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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."
Today's "exciting new technologies" are all based on exploiting people's egos. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, mobile devices allowing you to do all of these things on the move—this is what people would claim is revolutionary and liberating use of modern technology—but in reality it is a massive trap, and fantastically annoying for those of us who can shut the fuck up.
(The captcha required for posting this message was "contempt").
I want my flying car, damn it!!
Actually, I'll "only" be 25 next month, so I don't really remember being promised flying cars and all that jazz. I remember being promised the internet, and we got that. The future actually seems a little mundane, at least any future I'm likely to live to see. Star Trek, maybe, in another 200 years, but we're not going to get the Jetsons.
At least no one told me I'd be getting all my meals in pill form, although that's probably fairly close to reality in a "Flintsones (chewables) Meet the Jetsons" sort of way.
We still have about 5 and a half years to fully set up the back to the future 2 future.
i know i'm saving up for my hoverboard right now.
So when do we get our flying cars, FTL intergalactic ships (with sexy alien women) and all the other cool stuff they promised.
Deja Moo: The feeling you've heard this bullsh*t before.
Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future.
Until now.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
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.
It's "science fiction", not "predictions of the future". These are creative and imaginative writers. They aren't trying to predict what is going to happen in the future. Besides, there are plenty of sci-fi stories that are about "radical political transformation" as well. "1984"? "Brave New World"?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
They made it possible for us to travel in all but the worst weather, they don't leave piles of shit behind them to feed flies, and they're far less labor-intensive to operate. Horses have a certain nostalgic appeal, but we're a lot better off with them relegated to a hobby.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
My belief in a bright future was destroyed with Duke Nukem Forever.
maybe you should stop visiting their blogs then...?
'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.'
Okay, so how well has it done? Obviously we still have congestion (better than it was? worse? I don't know) and obviously we have pollution problems associated with cars but how does that compare to the problems we had before? Have they been a big step forwards or not? I don't see how the article can use this example to mock people's ability to forecast the effects of technology when it doesn't comment at all on whether cars have in fact resulted in more sanitary streets. I don't know how bad the horse shit and carcases problem was but by the sounds of things, the cars are an improvement and the prognosticators of the time were broadly right.
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.
It seems to me these days (certainly here in the UK) we have almost no sense of optimism about progress. In the middle of the last century when so much SciFi was created, there was this grand humanistic notion, that one day technology would solve all the wrongs of the world, and we'd all live in peace and harmony e.g. Star Trek.
These days our optimism has shriveled and died, so that now we no longer dream of a utopia - we just dream of getting by without too much discomfort, and it seems to me like modern SciFi (where it exists) reflects this.
Look, I didn't read this book, but if the capsule is even remotely accurate, I'm glad I didn't. The capsule claims that Corn tries to equate the cities of 100 years ago with today's and suggest that cars didn't _really_ change anything for the better, just changed which pile of crap we had.
I have lots of photographs of Toronto from the turn of the last century. For instance, the photos of people getting rid of their garbage by dropping it off at the dump - the end of a pier on Lake Ontario. Cities, in spite of being much smaller than they are and thus having to deal with a much smaller problem, were smelly, dirty, disease ridden dumps.
If anyone thinks the city of today, even with all of their very real problems, is anything even _remotely_ like the city of 100 years ago, they're idiots.
You get this all the time in anti-progress screeds, the "well we traded one problem for another", and then they just leave that hanging, like one problem is exactly the same as another. As Azimov noted, however, this ignores any change in quality. For instance, people used to think the world was flat like a pizza, then they thought it was a perfect sphere. They were wrong too, but, and this is the critical point, a sphere is "more right" than a pizza. THAT is how science works, approaching the asymptote.
And that's what technology is doing to. Yeah, cars running on gas suck, but only because we have three times the population and everyone's got one. If the world population was still only 1 billion and 99.9% of them could not afford one, then cars would be see as the miraculous inventions they said they were going to be. It took 50 years before anyone realized they might even have downsides, and another 50 before we've started getting seriously about fixing them. That's because of how amazingly great they are, not the other way around! And just for the record, I don't own a car, I bike to work or ride the subway.
Maury
I have a device in my pocket that will give me the answers to most questions, show me moving pictures with sound, let me talk to people on the other side of the planet and take pictures. We have machines that can scan the inside of our bodies without cutting us open. Satellites that help the device above tell me where I am at all times. And of course cable with 9999 possible channels. Look at an old episode of star trek, then look at the new movie...compare the bridges....How much stuff was "updated", because it would look old fashion and junky today?
See, the real issue here is that the guy doesn't actually remember, say, 1960. We may not have flying cars, but we have cross country plane trips for $14 (in 1960 dollars). We don't have videophones, but we've got Skype with video on computers -- and it's free. We're very rarely arrested for being queer, we're rarely getting arrested for voting while incorrectly complected, no one anywhere in the world has smallpox, and hardly anyone has polio. Famines are the result of political disruptions and the thuggery of Mugabe and his ilk, not lack of food.
After a minor shipping delay, flying cars have arrived for all. As of today, all major cities also feature moving pavements and weather control and commuter flights to the Moon will be commencing tomorrow.
Earth President Barack Obama welcomed the representatives of the Galactic Brotherhood to Washington, assuring them that the many wars on Earth were now to be conducted entirely by robots, though the robots would be carefully monitored and pulled out of battle and granted citizenship the moment they achieved sentience. He also offered the galactics free access to Google, with only the requirement for tasteful contextually-attuned text advertising to be imprinted on their DNA.
The reactionary forces of the twentieth-century United States finally conceded defeat and shut down the Five-Year Plan Tractor Plants of Detroit, where ridiculous oversized transport was bashed together by semi-literate peasants between fifths of vodka from the nerve gas factory next door, and the Five-Year Plan Software Plants of Redmond, where ridiculous oversized operating systems were bashed together by semi-numerate fresh graduates between fifths of Red Bull. The record and movie company back catalogues have been placed into the public domain for the preservation of human culture and the comic-book capitalists of Wall Street have been sent to calming, soothing, humanistic re-education facilities. "We'll teach them to love again," said Mr Obama.
Robot housecleaners are now universally available at quite reasonable prices. The robot companion for your child, designed to say "I LOVE YOU" while the child hits it repeatedly, was an early release for Christmas 2007. The new model features the voice of Justin Fletcher from CBeebies and is designed for parents to hit repeatedly.
Future innovations for the century include the rise of the Great Old Ones from their eternal sleep to take back the Earth and consume the souls of all humanity, first driving them slowly insane. The citizenry is being prepared for this eventuality using repeated broadcasts of In The Night Garden.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
As the name "horseless carriage" suggests, technological evolution is as much - or more - about subtracting things from society as about adding them. The Popular Science view of a jetpack in every garage and a submarine in every bathtub also neglects the layers of infrastructure needed to make a new paradigm work.
Combine these two and you must face dark economic wizards like Malthus, and evil powers like the Tragedy of the Commons. James Bond (or rather, Q) can employ a single jetpack. But a Robert Moses is needed to bring us all to the promised land of some new visionary technology (casually crushing the South Bronx along the way, of course).
For the most part it is being used to make rich people richer.
Exactly! Compared to 100 years ago, most people living in western nations are richer than their grand/parents. Standards of living have improved hugely. See issues like antibiotics, refridgeration, ubiquitous electricty, satellite television, long distance phone calls for pennies (or less), instant access to enourmous troves of information, lives that are decades longer, births that are far less fatal to mother and baby...
"Rich" is and always has been relative. Even lower-middle-class folks today enjoy personal amenities and creature comforts that some proverbial, rich, artistocratic Duke of Earl would have considered god-like magic only a few generations ago. The child of a wealthy industry magnate, only some years back, couldn't - for any ammount of money - have had a cochlear implant as now seen in plenty of average (but hearing impaired) kids today. It's absurd to compare one person's cash on hand with someone else's (as a measure of wealth) and to ignore comparisons to the vast reach of human history... compared to which billions of people live like kings.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Why deliver the future when the past keeps paying those who control the ultimate delivery of technology? If a corporation posses a technology that gives them an edge over everyone else, why would they deliver that to the general population and disrupt their market? Why do you think companies like West ing house and Tex as In stru ments are still around, because they *already* own the future, and *they* will choose when it is deployed.
Business is war, power over ideas is money and a lawsuit is a pretty effective weapon against *any* innovation. You can't build the future while it is locked up in some patent vault somewhere.
The future is now but the implementation is delayed by patent litigation.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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
Sorry but I think Corn is dead wrong on this assertion. America was founded on a radical political transformation and the abolition of slavery and the end of segregation are both radical transformations that have arguably changed the future of all Americans more than any single technology.
Today, even a poor man today can purchase strawberries in the dead of winter. And they are larger, sweeter strawberries than any that could be had at any other time in history. Magic.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Gartner has published a great curve that largely explains this phenomenon. We start with a new technology (trigger), and it's promise is almost limitless. It rises rapidly until it peaks at the height of inflated expectations. Then people realize the hype and we slip into the trough of disillusionment and many times this kills the technology, but if it's viable, it then settles into a steadily rising slope of enlightenment that, over time, becomes the broad productive deployment of the technology. Classic case: the internet, that went through this cycle through the 90s, hit the trough in 2000/2001, and is now broadly accepted as a part of life. Every new technology experiences this cycle to some extent. Wiki has a piece on this.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
I doubt that. Two hundred years ago, rich people lived in mansions with indoor stoves, plumbing, and central heating. They had private coaches. Poor people had outhouses and fireplaces, and traveled by foot. Now, rich people have the same air-conditioning, refrigerators and automobiles that you have. Theirs are just slightly fancier and more reliable. Most of them travel on the same airplanes as the middle-classes. Granted, the truly-rich have yachts too; but I think the truly-rich have had yachts for quite a while.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
As a SF writer, let me point out that the "predictions" of SF are very often more about what makes interesting storytelling, and not accurate predictions of what real life is going to be a hundred years from now. If the choice is between putting a "gosh, wow" element in the story, or putting in a boring element-- well, it's a story. If you want predictions, you should be writing nonfiction.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The only things we haven't got are the stupid things like flying cars. No one in their right mind wants some soccer mom flying her little precious in some tank-like flying SUV.
But for things that matter, like growing body parts, we're coming along just fine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzcEWmstN7U
The internet alone has changed so too. But people need to get it out of their heads that we'll all of the sudden, one day, wear nothing but white and fly around in cars.
I'm reminded a bit of the classic WB cartoon where the elves describe mass production to the shoemaker. What people couldn't foresee what the idea of transportation becoming so cheap (or labor remaining so expensive) that you could actually make the product half-way around the world and still sell it cheaper than if you made it in the US.
Similarly, the 1960's cartoon "The Jetsons" envisioned a future with a 3-day work week, most of which involved having to periodically push "the button". By the 1980s, though, we began to see new office technologies such as the fax machine not as the means to decreasing work, but as the means of expanding the work day to having more time to do the same work. The same can be said or the Blackberry which provides such a level of connectivity that one never has to let an employee "stop" working for the day.
my greatest regret from of our lost future. That and painsticks, but I hear Dick Cheney is working on that as we speak.
1. stupid people who can't figure out how to use technology. This is the cause of the "easy to use" revolution.
2. religious zealots who find technology to be "indistinguishable from magic" and therefore "against god".
3. government who chooses not to invest in new technologies and continues to utilize old technologies due to budgeting priorities.
4. industry as a whole who buys and buries new technologies until they can no longer sell old technologies.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Avery Brooks on Flying Cars
All who believe in telekinesis raise my hand.
"Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future." Apparently Corn flunked American History in high school.
-=Maggie Leber=-
That means it's got to strike a chord with the readership (or buyer) and either play on their desires or, provoke their fears. If a writer was to extrapolate the future, they'd end up with a rather boring SF piece - because tomorrow tends to be a lot like today and because most of the changes are social, not technological.
There are no radical shifts (call 'em paradigm shifts if you must) that society goes through. The only two current major tech. shifts are both to do with communication - either internet or the ubiquity of mobile phones. Thtey've both been around for about 20 year and will take at least that much more before the full effects are established. Plus, when the efects are known, I'd be willing to bet that they won't be the ones everybody is predicting.
Since the (social) changes aren't predictable, they don't make for great SF as the readers / buyers wouldn't expect or believe those outcomes. As has been said many times, SF has got to make sense, whereas real life doesn't have to. That's what makes writing SF hard.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Because if they don't deliver the technology to us, then China will.
Oh, good. So we can be expecting the Chinese Electric Car/Geothermal/Solar/Ocean power to replace world oil dependence any day now?
Get back to me when my food isn't deliberately toxic and money can't be made from selling medicine.
The West will nuke China before they are allowed to alleviate world slavery through the capitalist nonsense dogma kids are fed in their first year college! Fucking mind-mold factories with ivy and buildings which are SOOOO big and overwhelming and home is SOOOO far away; dazed as such, any shit which sounds Smart and Strong, delivered by a Charismatic Leader, (with no prevailing counter argument to be seen or heard), goes into a kid's head and sticks to the gray matter like super-glue. No matter how obviously stupid it is.
Heck, China loves slavery even more than we do, and that's saying something. It would be insane to think that the version of the military industrial complex which comes with Chinese "Stop or We'll Shoot" warning labels doesn't extend to hyper-paranoid control over technology distribution in the land of the Rising Sun. Just like it does here.
-FL
Ego might be basis greed, so maybe we agree, but I'd say it was Greed that messed up our "future." Look at the example in TFS - motor vehicles cleaning up our cities. Well the thing is they could have done a lot. Why hasn't this happened? Because instead of moving from some people having horse-drawn carriages or draft horses and wagons, we've moved to every person having a car. Am I arguing that only a few people should have cars? No, of course not. I'm arguing that there should be more public transport. Buses are much faster than horse and carriages, they carry many more people. We could have moved from horse and carriage to a decent bus service and taxis as needed. And if we had done en masse, they'd both be much cheaper than what we pay for a journey today. But no - there was big money to be made in everyone having their own car and the public lapped it up. The invention of the tractor could have meant much more leisure time for a society that had a large agricultural base, but instead, due to unequal wealth distribution, it just meant one person working even longer hours and a lot of people desperately trying to find something else to do. That pattern has been seen again and again, resulting in increasingly pointless jobs as surplus labour attempts to justify an income. Am I arguing against progress? Of course not - I'm arguing that everybody should get some of the benefit of it so that they can direct their energies to something more profitable to all of us rather than becoming telemarketers.
Modern society should be directing its energies toward achieving better things and then we would see some of the promise of new technologies better realised. Instead, society directs much of its energy toward stopping progress by trying to keep as many people as possible as busy as possible whether that has a purpose or not.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
sales hype and market competition...
As technology progresses some jobs are destroyed while others are created but need more education and training to qualify for.
Automobiles made the Buggy and Buggy Whip jobs go away. When robots replaced people on the assembly line, there was robot repair jobs.
Before the Word Processor and Laser Printer, companies used to hire a room full of a hundred typists to type up copies of memos and letters. But now one person can print out 100 copies with a Laser Printer. But there needs to be an IT staff on duty to fix the Laser Printer or Computer that the Word Processor is installed on.
All politics has done is limit what we can and cannot do with technology. Real change does not come from technology or politics, it comes from people deciding to change their ways for the better of the world. Technology was invented to make things easier to do, but it leads to sloth and greed and other negative things. You can get more things done with technology than you can without it, but people tend to get slothful or greedy. Technology companies have to keep coming up with new versions of technology in order to keep earning money, that is greed. Who says the 4.0 version isn't as good as the 7.0 version? Most likely the company that developed it. Meanwhile some people are satisfied with the 4.0 version and don't need to buy the 7.0 version, while others claim that even the 7.0 version isn't as good enough.
When I was young I loved calculators because they made doing Math easier. My father called it a crutch, claimed that if I did Math via the calculator I wouldn't be able to do Math in my head and I used the calculator as a crutch. Technology is a crutch, we use it and sometimes it causes us not to be able to do things on our own. We become dependent on technology to get things done. If there is a crisis and we can no longer have electricity due to a shortage of fossil fuels, how can we function without technology? Maybe the Amish have a point that technology is idleness?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Twitter, Facebook, blogs, mobile devices allowing you to ...
They don't count until they've been around for 1 generation or more.
Until then, they either count as fads or don't count at all as they won't have or have had a lasting effect on the world.
As an example, 8-track stereo doesn't count as an "exciting (new) technology" except in the minds of the marketing departments as it had no effect on the world as a whole, and didn't change our society. A.M. radio, however did make changes and is still around 70, 80 years on.
The only thing that will move these toys from a historical footnote to really earth-shattering is when someone gives them a measurable IQ. It wouldn't have to be very high, provided it recognosed speech and had the ability to learn. until then - nah!
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
And every time one of these "where are my flying cars?" stories comes out it has the same two issues: first, the author glosses over all the amazing advances that we do have. Dick Tracey watch? my cell phone is even better. The list goes on and on. I'm not sure if it is because the writer is just being dense, or just willfully ignoring these things in an effort to make a point. second, the writer of the story is being intellectually dishonest. to call sci-fi writings "predictions" is ridiculous. But I guess this sort of "soft news" needs to be written, to fill quotas, or something. And if you have some stupid-ass premise to write about, then you gotta try to make a compelling case for it... But to say that automobiles have not been an improvement over horses? (as the article implies) That is so patently moronic...
I blame the Advertising executives that brought us Atomic Ming the Merciless palace style gas stations in the fifties. The problem is people focusing on what has not come to pass and not focusing on why much of it is a silly idea in the first place.. What distresses me more is what passes for Science Fiction today should be more often called Science Fantasy, in that it predicts a completely impossible future with our current understanding of Science. I believe a prime example would be people dreaming up self sustaining colonies on Mars when recent studies of embryonic development in the microgravity environment appear to show that gravity is a big factor in fetal development.
The civil war was fought to preserve the status quo.
The south fought to preserve slavery.
the north fought to preserve the union.
the north won
People who are ill should be able to order anyone who is not ill to do anything they please. After all, you cannot put a price on illness, and those who are not ill can never understand what it's like to be so. Having a sex life is also a human right.
Names should not be allowed, because they are a burgeois romanticised concept. Is it anything but egoistical to demand to be called 'PAUL' or 'GREGORY VAN DYKE'? It also sets you apart. The rational and logical way is to have a number corresponding to your area of habitation and a unique identification code. At the same time private housing is abolished in favour of living in large eco-friendly pyramids, and living outside of these is wasteful and hence forbidden.
Because there are too many people in the world, we have a lottery and euthanise fifty percent using nitrogen. A lottery is the most fair way to do this because anything else (riches are sucked from others, talent is genetic which is random) would be inhumane.
When we have brain scanners, we can scan people for thoughts that are wrong. Because it would be inhumane to punish them for having wrong thoughts, you simply send them for reeducation.
Out of concern for the collective you need a permission to breed. If a woman becomes pregnant without permission it's forcibly terminated, because after all, you aren't destroying any life by doing so, only as much life as when you mouthwash, so it's no big deal.
I mean, there's plenty of 'radical political change' that would be doable. Which ones did the writer think of?
Scratch that, we can have radical political change, just in the way that *I* want. What, you thought YOU would be the one to decide?
Gaze upon the city of tomorrow!
I have always considered that the substitution of
the Internal Combustion Engine for the horse marked
a very gloomy passage in the progress of mankind. (Winston Churchill)
While any "western" democracy isn't perfect, I can't think any radically different system that would work better. Unless our technological changes affect our ability to survive or we somehow change basic human nature, I can't foresee any "massive revolution" that would lead to a completely different form of government. We've kind of figured out a good base system for governance and everything from now on is adjustments and refinements to the system.
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"
10) We did not destroy ourselves in a holocaust by 1960, by 1980, or by 2000, as many sci-fi writers have depicted.
9) In 'Future World" marketing shows, the man watched black and white TV or listened to the radio after he got home from work while the woman cleaned and made tv dinners. Now, men can play xbox 360 all day because the women cook and clean, AND have a job.
8) The biggest alien species we have possibly countered so far is a couple of dents on the size of a martian meteor.
7) Automation has made consumer products that we know better, and allowed for the use of new ones. Seriously, have you seen the documentary about the construction of an aluminum block for an engine? There's no way a human could cut with the tolerances and precision that these machines gave, and they didn't. Reliability is much, much better.
6) Materials are better. Man, they thought the future of everything was going to be stainless steel. Now, we can consumer products made from titanium. How cool is that?
5) Dual metal steak knives as seen on TV are frankly of a better quality than some of the finest japanese swords from the samurai era. The steel on the back is better, the forging is more consistent, the sharp end has a better grade of metal...
3) We have more and better food than we could have ever had before.
2) Our computers are hands down better than the computers depicted in the Star Trek, TOS, and in fact, are better than any computer depicted in any sci-fi medium or promise before then.
1) This is a great time for whiskey. American and Scottish producers are producing wonderful, wonderful spirits these days.
This is my sig.
Star Trek didn't do too bad predicting stuff from the 60's. I think one thing Roddenberry's crew took for granted was that the computer would just 'be there' for our bridge crew. And that was 1963 when personal computing was still not really thought of. People still used slide rules and mechanical adding machines and cash registers. I think it's simply a trickle of stuff that makes it, like the article hints. Things with the lowest effort to adapting present tech to new methods will make it arrive faster than the more difficult ideas. Like food created on the fly and matter transporters. And methods for which people pay a premium to embrace will surface the quickest. Think computers, cell phones and Walkman's. A minority of people paid the sky-high prices for the originals and encouraged the knock-offs to drive the price down fast. If the power of the peoples' pocketbooks wasn't so free on "have to have" stuff we wouldn't have tiny cell phones and iPods.
Star Trek had quite a few pointed predictions:
1. flash memory cards. Back when your recording media had to move at the correct speed to recreate sound this appeared too impossible. This stuff is now down to the size of a thumbnail.
2. medical scanners. For sure this is what is MRI today. Or the further development of ultrasound. And it's getting to the size of the tri-corder sooner or later. The room you have to put the unit it gets smaller every year.
3. Tablet PC/Palm computers/PDA/Kindle. (When they had to show a pretty girl, she came around for a signature with a tablet.) Only they actually got more compact than depicted in the show.
4. communicator. The cell phone. (Okay so you don't have to be on an away-team to have one... But the perk of getting a Blackberry from your job used to be a big thing.)
Stuff that hasn't made it:
1. the hand held phasers. These hint at power storage to size greater than even the smallest battery can bring today. Plus we still don't have the kind that would stay cool in the hand as it unleashed its charge. Stunner tech is almost there but hasn't 'gone wireless' to the distance they could zap someone on the show. There's a level of energy storage we still haven't reached.
2. matter transport and creation. A single photon across a room is hardly a start on this making you a turkey sandwich on the fly.
3. space craft/shuttles to space. The X-prize was an ambitious try to getting money behind the effort. We're almost there. But I still suspect someone will 'take the skies' from those ambitious folks in the name of regulating space for the good of the earth governments and not smacking willy-nilly into existing equipment up there in orbit. (And with NASA turning back to rocket technology of the 1970's to continue heavy lifting to the ISS a sleek little space ship bus not going to come from them. The tried and true is cheap enough for government work.)
4. warp drive/small fission/small fusion. Of course, we're going to have to wait for small-scale fusion or the space race developed fuel-cell tech because there's a level of danger.
The technology might be ready to adapt to the 'next greatest thing' but the ease of use still hasn't eliminated the 'idiot factor' in the design and operation. Like the article's jet pack example. You're putting a fuel on a person and directing the jet past their body. Someone is going to make a mistake sometime. Presently, there isn't a company out there which wants to face the class action court case for burns and accidents. There's a level of risk that businesses no longer take. I think there's not a lot of individuals that want to take on that level of risk. Great strides forward might be sitting on shelves all over America because of this.
"I got it all together but I forgot where I put it."
And yet, the middle class is vanishing in America, unemployment is high, wages are low and dropping, property values continue to drop in the places where the majority of the population lives... Yes, obviously the current system is doing great.
I'm not disputing that capitalism does great things. It's not clear that it's sustainable. So far it looks as if it very much is not. Take a look at the biosphere, even setting aside any considerations of global warming whatsoever, and tell me what kind of progress we're making.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The "Troll" mod on the parent is undeserved. What drinkypoo said is perfectly correct --- the driving force behind the development and deployment of technology is making a few rich people richer; whatever benefits have accrued to the rest of the population are merely side effects. More than making rich people richer, technology has been heavily skewed towards accumulating power and control in the hands of a few. Besides the obvious power-accumulating role of military technology, there is the more subtle (but more insidious) "progress" in industrial "labor saving" saving technology --- which is not designed to make workers' lives any easier, but rather to save employers from having to hire as many workers (and leaving the remaining ones as unskilled, interchangeable button-pushers wholly reliant on the decisions and direction of their employers rather than being independent masters of their own craft). I recommend the book "Progress Without People: in Defense of Luddism" by labor historian David Noble, an excellent set of essays on the way "progress" is used to de-skill and disempower workers even when it is more expensive and less productive than alternative methods that would lead to a more even distribution of authority in society.
it is that our Federal Constitution was designed by the rich aristocrats to STIFLE political change and to DISEMPOWER the voters
Yes, the constitution makes radical change either take a long time or take an overwhelming majority.
This is NOT a bad thing. nor does it "disempower" the voters.
I don't drive more than 15K miles a year these days, and I use synthetic oil that is stated to last 7500 miles or more. The oil that comes out of the car is only slightly dirtier than the new oil that goes in. The car has 140K miles on it and runs perfectly.
gee, that confirms the fact that americans are naive
us europeans all too well know that in fact politics put food on our tables, put concrete between us and the storms outside, keep the houses warm at night and during winters, devise drugs, treatments and whatsoever; politics and high moral standards
I do find the idea that governance is something that gets discovered just like any other invention in history. It is almost as amusing as knowing the idea of "portfolio diversification" was a "discovery" made by some dude a while ago. I mean, it seems obvious that you should diversify your stock portfolio, but I guess before this guy came along nobody considered it. Democracy seems kind of obvious to me, but it took a while to get here.
So yeah, someday there will probably be some better form of government that will be "obvious" to those at the time. However right now we dont even know of its existence. Same as we didn't know the existence of portfolio diversification.
I want stepping discs.
Americans could look to technology as long as the resources of the land supported individualism (that IMHO cannot last further than, say, another century based upon population growth). As our needs overlap, the need to cooperate and find political solutions will grow as fast, maybe faster, than even technology needs.
Some probably come in from an internet cafe or steal some minutes from their work :)
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Well, yes they have. In the early years of the century, during the thirties, and again in the sixties, we looked for radical transformation. The wealthy, who own the media and a *lot* of politicians(come on, argue that), have spent since the end of WWI, and esp. since the seventies, brainwashing the public to believe that real change can't come, and if it did, it would only be a change of masters, and not better for most folks....
mark
Property value was a bubble. It should be dropping as the market corrects itself. If goes back up to where it was, something is wrong, irregardless of the economy.
I agree. However, that's not the point; the point is that things will get significantly worse before they get better.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
We have a lot more heavy carbon sucking forests now since the advent of motorized transport. Back before then, we needed some millions (whatever, a huge number) acres of pastures and hayfields that were required to feed all the horses and mules, especially in the heavily populated new england and mid atlantic states. So in a way it became a tradeoff, dumping extra carbon from petroleum fuels, but we get to have our forests back that help to take that carbon back in and also provide a lot of shade and cooling over huge areas.
Theres a really cool sci-fi book I recently discovered called the Bible! It has all sorts of tales of super-men with powers to create entire worlds in 7 days (and he even took the day off on one of those days!), tales of sci-fi monsters, hybrid human/super-men crosses that can heal normal men with one touch, ability to part seas, walk on water, what a wonderous book! I wonder when men will see one of these great sci-fi stories come to truth....... wait....
Bravo!
Or even valid information,but horribly presented (like web scrapes with ads).
I fudge it here on the Dot with a +3 modifier for length. The long snarks are flamebaits and not Goatses, and the long posts are typically worth reading on balance.
"linguistic quantification operator".
How about the higher a modified version of a Flesch Index? (If the writer can form quality sentences, then it might have some intelligence behind it?)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Madison et al did this by creating a governmental structure that would increase the number of factions in the political districts by enlarging the political districts.
I call bullshit, because the majority vote system in the US has lead to only two parties having real power in Congress.
Third parties (like the Libertarians and the Greens) might get lucky and score a few seats, but they are far from playing a big role. In fact, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_United_States_Congress#Party_summary there are currently only two independent senators and one non-voting independent member in Congress. The rest are either Democrats or Republicans.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I'm structuring my medical plan for fights with Biff/Griff.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"Sure. We'll switch to Animal Farm! Thanks for the tip!"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It's worth comparing 1909, 1959, and 2009.
Almost everything we have now existed in 1959, although more expensive and clunkier. Jet aircraft, nuclear power, rockets, transistors, computers, television, car mobile phones, solar cells, freeways, plastics, antibiotics, mass produced cars, shopping malls, and home appliances were all in existence by 1959. DNA had been figured out. Even e-mail and computer networks were starting to work. None of those things existed in 1909.
What we have today are mostly improvements on those technologies.
What didn't we get that was expected? Lots of things. A new source of energy. Strong AI. Antigravity. General purpose robots. Workable space travel.
If you look at 50 year intervals since 1759, there's been less fundamental change in the last 50 years than in any of the previous five periods.
This is a real problem, because we're stuck with a set of technologies that rely on depleting resources that won't last another 50 years.
Using the term 'ranma' as an example (the famous anime character)
I typed into google.com:
ranma
and got about 4,180,000 results.
Next, I typed:
ranma -blogger.com -blogspot.com -livejournal.com -typepad.com
and got about 3,590,000 results.
Not much difference but an improvemt when you filter out the blogsites that appeared on the first page of google with the term 'blog'.
To avoid this, just search for your search terms on the top 3 sites by way of google.
Wikipedia for info on just about anything -- meaning it is clogged with LOTS of popular entertainment information like Ranma 1/2.
'ranma wikipedia'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_½
(Sorry, the link above is broken because it has a 'funny' character in it -- use the google search query above to get to it instead)
IMDB if there is audiovisual works out there containing the stuff you are searching for.
'ranma imdb'
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096686/
Amazon if you want to buy stuff containing the search terms you want.
'ranma amazon'
http://www.amazon.com/Ranma-Digital-Complete-First-Season/dp/B00005QCW0
If you don't want to buy anything but just want the information, type this into google using Ranma as an example:
ranma -https
returned about 3,870,000 results
This filters out all pages containing secure URLs from which to buy stuff in privacy. Unfortunately, there are some links out there that use https to keep their discussions private or are talking about the https protocol itself and get filtered out as 'colateral damage'. Also, there are bound to be a tiny few sites that unknowingly (or maliciously) have 'buy it now' links on unsecured http URLs so make sure the connection is secure (and you trust the seller) before you type in your credit card number or other sensitive information.
ranma -.com -https
returns about 1,050,000 results.
This search terms filters out over 3 million sites that are most likely trying to sell you something. All thats left behind are basically .net, .org, and international sites where the information you want is presented to you 'for informational purposes' and not to make a sale from you.
I have read that the average person with a car today spends more time in transit than did people of antiquity
Well, of course he does.
There is an old saying - Indian, I believe - that language changes every twenty-five miles.
Unless you lived as a nomad - followed the herds of elk or buffalo - you lived and died within that fixed twenty-five circle through almost the whole of human history.
The average person of antiquity couldn't afford to keep a horse.
That put you in the Equine class. The minimum financial requirement for entry into the Senate.
The average person of antiquity didn't have the right to travel. He was bound to the land or to his craft.
The road is a military road. The rider an imperial courier.
I can carry, in my pocket, a magic map that knows both where I am and how to get to where I want to go provided I poke it in just the right way to tell it.
I can stick my conveyance on a small, paved patch near my house and leave it there, ignoring it unless I actually need or want to go somewhere, even if I don't need to go anywhere for weeks at a time. And at no point do I ever have to shovel poop for the benefit. There's no magic smoke to it, if it dies, I can almost always restore it to life by replacing the right parts, even if it's left out for a while, unless it is completely disfigured.
It travels on a ribbon of stone. A smooth and nearly unbroken network stretching from coast to coast that would have made even the romans jealous (except the longevity, of course.)
I carry around a machine in my backpack which could, if I wanted to, and enough people put forth the effort, contain a copy of the text of every work of literature, ever. And images contained in many of them, as well. And it can even read it for me.
In my home, there is a box, with numbers on it. By mashing those buttons in the correct order I can talk to anyone, anywhere in the world, that has a similar box. I've got one in my pocket, too. If I call a business, I can request and pay for goods that could arrive in less than 48 hours, no matter how far away.
If I'm sick, I have many, many options, and the lowest-level option is to take an extract of something that will mask the symptoms. And it actually works.
The list really goes on, and on, and on. We already live in the future, and it is awesome. It might not be precisely the future predicted by the buffoons of yesteryear, but neither will the future of now be the same as our buffoons predict. Except that it'll probably be even awesomer than now. And awesomer will be a word, too.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
When you can get around the world in 400 ms with the Internet?
"Exactly! Compared to 100 years ago, most people living in western nations are richer than their grand/parents. Standards of living have improved hugely. See issues like antibiotics, refridgeration, ubiquitous electricty, satellite television, long distance phone calls for pennies (or less), instant access to enourmous troves of information, lives that are decades longer, births that are far less fatal to mother and baby.."
All true in 1973, the year that economists generally peg as the point where the "middle class" stopped getting any richer and the share of the already-wealthy started to skyrocket. Basically, all the technological and productivity gains of the last 35 years have gone about 98% to making the top 10% or less richer and the lives of $29,000-a-year assembly-line workers have not changed significantly. They do have cell phones, I guess, and they can probably afford to go to Hawaii for both their honeymoon AND their 25th wedding anniversary, and they have 85 channels ("...and nothin' on").
I'm stretching the point - especially in electronics, and to some extent in medicine, it's been a terrific third-of-a-century. But the improvements to the bottom 80% of the population just don't TOUCH the effect that basic medicine, electricity, phones, radio, TV, semi-trailer cargo, (plus fridges) had on their basic standard of living in the first two-thirds of your last century. It was even more dramatic than the effect of trains, steamships, steam-powered factories and so forth had in the century before that. Partly, some suspect, because those 19th-century gains also went mostly to their rich class of the time. (The Luddites came about in part because life in the "dark satanic mills" was *worse* than the pre-industrial farms, so ill-treated were the workers.)
The original poster's point was that you need social change for the fruits of technological improvement to be broadly shared; otherwise, most people just get crumbs from the table, like the poor of undeveloped nations when vast sums are dropped on their leaders for "development". I sometimes wonder if 1973 was the start of another "19th century"-like period of industrial progress with social regression...which will surely lead at some point to another round of pent-up social changes, like the "trust-busting" laws and union movements of the early 20th.
The major research being conducted into advancing technology is not to better humanity but to make better the people investing in said advances to get richer. Yes, there is trickle down benefits to all people as this happens, but if a company like IBM did not research/develop adding machines so they could make more money to sell them, one could ague that the modern computer would never have been developed. This can be traced back to the invention of the abacus. There have only been a few discoveries that are the core of modern technologies. Someone invented a way to domesticate animals for the better of people. Someone discovered electricity, and it was only the research into using electricity that has lead to the modern day computer. The computer can be seen as entertaining, but the real use of computers is for the research/application of creating more wealth, if you break it down into where most of the computer cycles go to, I think the majority is for making more wealth. This is not a bad thing, for it does trickle down, but when you have companies using computer programs to figure out how to increase profits with the leaders of these companies blindly following the computers output. Look at the Wall Street variables that went into affect that has changed the world forever, just because a computer program said it would be better. Ask the people who lost their lifetime investments, do you think the computer program even cared about being wrong? Look at the steam engine. This brought great improvements to modern people. The steam engine lead to the internal combustion engine which provided even more improvements to modern people. But, if these inventions did not offer the wealthy to get wealthier, they would never have been applied. For an example, look at the nuclear age many visionaries thought we would be living today. Yes, a couple of A bombs did unimaginable destruction, but what happened to all the low cost power we were supposed to have. Splitting the atom was and still is a great invention/discovery, but, it has been held back mainly from the wealthy energy companies mass marketing/political investing to keep mass acceptance from ever happening. It is amazing that last year when the cost of oil was north of $100 per barrel, there was more talk of nuclear energy, and now the cost of oil has dropped to where the nuclear energy does not even make a minor post, even though the new nuclear plants are almost impossible to melt down. Look at the fall of the rail shipping system. If the railroads where not allowed to be bought out by the larger trucking companies, you would have only regional trucking from the nearest railhead to customer, versus cross country truck shipping. How much oil, pollution and road accidents/wear and tear could we eliminate by using rail lines again for what there were originally designed for? All of this leads to where our futures lead. For the residents of this earth to fully realize discoveries/inventions, the people of this earth need to demand accountability of the uses of said advances. This will never happen with the rich getting richer. I don't care about who has what toys, but if these companies use these advances to make me work harder or lay me off when the computer model says the time is right,even when these companies are making more profit than ever imagined even 100 years ago, where are we as a civilization?
Sadly, that future we aren't existing in due to the ultra-greed factor which so prevails in our society today. Our technologies are simply incremental, resulting from the offshoots of the space program, with very little real innovation and invention resulting today - due to that prevailing greed factor and the disassembling of American society, economy and education.
So what is an expert with a crowd full of people chained to the floor in front of him, but sticking their fingers in their ears?
I've read TFA and I still don't get the point. Author says that Americans believe that technological advancement will solve problems instead of social advancement. I think that he does not understand that all major social movements were driven by technological progress, or at least they were made possible by it.
For instance, state as we know it is only possible in a society where high-speed communication is possible. It is not a coincidence that old feudal regimes where overthrown at the same time when technological revolution was in progress. And this is nothing new, and it was elaborated by Carl Marx in great details (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism) more than a century ago. (Yeah, Marx is considered to be wrong, but not in that part.)
In a part where author describes how we have traded one problem for another, only I could say is "rubbish". If he does not think that car is better than horse carriage, I would say that other 6bln ppl believe in the opposite.
No sig today.
Lawyers.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
All I can say is, the future ain't what it used to be...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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.
40 years ago fathers with no degree themselves could afford to pay for college for several children. 40 years ago people could afford to buy a car with cash, and could afford to buy a house on a single income. 40 years ago there were neighborhood grocery stores and produce stands with produce that tasted better than large-scale slave produced foreign produce. Cheap Chinese trinkets like cell phones and televisions do not indicate an increase in the standard of living anymore than glass beads did for the native Americans. Once the government is unable to subsidize everyone with borrowed money the true extent of how far the American standard of living has diminished will become apparent.
Really? Those strawberries taste like crap, and are coated with pesticides. The best strawberries have always been wild strawberries, or at least cultivated ones that you've picked yourself in summer.
Imagination can be a liability in inventing. Really.
Mark Twain lost all his money on an automatic typesetting machine invention. It's not surprising that he would be interested in the technology, given that one of his early jobs was manual typesetting. The machine, while elegant and impressive while it worked, was continually breaking down because of its complexity. That's a very common theme in technology creation: every stage of progress has it's "bugs"; it's always easy to imagine getting the current set of bugs out; on paper they don't look as formidable as the problems you've solved to get this far. But your solutions tend have their own bugs too, and so ad infinitum. One of three things happens. You run out of money before you have a practical product; a competitor gets a good enough product on the market before you're ready (as happened to Twain), or you succeed with a somewhat buggy product. You never succeed with a perfect technology. The key is for the problems to accumulate after your customers have decided they're happy. Or even better: dump the customer's problems on somebody else.
Automobiles are a great example of this. They're a tremendously successful technology, but we find we have things like radio call in shows dedicated to the problems people have with them, and all kinds of amazingly unpredictable problems like illegal tire dumps breeding mosquitoes.
Ur, by the way, was a major city for about 2000 years, from about 2600 BCE to 600. That's a pretty good run. Too bad they never worked out a solution to that semi-millennial drought problem.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Like any normal person, I despise the French. But at least they have a solution to what to do with a hoss once it pops its clogs. Just add a side of fries and a little Dijon mustard.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
I'd modify that statement a bit and say that the environment is at its most trashed in places where, firstly, industrialization is pushed hard, and secondly, where there is no free press to report about the negative side effects that industrialization often has, and thirdly, where there is no democracy that would allow policy changes without bloodshed.
The western world with its oh-so-perfect capitalism was ruining its environment just as badly as the commies, but in the free world, environmentalists started making a stink, and public opinion slowly turned around. The fact that the western world has become cleaner in recent decades, despite populations and consumption that continue to grow, is a testament to our free media and our democracy; it has nothing to do with our economic system.
The article mentions a successful teleportation of a photon done during 1993. Now I know teleportation of quantum states is possible, and that there are attempts to use it as an advanced encryption scheme. However, this article seems to indicate real teleportation of physical matter has been achieved. Am I misinterpreting something, or are the CNN writers woefully misinformed?
It may be smaller than today. Past performance is no predictor of the future as they keep saying.
Deleted
Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future.
But what about:
- The American Revolution
- The Civil War with respect to slavery (Dred Scott, Emancipation)
- The Civil War with respect to state's rights (or lack of them)
- The establishment of Selective Service
- The establishment of income tax and the IRS
- The trade union movement
- Prohibition
- The repeal of Prohibition
- The New Deal
- The Cuban embargo of 1962
- The civil rights movement of the 1960s
- The Vietnam anti-war movement
- The Reagan "Morning in America" movement of the 1980s
- The gay rights movement of the 1990s-2000s
Every one of these changed the future for vast numbers of Americans and arose through political means. So how can you say only technology has changed the future in America? Or are you saying something different from that?
a testament to our free media and our democracy; it has nothing to do with our economic system
You cannot separate the two. Take away the opportunities to take risk and thrive (by forming a Nanny State, instead), and you also chip away at democracy and freedom.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
a testament to our free media and our democracy; it has nothing to do with our economic system
You cannot separate the two. Take away the opportunities to take risk and thrive (by forming a Nanny State, instead), and you also chip away at democracy and freedom.
I don't think I understand what you're trying to say here. There are plenty of examples of socialist policies being implemented in democratic countries -- Social Security in the U.S. is one example among many.
When the electorate in those countries lose faith in those policies, they are free to elect a government that eliminates them.
Last I heard, Social Security is not enshrined in the U.S. constitution, and even if it were, the constitution can always be amended. It's not like that has never happened before.
I must confess that I've never really understood the mentality that seems to equate "socialism" with "dictatorship". Yes, the Soviet Union and its satellite states did combine the two, but there are plenty of examples where there is socialism without dictatorship (e.g., in Western Europe) and dictatorship without socialism (e.g., in South America and Africa).
like beads of running mercury
How many of us have actually seen beads of running mercury ? Isn't the idea of a simile to make you better picture something ?
Fast and bulbous !
That's right, The Mascara Snake, fast and bulbous ! Also, a tin teardrop.
Bulbous also tapered.
Squirrel!
Um, no. Environmentalists happened to it, ignorant, FUD spreading environmentalists. The energy companies wanted nuclear power but the FUD spread by the tree-huggers, helped along by movies like "The China Syndrome" had so many people screaming "Not in MY back yard" and Congress passing so many rules and regulations that nuclear power plants could not be built with a reasonable amount of money, nor could a site for construction be found. I grew up during that period. I remember the panels, the inquiries, the protests. I remember companies shutting down construction of nuclear plants because concerned groups of people, like your parents, were suing them for fear their kids would grow a third eye.
Um, no again. The reason there is long haul trucking is that it was cheaper and more efficient to move freight by road directly to the distribution centers rather than paying for rail spurs and service.
I suggest you read a book on history instead of just making shit up.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The problem with people & new technologies is that they want to use them just like the old technology. They don't want to change themselves when what they do and how they do it is often the fundamental problem. Horses are in fact a good example. Although they replaced horses they were used in the same way (in part because an infrastructure of roads etc already existed) and therefore the same problems persist. When a new technology comes along that could solve some of the problems they won't touch it becuase of the changes it would require. Take for example electric cars. A perfect technology, no, but people won't use it because they can't envision adapting. In reality the long "fill" time means not so much waiting around at a filling station for hours but never having tocall into a filling station again becuase you would take 1 minute if that to plug the car in when you got home. The range is fine for pretty much 98% of all trips you would ever make but if you can't tow your boat across the continent what good could it possibly be!
Renewable energy sources are treated the same way. Instead of looking at an alternative strategy to only a single or maybe two energy sources without any buffering wind, solar and other sources are dismissed because they cannot singly supply the current peak loads. What seems to be wanted is a single source of energy that allows us to waste as much as possible and doesn't have any impact at all - well at least in our own back yards.
The result? We are stuck without real progress. There are lots of ways in which various technologies can solve problems but we have to change ourselves. Sometimes the change is nothing more than allowing something to happen, Living in Western Australia I speak from some experience. Our problem? Huge population growth with limited (very) water. Solution. Use less. A lot less. And that's what we have done. We still have nice gardens and plenty to drink and in the time we have created our two new desalination plants have made life a lot easier. But believe it or not there are still people who say we need more water so we can go back to wasting it!
Most times we need to change either the way we are or the way we think about things to benefit from what we are being offered as improvements. But we still need to be careful of the miracle-mongers or the scare tacticians who just want to keep their entrenched position.
1973, the year that economists generally peg as the point where the "middle class" stopped getting any richer
That was about when the inflation that followed Nixon's devaluation of the dollar really started to hit home.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Social Security in the U.S. is one example among many
Exactly! Thank you. That system isn't exactly a monument to liberty, is it? It's confiscatory, non-voluntary, and bankrupt (both morally and fiscally). A socialist program that makes one person a slave to another, and which has been embedded into the psyche of enough voters as a magic entitlement that it now defies most any legislative cure by the people sent to congress to democratically represent the people footing the bill.
I've never really understood the mentality that seems to equate "socialism" with "dictatorship"
"Dictatorship" isn't really the right word. "Totalitarianism" would be a better fit. Though the "benign" dictatorship of western European countries, which provide dubious cradle-to-grave "care" for their hugely taxed citizens is paternalistic and unavoidable if you're born there.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
A teacher.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Oh please. You're missing two important points:
It seems one modern invention slipped by you.
We call it a "Paragraph"
All of those problems vanish if flying cars are powered by magic. It's not new, and we should have imported that shit from the Persians when we had the chance. If they could do it with carpets, we could do it with Cadillacs. Instead we took algebra...whoopee.
Zero emissions, zero collisions, zero maintenance (well, for the flying part--the heater is still going to break just before winter hits). I don't know why no one has looked into this.
Your brain is not a computer.
I was on hiatus from SciFi in the 70s, but the two books recommended to me that I did read were The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich (a whole different story) and A for Anything by Damon Knight. Basically, the premise is that when goods can be copied and produced on a whim, the only remaining valuable commodity is slave labor. Pretty prescient for a book written in 1959 by a guy who died around 80 seven years ago.
Those fancy technologies have been developed. They just never made it to the civilian population because the BlackOps sequestered them for their own nefarious purposes. How many of the UFO craft flying overhead are of human origin? Probably a lot, if not most. Including cloaking technology. Many of the wild inventions of our day have been stolen and sequestered. And anyone who says as much is called a crack pot and put on a list for a concentration camp when the regular civilization starts major meltdown. The military-industrial complex, and then some. MIB on steroids.
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
Anyone who really cares about BSG has already seen the ending... and if you claim you do care and haven't seen it, I call shenanigans.
... wait, what?
I don't think a person from the 1930s would be disappointed by 2009.
No, but a person from the 50's would. And maybe even the 40's. Look at the 39-40 World's Fair. Much of it actually came true in function... interstate highways, every home with a washer and dryer, etc... but humans are kind of funny when it comes to wanting things. Once we get them, we're bored. "Been there, done that" is human nature. But even more than that, we reached the future, and even though we got much of what was predicted, we didn't get it in nearly the kind of beautiful forms we imagined. Our buildings don't look majestic like the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building. Now they're either plain, steel and glass boxes, or twisted grotesques like Frank Gehry's works.
We reached the future, and it was ugly and soulless and boring.
And the people of the 50's? Where are our moon bases? Where are our ships patrolling Saturn? The answer is, we got to the moon, and then said "been there, done that".
Humanity has a tendency to imagine either wonderful, Utopian futures, or horrible, hellish futures. And usually, neither are correct. We live somewhere in the boring middle, because that's what reality is.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Alas, that comment needs to be modded Insightful....
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
Just replace "horses" with "cars" and "droppings" with "carbon emissions" and the premise remains unchanged. With the added irony that feeding them means going from local crops to imported arab oil.
We lost our favorite 4 stars....Starwars, StarTrek, Stargate and Battlestar Galactica....w
hat else are we supposed to do, there is nothing left to watch
Sadly, I think much of that sci-fi future hasn't happened because even though a lot of awesome inventions exist, our society is based on profit. If you can't figure out how to profit financially from something, it doesn't get produced. Things are also kept scarce so that there will be a demand for them, or so they will seem like 'prestigious' items. How many people are dying in 3rd world countries b/c sending vaccines and drugs to them isn't profitable in a monetary sense?
I think Open Source Software is one step away from that problem. Many people, myself included will create and release software simply b/c there is a need/want for it, and profit desires are either secondary, or non-existent (granted not in all OSS, but many). If we can figure out how to apply that model to other areas of society- that would be a fantastic step.
I'm not anti-profit, but there's more to life that just that.
"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."
You're exactly right. I mean, from the open tar-pits in Sweden, the nuclear waste being dumped into rivers in France, the open cesspools of raw sewage that you see in Norway, to the dioxins in the tap water in the Netherlands, everywhere in the world, socialism leads to trashing the environment.
Oh, wait.
I think you're missing the point when you look at disasters like the Aral sea or similar examples in China. What the former soviets and China have in common is not "socialism", but "totalitarianism".
Anywhere that you don't have a functioning _democracy_, you have rampant environmental degradation. For a really neat case study, contrast Haiti and the Dominican Republic - They're on the same friggin' island, one has had a history of tinpot dictators, one has had a (relatively, for the region anyway...) democratic system. Guess which one's environment is in better shape?
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Um, is it any surprise that we have less optimism?
I'm 33 years old. When my dad was my age, he was a mere civil servant, with less education than I have now, and he was able to own a house, 2 cars, and support a family of 4 on his salary alone.
For me, home ownership (granted I live in an expensive city) means either moving out to god-awful suburbs and turning my 20-minute commute into a 90 minute (each way) commute, or requires a lottery win.
When my dad was my age, your median value house had a purchase price of 5X the median income, not 10-15X median income.
We're seeing something unique in recent history - for at least the last 100 years, (maybe more, depending on where you are) most people expected to do better, economically speaking, than their parents did.
I am _already_ not doing as well economically as my parents did when they were my age.
We all thought that automation and industrialism would lead to more leisure time and less work. Well, yeah, that's happened - it's lead to unemployment. Presumably, the unemployed have more leisure time.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
could have meant much more leisure time
In fact, people do tend to have much more leisure time these days than before the invention of our many labor-saving devices.
increasingly pointless jobs
How about we let the person paying the salary, not h4rm0ny, determine whether a job is pointless?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
You can't compare the middle class of today with the middle class of forty years ago. The middle class is defined by the income differences of people living at the same time. The question you need to ask is whether the difference in income between the richest people and our current middle class has stayed proportionally the same or whether the gap is bigger.
Why do you want to define it that way?
Suppose an omnipotent being offered to transform society as follows: all the inventions of the last 300 years would be erased, but you, personally, would be 1000 times richer than the average miserable sod. I would not take that deal -- I'd lose access to computers, modern medicine, and lots of other stuff that I love. (I bet you wouldn't take that deal either.) I'd rather be an average shmoe in 2009 -- even if I'm not middle-class, by your definition -- than fabulously wealthy in 1709. I don't care if the gap between me and the "rich" increases exponentially, if it means things keep getting better for me.
It seems like you would hurt the living standards of average people simply out of spite for the rich. Shame on you.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Exactly! Thank you. That system isn't exactly a monument to liberty, is it?
OK, so you don't like the fact that some of the taxes you have to pay are used to support the unemployed.
Fine. So vote for someone who will get rid of Social Security.
Your problem seems to be that you don't like how your taxes get spent. Fair enough! But your problem is not that there isn't enough freedom where you live; your problem is that the politicians that got elected don't do what you want them to do. Tough shit, bro! But you're still able to vote for whomever you like in the next election, and until then, you're free to try to convince people to see things your way.
Being able to campaign for the policies you want: that's freedom.
Being able to vote for whomever you want to vote for: that's freedom.
Being able to run for public office yourself, if you don't like any of the other candidates: that's freedom.
Having to put up with policies you don't like, because the politicians you like lost the election: well, that's freedom, too. Deal with it.
"Dictatorship" isn't really the right word. "Totalitarianism" would be a better fit. Though the "benign" dictatorship of western European countries, which provide dubious cradle-to-grave "care" for their hugely taxed citizens is paternalistic and unavoidable if you're born there.
I was born there (Western Europe) and I've also lived here (United States) for 10 years. Call me brainwashed, but I don't think that either of those places is ruled by a dictatorship or a totalitarian government. When people get fed up, they vote for someone else. The fact that people in Europe tend to support slightly more "liberal" or "socialist" governments, compared to the U.S., is not because they are forced to... it's just a choice they make.
And it is a choice that they get to reconsider every four years. Free elections, you know?
Its not sustainable as opposed to the other possible political systems we could have, but dont because of petty greed, vindictiveness, and fear. Its not simply capitalism vs socialism, and socialism isnt inherently authoritarian. Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong-il are authoritarian socialists, while Mikhail Bakunin, Noam Chomsky, and the Wobblies are libertarian socialists. Similarly, Murray Rothbard, SEK3, and Ludwig von Mises are libertarian capitalists, while Deng Xiaoping, Bush 43, and Pinochet are authoritarian capitalists. Had it not been for the intervention of the State over the years, wasting money on frivolous and illegitimate wars, trying to save money by exploiting people or trashing the environment, Im sure that technology would have progressed further. Its far cheaper to fix something before it breaks than trying to clean up the clusterfuck afterward. America is not much less culpable than the Soviet Union in that sense, we just have a moderately free press to report on it, which resulted in some moderately improved legislation regarding the environment. Nothing radical enough to result in real definitive change, though. We always have to compromise with big business. Why the hell should we compromise when it hurts the hand that feeds all of us? Its seems that we only change our harmful habits in the face of immediate, perceivable danger.
Von Neumannized toasters and cute robot kittehs,
C-legs and JPEGs and theme park like cities.
Vaccines and soma made right from our genes,
These are a few of my favorite things.
--
Hypertext isn't what it's marked up to be.
"The Internet is something the people in the 50's didn't even dream of."
J.C.R. Licklider's memos were first published in August of 1962; while technically a little over 2 1/2 years after the 1950's, I think that's close enough to say that yeah, they did dream about such things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
-- Terry
"Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future." Umm... Revolutionary War? Declaration of Independence? Constitution? The South leaving just before the Civil War? The Civil War? Emancipation Proclamation? Manifest Destiny? Women's suffrage? Civil Rights movement? The current battle for gay marriage? Any of these ringing any bells?
I'm a psychologist (amongst other things).
I have often though one of the more admirable things about our Constitution is the way in which it deliberately introduces inefficiencies into our governmental processes. How terrifying it would be if we could quickly and easily change things on a whim, or on the word of a demogogue. Our constitution would basically be dictated by Rush Limbaugh or DailyKos (more than it is now). 'Efficient government' is a scary phrase.
snig
As opposed to what... Marxism? Yeah, that sure worked out.
Marxism was outlined as being a reaction to capitalism. I'm not aware of any Marxist experiment in which the country actually existed in a capitalist state prior to adoption of the new political structure.