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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.
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.
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 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.