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Why Our "Amazing" Science Fiction Future Fizzled
An anonymous reader sends in a story at CNN about how our predictions for the future tend to be somewhat accurate (whether or not we can do a thing) yet often too optimistic (whether or not it's practical). Obvious example: jetpacks. Quoting:
"Joseph Corn, co-author of 'Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future,' found an inflated optimism about technology's impact on the future as far back as the 19th century, when writers like Jules Verne were creating wondrous versions of the future. Even then, people had a misplaced faith in the power of inventions to make life easier, Corn says. For example, the typical 19th-century American city was crowded and smelly. The problem was horses. They created traffic jams, filled the streets with their droppings and, when they died, their carcasses. But around the turn of the 20th century, Americans were predicting that another miraculous invention would deliver them from the burden of the horse and hurried urban life — the automobile, Corn says. 'There were a lot of predictions associated with early automobiles,' Corn says. 'They would help eliminate congestion in the city and the messy, unsanitary streets of the city.' Corn says Americans' faith in the power of technology to reshape the future is due in part to their history. Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future. They prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change."
Because humans are obsessed with bureaucracy and pointless endeavours like greed. You can bet if our species was as fanatical about science as it is about religious bureaucracy we would be in a better world.
The future is not flying cars or gee wiz, it's about changes in productivity.
Cars did change things drastically. In particular they allowed both suburbs and concentration of commerce centers people could travel to. Trucks could now go to stores as well lessening the importance of trains and hubs. It impacted things you don't think about as well like farming.
so did steam boats. You have the whole development along the missiispi for example. It's worth noting that just before the revoluionary war with "america" in england there were two IPOs offered: one for steam troop transport development and the other for the development of a machine gun. Both IPOs failed due to the South Sea stock company (a ponzi scheme) offering better terms (leading to the first stock market crash later). But if there had been military steam ships in 1776, the queen would be on our money.
progress is about changing scales that create new organizational paradigms. eventually each new growth opportunity saturates and becomes yucky in a new way. look at coal polluted cities. at the start coal was a miracle comapred to wood heat or no heat. Look at the productivity created by assembly lines then think about the pre-union industrial working conditions that shortly followed.
Consider the height to which buildings could be built and how that has also led to crowding. instead of hobo housing for the poor we now have low cost housing in high rises--- and the stagnating socio economics that result from that.
basically progress is: innovation creates new paradigms for growth which then satrurate and become bad in new ways.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I think you've touched on the real problem... the rate of change is so fast now that no one even notices. In Future Shock Toffler talked about how there are people that just can't deal with the rate of change of the 1960s, and they suffer from a form of disconnection similar to Culture Shock - but with no way to escape from it except drop out of society.
But those people have dropped out of society; they're in their 80s and 90s. Devices that my father looks at in bewilderment and refuses to even think about are instantly picked up by my daughter who never gives it a second though.
Progress is so rapid and all-encompassing that we just don't even think about it any more. People talk about the missing future of flying cars, telling us about it in articles they wrote on a computer and uploaded to the internet. *sigh*
In cities roller skates are one of the fastest methods around. Followed by push bikes (even if you follow the laws exactly). Folding bikes are even better as you can also use public transport when needed.
Happiness economics.
Instead of basing how rich we are on money alone, we would do far better to increase the levels of the one thing that really matters for all people, by experimenting, researching, and modifying various aspects of towns and cities the world over.
This way, we can expand and refine cities until they converge towards the ideal (whatever that may be).
Still one of the most interesting diagrams on the internet ever.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Maybe today's "exciting new technologies" will create programs capable of telling when a lazy ass reporter is lifting entire paragraphs straight from Robert Heinlein's Expanded Universe.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
We're a long, long way from flying cars.
There's quite a bit of work to do yet, but my point is that we're rapidly approaching that tipping point. Surface cars are inefficient and dangerous, and roads are unbelievably expensive to build. We drive along very narrow channels with other vehicles coming towards us at fatal closing speeds, typically with nothing but a painted line to separate us. Daily fatalities in any average city's highway system are routine.
when you consider how much they're going to cost
They'll follow the same cost curve as automobiles did. Only the rich will be able to afford them initially, and they'll sell in the thousands. Then, they'll get cheaper and sell in the hundreds of thousands, and so on. By going robotic, they'll also be more feasible to share than present-day cars are.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Surface cars are very efficient and increasingly much, much safer.
Not compared to an aircraft that can go point-to-point. My daily commute when I lived up in the mountains in Los Gatos was about 30 minutes, and it would have been a one minute flight or less.
Roads are not expensive to build in comparison to anything else.
Compare the cost of building roads to the cost of not building roads. QED. Also, the political costs you mention are still costs of building roads. That's a lot of tax money to spend, that air cars wouldn't need.
For a car that refuses to function when it snows.
Where are you getting that from?
Even after the most severe snowstorms, you'd be able to fly over the snow sooner than the roads would be ploughed.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
basically progress is: innovation creates new paradigms for growth which then saturate and become bad in new ways.
I take issue with this. There are two types of technological innovation, those which enable more efficient collectivization, and those which enable more efficient individualization of society.
All of your examples of things "becoming bad" involve the (over-)application of the former type, collective technological innovations. I would argue that the second type of individual technological innovation is immune to this type of obsolescence. Individual technological innovations merely involve a trade-off in labor for capital. Once a particular technology has improved to the point that this trade-off becomes acceptable to the individual, the technology finds widespread use. Since it is an individual trade-off, there is nothing but individual preference or resource exhaustion that will ever change this dynamic. Collective technologies, on the other hand, also involve a trade-off in individual rights to the rights of the collective. Given two equally efficient technologies, a person will always choose the individual technology over the collective one. As technologies improve, collective technologies will tend to be replaced with more individualist technologies due to this defect.
Laundromats, for instance, have "become bad" and been mostly replaced with individual washers, even though laundromats are more efficient. Suburbs, perhaps, you may argue, are an individualist technology that has "gone bad". But I think that is more due to a failure of (collective) energy production technologies. And I would argue that the same type of individualized technological innovation is currently under way in the energy field in order to make up for collective energy production having "gone bad". Barring complete breakdown of collective energy production and failure of more individualized technologies, I don't see automobiles ever being replaced by more collective transport methods. So I will concede that energy production will likely remain collectivized until Mr. Fusion is produced. Other than that, I believe all other production technologies will tend to follow the path I have outlined.
Ultimately, while you may see a cycle of boom and bust due to technological innovation, I only see a cycle of boom and bust in technological innovations that require collective ownership and use, such as high-rises, assembly-lines, and fossil fuels. These technologies are subject to monopolization and negative externalities that offset their benefits. In individual technological innovations, I believe there is more steady improvement.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The difference is that your Father wanted to know how things work because he was used to fixing things.
your daughter is happy with being oblivious and treating technology like a magic box, and if it breaks, we throw it away.
THAT"S the big difference between luddites and the future embracing people.
Most of the time Ludddites see the disadvantages of the new "technology" that is being sneaked in under the radar.
iPhone? no thanks, I cant replace the battery.
New Hybrid car? no thanks I cant work on it as I cant buy the tools needed for the Electric side.
I Understand how an iPhone works, and I could fix it, but they intentionally design it to keep me from fixing it. That sends alarms to my luddite side.
My grandfather was a Genius for cars. He could do anything with them, he even embraced electronic ignition. He HATED the Computer controlled cars of the 80's because you could not buy the tools to work on them. GM and Ford refused to release info on how to tune the ECM in the early 80's cars so you were stuck. He hated computer control on cars and would rip it out and switch it to a simple Fuel injection system or even Carbeurated.
If progress is coupled with DRM or thing to block you from working on it fixing it, it's not progress.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I get so very tired of this canard. For centuries, if not millennia, before Columbus sailed to the Americas, educated people knew that the world was not round. The idea that folk in Medieval Europe believed that the world was flat is a misconception that was invented some time during the 19th century (Russell blames Washington Irving).
Rhapsody in Numbers
Despite of what all the tree huggers would have you believe, automobiles
did infact achieve their promise. It's just that most people have no clue
what the alternatives are. They have no real frame of reference. They just
examine things in terms of their limited experiences. This whole current
whining is really nothing more than "taking things for granted" and is by
no means a thoughtful analysis.
For those of us that can, it's pretty easy for us to imagine the alternative
that motorcars saved us from. It could have been better. Although we never
need the internal combustion engine for that. That's rather the point. You
never needed cars for the sort of mass transit utopia people are whining
about now.
The real point of all this nonsense is how this stuff is more about
politics than technology. You can't have jetpacks, and robocars and
flying cars because people are idiots that can't even be trusted with
regular cars and lawsuits would follow the inevitable chaos.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
the middle class is vanishing in America
Compared to what and when? The middle class of forty years ago would never have considered themselves to middle class if they had two cars, four televisions, mobile phones, fresh produce from Chile flown into their local grocery store every day, etc. If people today deliberately stuck to similarly scaled expectations and monthly overhead, they'd live far, far better than the middle class to which you seem to be comparing them. They're not vanishing - you're just changing the definition.
unemployment is high
This week. Of course this country has had it far, far worse, and for years on end. We are now - at the depths of a cyclical recsession - experience unemployment rates that are about what many countries live with permanently, and a fraction of what's found in many other places. With the typical upswing that (despite the current congress's and administration's seeming attempts to prevent it) inevitably comes, we'll be back to unemployment rates that are the envy of most industrialized countries.
It's not clear that it's sustainable
As opposed to what... Marxism? Yeah, that sure worked out.
Take a look at the biosphere
Indeed. The environment is at its most trashed in places where socialist governments run the show. See the train wreck that happened in eastern Europe under the helpful central control of the Soviets, or the rapidly worsening disaster that is China.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.