Slashdot Mirror
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").
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.
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.
I want my flying car, damn it!!
It's getting closer. Back when Moller started out, we didn't have GPS, for one thing. In the meantime, computing power increased enormously. An iPhone has more computing power than a typical autopilot does. Today, robotic helicopters are routine undergrad engineering class projects.
What will make flying cars feasible is making them fully robotic, so that they can be safely used by a drunk or a child. Get in the vehicle, and just tell it where you want to be; leave it up to the car to get you there. If it comes close enough to any other vehicles, they'll negotiate collision avoidance between them. When you get there, tell the car to go find somewhere to park and wait for you.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
Does the American Revolution not count as a radical political transformation? Federal republics were not common in 1776.
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.
I don't know about you, but I don't ever want to see flying cars. Most people can barely figure out how to safely operate a wheeled car in two dimensions. Imagine how nuts it would be if we added a third.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
Better still, they could put autopilots on normal cars, and eliminate the shitty drivers. Of course, Fisher would object, as it would make it easier for unfit people to reproduce, but I think that natural selection in the human race is a lost cause anyway.
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
Additionally,
- they'll have to know how much fuel they have and refuse to go anywhere out of range of a filling station.
- They'll have to know the weather everywhere along the route and refuse to fly in certain conditions, including many conditions you'd be OK to drive in. Any time it's near freezing or snowing, they'd have to know the temperature and humidity at all altitudes to be certain that ice buildup would not cause a crash.
- Every active system and instrument would have to be electronically monitored somehow, and any warning would have to be an automatic no-fly. And the instruments would have to self-calibrate somehow.
- And the car would also have to refuse to fly if regular maintenance hadn't been done on schedule.
.
We're a long, long way from flying cars. And, when you consider how much they're going to cost, the real-world advantages of a flying car might not be worthwhile. Do I really need to be stuck at home every time it snows (or is forecast to maybe snow)? Or every time any little mechanical problem occurs? My current car has a lot of little tiny, non-critical mechanical issues because it has 100,000 miles on it. It's still a good reliable car that should last me another year or three. If it was a flying car, every single problem would have to be fixed and the systems overhauled.
Actually, you know what... forget the cars and ships.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
You mean, placing politics in faith?
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
Because if they don't deliver the technology to us, then China will.
At least no one told me I'd be getting all my meals in pill form
I remember being told that our lunches could eventually come in pill/wafer form in health class when I was in high school. We had an exchange student from Hong Kong who misunderstood this and thought it was going to happen in the next couple of weeks. He was almost in a panic about whether or not the price for lunch was going to go up.
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.
Someone tell the politicians that George Orwell's 1984 was NOT meant as a guidebook.
We're a long, long way from flying cars.
There's quite a bit of work to do yet, but my point is that we're rapidly approaching that tipping point. Surface cars are inefficient and dangerous, and roads are unbelievably expensive to build. We drive along very narrow channels with other vehicles coming towards us at fatal closing speeds, typically with nothing but a painted line to separate us. Daily fatalities in any average city's highway system are routine.
when you consider how much they're going to cost
They'll follow the same cost curve as automobiles did. Only the rich will be able to afford them initially, and they'll sell in the thousands. Then, they'll get cheaper and sell in the hundreds of thousands, and so on. By going robotic, they'll also be more feasible to share than present-day cars are.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future." Apparently Corn flunked American History in high school.
-=Maggie Leber=-
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.
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
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.
If you want a flying car, go get your pilots license and buy a nice used Piper Comanche.
Drive to airport, get in plane, fly to destination airport.
It's a lot cheaper than the cost and cost of ownership of the first flying cars will be, and you dont have to wait.
$50,000 will buy you a very VERY nice plane. Another $3500-$4500 for your license and you're in the air and flipping a bird to everyone in the boarding lounge as you take off. You will be in and out of airports faster than anyone on a commercial jet would be
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Mundane? I can watch, for free, a live stream of astronauts in orbit, repairing the delicate internals of a space telescope, with the information arriving via a worldwide network of computers. On my phone.
We're already living the the future.
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?
Surface cars are very efficient and increasingly much, much safer.
Not compared to an aircraft that can go point-to-point. My daily commute when I lived up in the mountains in Los Gatos was about 30 minutes, and it would have been a one minute flight or less.
Roads are not expensive to build in comparison to anything else.
Compare the cost of building roads to the cost of not building roads. QED. Also, the political costs you mention are still costs of building roads. That's a lot of tax money to spend, that air cars wouldn't need.
For a car that refuses to function when it snows.
Where are you getting that from?
Even after the most severe snowstorms, you'd be able to fly over the snow sooner than the roads would be ploughed.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
basically progress is: innovation creates new paradigms for growth which then saturate and become bad in new ways.
I take issue with this. There are two types of technological innovation, those which enable more efficient collectivization, and those which enable more efficient individualization of society.
All of your examples of things "becoming bad" involve the (over-)application of the former type, collective technological innovations. I would argue that the second type of individual technological innovation is immune to this type of obsolescence. Individual technological innovations merely involve a trade-off in labor for capital. Once a particular technology has improved to the point that this trade-off becomes acceptable to the individual, the technology finds widespread use. Since it is an individual trade-off, there is nothing but individual preference or resource exhaustion that will ever change this dynamic. Collective technologies, on the other hand, also involve a trade-off in individual rights to the rights of the collective. Given two equally efficient technologies, a person will always choose the individual technology over the collective one. As technologies improve, collective technologies will tend to be replaced with more individualist technologies due to this defect.
Laundromats, for instance, have "become bad" and been mostly replaced with individual washers, even though laundromats are more efficient. Suburbs, perhaps, you may argue, are an individualist technology that has "gone bad". But I think that is more due to a failure of (collective) energy production technologies. And I would argue that the same type of individualized technological innovation is currently under way in the energy field in order to make up for collective energy production having "gone bad". Barring complete breakdown of collective energy production and failure of more individualized technologies, I don't see automobiles ever being replaced by more collective transport methods. So I will concede that energy production will likely remain collectivized until Mr. Fusion is produced. Other than that, I believe all other production technologies will tend to follow the path I have outlined.
Ultimately, while you may see a cycle of boom and bust due to technological innovation, I only see a cycle of boom and bust in technological innovations that require collective ownership and use, such as high-rises, assembly-lines, and fossil fuels. These technologies are subject to monopolization and negative externalities that offset their benefits. In individual technological innovations, I believe there is more steady improvement.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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."
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.
Where are you getting that from?
Even after the most severe snowstorms, you'd be able to fly over the snow sooner than the roads would be ploughed.
-jcr
Just guessing, but...
Small aircraft are vulnerable to icing. During a snow storm, this is actually not an issue. But you don't want to be in wet clouds or rain with the temperature anywhere near 0c.
At greater cost de-icing is available. But even high-end systems can be overcome by a sufficient rate of accumulation.
Then there's the simple matter of wind and turbulence. Stuff about which cars don't care make life uncomfortable or dangerous for pilots. Is the usual automobile driver going to know the penalty in runway length caused by a 5kt tailwind?
Autopilots are great...until they fail. Or a sensor clogs. Or the alternator trips.
We'll have flying cars eventually, I suspect. But we're not likely to own many. They'll be taxis in the near future. Even once automation is sufficiently safe, they'll still be more efficient as a public utility than everyone owning one.
Shit, I must be living in the past - I pay $Texas/MB for the same service!
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.
See the other comment about the ice buildup.
You're essentially asking computers to be perfect, coping with weather hazards that experienced pilots simply avoid. A skilled, responsible pilot will choose to simply not fly when the weather starts to get dangerous. He could choose otherwise and probably avoid crashing because of the weather. Probably. But that's not nearly good enough, so he stays on the ground.
What do you want your computerized flying car to do when it's probably safe to fly? And what about when it's completely safe to fly and the weather turns bad halfway there? You'd have to land somewhere and wait.
Flying cars are not really analogous to cars because flying is not like driving. Piloting an aircraft can't be done casually.
And if you're going to be relying completely on a computerized autopilot, that thing will have to be designed to avoid risks like commercial airline pilots avoid risks. It couldn't ever take any chances.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Would it still be a one minute flight if ALL the commuters you deal with every morning were in the air with you every morning?
Yes. Very few of those people would be going from my house to my office. Think about it for a second: traveling for about a minute on a straight path, versus spending 30 minutes or so on streets which aggregate traffic into a highly concentrated volume.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
They'll be taxis in the near future. Even once automation is sufficiently safe, they'll still be more efficient as a public utility than everyone owning one.
I'm sure that sharing them by various means (taxi services, pooled ownership, etc) will happen. I expect that the rate of individual ownership as costs fall will follow what happened with automobiles. There was a time when far more people used cabs than drove their own cars.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
A teacher.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
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?
Why do you want to define it that way?
Because "rich" and "poor" is relative, and "middle class" is defined as being between those two relative states. You know, "middle."
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.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Yes, we as a whole are better off. No, I don't want all of society to be worse off in exchange for being comparatively better off. Where was that implied?
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.
Ok. Obviously. So would I. What the hell is your point? That 2009 is better than 1709? No shit. If you were living in 1709 you'd be happy being being middle class then because it was better than middle class from 1509. Would you be happy living in 2009 with a standard of living from the middle class of 1709? No? Why not? It's still an improvement over the middle class of 1509 and by your definition all that matters is that there is an improvement over time!
That's why you can't compare it to the past. You don't compare the standard of living of today directly with the standard of living of the past. It's simply not applicable. Nobody can have access to computers, cars, or modern medicine in 1709 because those things did not exist. It was impossible for even the stinking rich to have. You are therefore not making a comparison of wealth.
Wealth is what you can afford based on things that currently exist. So the only way to make a valid comparison is to examine how the richest of the rich live today. The define what is possible. Then you compare how far away you are from them. Then you compare how far away people in the equivalent class in 1709 were from their upper class. Now you're comparing wealth: what you can afford that actually exists in your time.
It seems like you would hurt the living standards of average people simply out of spite for the rich. Shame on you.
I never implied the rich getting poorer is an acceptable compromise to the expansion of the middle class. Obviously that implies we're all worse off. However, everyone's wealth should increase proportionally at the very least (assuming better technology but no social advances) and ideally, the gap between the classes should diminish by having the wealth in the lower and middle classes increase at a faster rate than the upper class (everyone has increased access to the resources of the time).