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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?
I'm still waiting for Skittlebrau.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Team Fortress 2... And seemingly Half-life 2
I have a 3G mobile video phone on my desk and it works, so that one can be struck off the list.
Remember Y2K? Me neither. Guess I'm still waiting for those missiles to accidentally launch.
Proper holographic displays where the device will sit on your coffee-table or hang from your ceiling and the image will float in the middle of your oom and replace TV as we know it. That would be cool. /. and russia jokes.Oh crap.
At least we can be sure of some things.
Suppose we're gonna see lots of crappy flying car jokes here on
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
So videophones never materialised? So what's this in my pocket?
Video mobile phones are around and on sale in at least the UK and Australia. I've got the NEC e808 which is a bit big but does have a Qwerty keyboard. See www.three.co.uk for more info.
Actually, I'm still waiting for some of the drivers on the local freeways to start exhibiting real intelligence.
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?"
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
Still waiting.
...just my 2 gil.
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
In a perfect world you wouldn't need a Utopia.
Suck figs.
Teleportation... please, I hate driving/ flying etc. Living in the UK, the roads are always jammed and the trains never run on time, and lets face it, were all a bit dubious about flying.
It'll also be a faster method of getting my pizza to me before it gets cold
The article is a bit lacking in substance. There only seems to be a few short paragraphs, I can't find a continutation page. Was it really worth posting?
I'm just waiting for this damn computer to get a cup of tea right!
...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.
...is some sort of mechanism - 'bot, cyborg, whatever - that can handle all of the simple, silly, repetitive junk all of us have to do every day.
- Cut the grass. Simple. Pre-programmable.
- Empty the dishwasher. The same dishes go in the same cabinets every time.
- Sweep the floor (ok, there's roomba).
- Shovel snow.
- Paint the walls/ceiling.
- Wash the walls/ceiling.
- Fold laundry.
- Etc!!!
Asimo, take me away!Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
videophones have been around for a while in the UK and in other countries(seems to be broken?). The quality still isn't brilliant but Orange(I think) have started to offer Soccer highlights over the latest phones.
moon colonies, ok, we chose to put a space station up there first, and then realised it costs a lot of money for little (commercial or military) value. Moon colonies are sadly not as sexy as say a Mars colony, or even a Mars mission, which ESA has planned in 25 years, NASA tried and continues to test methods of producing enough food,air and water, other countries,notably India and China have planned Moon landings so we are going back. Space is unfortunately used as a pissing contest between nuclear neighbours, when this stops then some more science can get done(e.g. Hubble, Galileo, Beagle 2)
food in pills. You can get food in pills, just not the calories, vitamins will give you nearly all of the trace elements you need to live. Calories are a lot harder, to get 500 Calories into a pill means eating something with 40 times the energy concentration of sugar or twenty times the concentration of fats, I doubt the human body would have much success digesting such complicated food. You can however get protein and creatine supplements which are in tablet/powder form, and sugar sweets( those silly energy sweets which taste of really sour orange) have more calories than their equivalent weight in sugar. (The protein supplements also tend to taste bad and are fed to animals instead. )
cars that drive themselves; power steering has been around for a while, as has ABS and cruise control, that is about as much as the current laws will allow on the public roads. intelligent cars have been developed, which, when combined with other intelligent cars, are actually safe. It's the human drivers who freak out at the sight of a driverless car that's the problem :-)
jet packs; Jet packs appeared in Thunderball (James Bond). You can buy them if you have enough money, or you can build them if you want. They're not used much because, much like the Segway, there are easier and cheaper way of getting around.
moving sidewalk's are in most airports now, as well as some metro stations. There have also been "moving stairs" around for just as long.
--This post brought to you by Google.com, paid for by Google For America, Inc.
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
Maybe it'll be possible some day to pack a major amount of calories and various proteins into a convenient pill form, but I really can't see have much application beyond, say, the military.
... to ...
Food is supposed to be a sensual experience, part of the feedback system that ensures we eat. Sure, there are some people out there who just eat to live, but we're pre-programmed to find eating pleasurable, from the sight of a perfectly grilled steak, its brown crust glistening under a sprinkling of whole peppercorns, to the scents of exotic vanilla beans wafting up from a mound of cold, soft ice cream, to the texture of crusty, rustic bread, hand-ripped from a lovely brown loaf dusted with cornmeal, to the taste of warm, moist, yielding carrots, drizzled in honey and butter, to
I need to change my shorts. Back soon.
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.
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
Team Fortress 2... And seemingly Half-life 2
Don't forget Nuke Nukem Forever - which is the time it will take to develop and not the working title as many people mistakenly assume...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
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.
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.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
.... And I'm so full of conviction I daren't even put my name to the post.
My VCR doesn't even do 30 fps! 29.97, now thats where its at.
Mod point free since 2001
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.
...and for dessert....here it comes....blueberry pie!
:)
Thanks, Violet.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
Private aircraft have to submit flight plans so the FAA will know where they are at any given moment
Sorry, but that's utter bullshit. I can get in my plane here in Rochester NY, and besides talking to the control tower and departure controller until I'm 10 miles away from the airport, I could fly all the way to the Pacific Ocean without telling anybody where I am going or even turning on my radio.
The difference between flying and driving is that pilots actually have to demonstrate some skill and judgement in order to get and keep their licenses. There are bad pilots, but nowhere near as high a percentage as there are bad drivers.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Good news! It's a suppository.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
> 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
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
ala 'Fifth element'. minus the anoyying automated ticket giver.
Yeah, but with the half naked Milla Jojovich in the back seat!
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
The rest of the world doesn't need drug development that focuses on losing weight without exercise and maintaining an erection for more than 30 seconds without a ruler and gaffer tape.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.