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."
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.
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.
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
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.
Sorry, have you ever used a search engine and tried to filter through the utter fucking tripe from morons who have no clue about anything but will happily talk about it as if an expert?
Since he claims to be able to shut up, maybe he should. :-)
-=Maggie Leber=-
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."
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.
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.
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"
That's why Google needs to recalibrate the differential equation of the search formula. See, if they'd set the limit variable to compensate for misinformation, which can easily be revealed mathematically if you use a derivative variation of the linguistic quantification operator, you can reverse the polarity of your crappy searches and essentially find what you're locking for in reduced time exponential to the search hits of the internet's tangent.
Sheesh, its that easy people.
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.
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 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