am I saying?
I'll tell you why it isn't popular: the same reason motorbikes aren't mainstream popular. They are terrible to use in the rain, you can't give people a ride on them with you, they don't allow you to hide all but your head and shoulders, and they don't have a stereo. Simple.
A truly, completely modern city might be somewhere to look to for futuristic ideas, but then Stevenage in the UK, for example, a concept city just outside London with cyclepaths all over the place, yet people don't all cycle, most still use cars. Because a car also comes in handy when you need to go hundreds of miles. Sadly the site doesn't mention the cyclepaths except in section 5.1.5 of some transport review. Notice how in section 5.1.2 their transport policy "focused on accomodating the car" in spite of their miles and miles of cycleways.
I grew up near Stevenage, and it's not the idyll you might think, indeed it's a rather characterless place, bit too much of a concrete jungle, but the revolutionary ideas that went into the town planning were spoiled by poor fashions in architecture at the time, and ongoing council policy which did not match with the original town planners idealistic philosophies...
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I saw videophones working in about 1995. They were widely deployed throughout NTT and worked over ISDN lines. I don't know how many they've sold externally though.
...It just isn't evenly distributed yet" - William Gibson.
It's true.
we have flying cars. forget the moller skycar, the future is the xantus powered lift aircraft.
we have jet packs, but now affordable backpack aircraft only nearly nobody wants to build them.
I think some people can't handle the future. they're too afraid of getting smushed up by it.
Have you any idea how many cars that stops on freeways/highways?
Ever thought about the consequence of a car suddenly malfunctioning when you fly 1000ft above a residential neighborohood?
When something goes bad in car traffic the worst thing that happens is that the car (and driver) is destroyed by the speed. If you are lucky the car stops and you call for backup. If you are 1000ft above ground level the speed and height will kill you with almost no exceptions.
Do you realy want Old Aunt Jenny to crash into your house at 200mph just because she forgot to change the oil on her new Ford FreedomFlyer 2004?
The only cases where its sound and economical to fly today are long distances togeheter with a bunch of other people to cut cost.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Not all predictions turned out exactly the way that speculative fiction envisioned them:
- Sliding doors exist (mainly for elevators), but don't say "swwiiish" whenever they open and close.
- The tricorder doesn't exist as such, but there's PDAs and mobile phones that can do much of the same, and much that the original tricorders couldn't do. Many of them even look like a tricorder, due to it being a practical design.
- Computers speaking. Thankfully, they don't speak in a monotone tin-bucket voice. (The exception being my Asus motherboard BIOS, which tells me in a metallic semi-feminine voice "no CPU instarred" twice before booting.) Luckily too, we don't have thousands of computer voices speaking simultaneously from every cubicle. This most likely because the cubicle was never predicted.
- Voice recognition. Unfortunately, we have that on too many phone services. If, like me, you have a voice that makes James Earl Jones sound like a puberty boy, they're not too helpful.
- Stasis/hibernation. It exists, but if you want to time travel that way, only your sperm can go.
- Jumpsuits. They exist, and presumably some people wear them, but I can't remember the last time I saw one in real life. Possibly due to the fact that most people still need to go to the bathroom every now and then, and there's no transporter that can take care of that need for us yet.
- Designer drugs. Yes, we have them, but they're nowhere near as sophisticated or readily available as in speculative fiction. We also have the smokeless cigarettes, but it's not a plexiglass tube filled with crystals, nor do they make you zonk out.
- Androids. Replacement bodyparts are common, but few if any of them are improvements on the originals.
- Laser weapons. Sure, but they don't make Moog sounds when used, and are more useful for guidance than payload.
- Universal nudism and free sex. What happened? After a short burst in the 60's, this one seems to have died... *sigh*
Regards,
--
*Art
I want one of these.
Three years ago, they matched a prototype of this car against a Ferarri, a Corvette, a Miata and a Porche Carerra on a 1/8 mile drag strip. It beat, by 7 lengths, all of these except the Miata. The only reason the Miata won was because the driver of the T-Zero forgot to disengage the hand brake.
www.wavefront-av.com
The "food pill" concept does have a fundamental physical limitation. By "food" we usually mean things like proteins and carbohydrates, not things like vitamins, and "pill" usually means something rather small
that can be swallowed with one gulp.
Our daily requirement of protein and carbohydrate is on the order of hundreds of grams. To get 100 grams of carbos, you need at least 100 grams of material, and typically a bit more (unless you're gulping down pure sugar). This would be well beyond the size range of what we would usually call a "pill".
You can put things like vitamins and a few "supplement" materials in pill form, because we only need those in sub-gram amounts. But you're not going to put significant amounts of amino acids or sugars into a pill, not in the quantities that we need them. The universe just doesn't work that way.
Also, we need a significant amount of water per day. Our biochemistry only works in a water medium. If you could reduce the proteins and carbos to a digestible but waterless form for less bulk, you'd just have to consume the water some other way. You might as well leave the water mixed with the proteins and carbos and consume them together. It's a lot more satisfying to the palate than downing pills and drinking large quantities of water.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
There was a Y2K problem. I spent an afternoon in 1997 fixing the one bug we had in our software.
:-) will be complaining that incompetent programmers didn't check for this when they wrote the code. Testing for events that are not going to occur for years or decades is usually not high on the list. As you've seen from the lack of a disaster, our software development techniques are good enough to cope with easily anticipated bugs.
We couldn't fix the only serious problem we had; a batch of industrial PCs that we shipped to our customers before 1995 wouldn't work properly after the leap day of 2000. That is why you think there was no Y2K problem; most of the problems were minor and could be "fixed" by setting an incorrect date. Computers fail for many reasons, and most Y2K bugs were solved the same way as Windows bugs are solved; users and programmers found work-arounds.
I really object to your characterization of programmers and designers as incompetent. I'll bet programmers are writing code right now that will fail during the non leap year of 2100; and you (or your preserved head in a jar
-- Pot is safer than Beer