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What Will Life Be Like In 2008?
tblake writes "Back in 1968, Modern Mechanix mused what life would be like in 40 years. Some things they came pretty close on: 'Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees' accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card's number is fed into the store's computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.' Some things are way off: 'The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city's suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whiz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round.' And some things are sorta right: 'TV screens cover an entire wall in most homes and show most subjects other than straight text matter in color and three dimensions. In addition to programmed TV and the multiplicity of commercial fare, you can see top Broadway shows, hit movies and current nightclub acts for a nominal charge.'"
Well, I think you almost hit the nail on the head. "most predictions from the 60s and 70s..." There were quite a few of them right? Seemed like every author or magazine wrote at least one article talking about what stuff would be like in the year 2000, 2010, etc...
,kmdsxzqw3i98" either. It's nice for him that he got some stuff mostly right, but unlike you being impressed at this, I would have been more impressed if none of them did.
So we've got plenty of predictions from the 60s and 70s, and this guy mananged to get several of his right (though others are way way off).
What's that they say about an infinite number of monkeys? We only had a finite (if large) number of predictors, but unlike monkeys most of them wont just write down "j
As for the driverless car thing, I think that it could conceivably happen in my own lifetime, but I don't expect it anytime soon. Certainly not as a common thing in the next decade.
Flying cars? Fuck flying cars, I want my four hour work day god damn it:
People have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours. But the extra time isn't totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder's spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments--on the average, about two hours of home study a day.
They were just confused that the ease in which we can accomplish four 1968 work hours would eliminate us from having to do an additional four hours of additional work.
By 2048 the concept of a national currency will have devolved back into a token based economy founded on barter. Those few that survive will focus on securing the necessities of life. Whole regions will be uninhabited as global warming turns them progressively to desert.
Personal transportation will be a thing of the past. What movement occurs will either be human powered or the preserve of the feudal lords. The only areas where an energy rich economy continues to exist will be those of the Middle East, at least those parts not a radioactive wasteland. Most oil will be vegetable oil, and with the collapse of intensive agriculture there won't be much of that.
Many of the major cities will be going underwater as sea levels rise following the accelerating collapse of the Greenland glaciers and the lack of funding to support management measures. Diseases come in waves across the globe, each wave wiping out more than are born. There is a general malaise, a depression of opportunities lost. Most do not want to bring children into this world.
How many of us actually work for eight hours? I know I generally have plenty of time to read Slashdot (ahem) (cough) keep up with new developments during the day.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
He describes a world where the entire infrastructure has essentially been rebuilt in 40 years. I can't see how that would have seemed plausible even back then. That said, portions of it are impressively accurate.
...the article maintains a phallocentric society, where men go to the office to work, and women stay home and coo-- I mean, oversee the cooking. While some of the technological advancements have certainly come to pass (and some pretty close if we look at them analogously), the social attitude of the article is firmly entrenched in the 1960s. Consider:
The housewife simply determines in advance her menus for the week, then slips prepackaged meals into the freezer and lets the automatic food utility do the rest.we could invest in public transportation and abrogate people's stupid, life-risking civil liberties by takin' way their cars.
SERIOUSLY. If we invested the amount of money people spend on Cars, Car Insurance and Gasoline into public transportation, we'd have some sort of awesome, pneumatic tube public transportation system a la Futurama. The reason there's so much congestion is because people have decided they each need to get to work INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED in LARGE CHUNKS OF CARBON-BURNING METAL.
What I found most interesting about this article is how shopping in 2008 is actually BETTER than was imagined in 1968. The author thought items for sale would be displayed on a television, and people would order items through a different interface -- the telephone -- by pressing on a telephone keypad.
Instead, today we can interactively view an item for sale on the Internet, get competing prices, read reviews from real people around the world, and order the item through the same interface using buttons with descriptive labels. It seems so obvious now, and as a developer I still think we have a ways to go, but look how far we've come! This wasn't even fathomable 40 years ago.
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We'd probably have more of that cool stuff if people could learn to get along a little better. But as it stands, they failed to mention that people today still lock their doors, have automatic car alarms, and that nine tenths of the world's population not only don't have flying cars, but live in mud huts while working for some cruddy manufacturing company for pennies a day. --With unexploded cluster bomb ordinance scattered outdoors.
Neal Stephenson, were he born in the Forties, could have put a more realistic spin on this article. Too bad.
I predict that by 2015 or thereabouts, and probably a bit sooner, the earth will be a meteor pock-marked hell dealing with super-fast glacial rebound where there really is no more paper money, and the only domed cities will have George W. Bush and/or Vladimir Putin living inside them.
-FL
The pace of change is slowing down. Look at four 50 year periods in history.
Progress is flatlining.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
* Life expectancy measured from birth for US males is up 10 years. For some other nations the gain has been more dramatic (typically the ones who got to the development party late).
* You know those radios, TVs, electronics, and computers? Yeah, you don't have to be a middle-class white American to own them any more.
* There are plenty of quality of life drugs (one of the reasons for constantly increasing health care costs is that our standard of care is constantly increasing). Acne, allergies, and decline in virility as a function of age are now essentially optional. Give us another decade or three and we'll add senility to the list.
* No major new form of transportation, but passenger air travel has been greatly democratized. Most Slashdotters can get a roundtrip ticket to Japan for a week's wages. It used to cost more than a month's. Domestic air travel is now price competitive with *bus fares* in many instances. It now strictly dominates passenger rail service in the US.
* Improvements in efficiency in banking, of all things, means that many, many more Americans have access to credit. No need to know the loan officer, no need to pass the "Is this man a responsible Christian gentleman?" test, no direct restriction based on income, even. This would have been a fairly radical notion in 1958. This has increased home ownership (*mostly* a good thing even with the current debacle which, it bears noting, is affecting less than a 10th of homes), made life much easier for many entrepeneurs, and greatly increased access to higher education. There are some downsides (folks going into debt to get plasma TVs), but the economist in me says "Well, they have a plasma TV now, and its clear they wanted it".
* I talk 2 hours on the phone every week to my family, across the Pacific Ocean, and pay about $10 a month for the privilege. Adjusting for inflation, that would buy less than an hour of call time to the house next door. A person from 1958 would be shocked, shocked that many phone calls are free. (I predict that a person from 2018 will be shocked, shocked that many weren't back in the dark ages of 2008! Imagine, you still pay for something as prosaic as speaking to someone in Japan! Why, its just bits?!)
* I can send a letter to anyone in the world, instantaneously, for free. If I actually want that letter to involve paper, I can send it now (2 PM) and have it arrive at 8 AM *just about anywhere on earth, without fail, tomorrow morning* for about two hours wages.
* In 1958, cheap prepared food was not a reality for most people. It now is. (I almost can't remember the last time I cooked, which is a little weird at the moment but I don't think this will remain weird forever. My mother remembers people sewing.)
* Most consumer products are so cheap that replacement is cheaper than repair. (TV shorts? Pants rip? Telephone on the fritz? Buy a new one.)
* Your main health problems are caused by an overabundance of cheap food and a dearth of manual labor taxing you every day. These are, in terms of human history, "high class problems".
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
There's a reason it's mandatory, you know. It's so that when you're hit by some asshole driving like an idiot, you get your car fixed and you get your medical bills paid.
The only insurance that's required by law is liability.
Before it was required, people were getting completely fucked. You'd get hit by some asshole and he's be broke and not give a shit. You can't get blood from a stone, so you could potentially lose everything you own paying for an accident that wasn't your fault.
In a perfect society, people would get insurance on their own and everything would be good. But we don't live there, so sometimes shit needs to be required, as shitty as it may seem. Don't blame Uncle Sam, blame shithead John Doe down the road.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Not trivial at all. Doing 250MPH, if you have a vehicle a mile ahead of you doing 225MPH in the adjoining lane, it's not beside you or ahead of you - but change lanes and end up behind it... There's all manner of such edge cases.
Of course, that nobody has ever really specified that such things must be controlled tightly is proof positive that such things can never be controlled tightly.
As far as getting cash, my banks ATMs are everywhere. I also use my debit card for any larger purchases and most places offer cash back nowadays. I personally hate the idea of walking around without some paper currency... for things like lunch with friends.
Somewhat related, I hate using my debit card for small transactions at local businesses (like the $5.00 burrito down the street from my work); otherwise they get screwed out of their profit margin with transaction fees, and it makes tipping a pain.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
Like a squirrel saving nuts for the winter, you worked hard in school and college while those guys watched MTV. Now you reap the benefits...
And you say that like we're the suckers.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.