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What We Get Wrong About Technology (timharford.com)
Tim Harford, a columnist for the Financial Times, uses the example of Rachael and Rick Deckard from Blade Runner to explain how we humans, when asked about how new inventions might shape the future, often tend to leap to technologies that are sophisticated beyond comprehension. Also spoiler of the Blade Runner plot is ahead. He writes: So sophisticated is Rachael that she is impossible to distinguish from a human without specialised equipment; she even believes herself to be human. Los Angeles police detective Rick Deckard knows otherwise; in Rachael, Deckard is faced with an artificial intelligence so beguiling, he finds himself falling in love. Yet when he wants to invite Rachael out for a drink, what does he do? He calls her up from a payphone. There is something revealing about the contrast between the two technologies -- the biotech miracle that is Rachael, and the graffiti-scrawled videophone that Deckard uses to talk to her. It's not simply that Blade Runner fumbled its futurism by failing to anticipate the smartphone. That's a forgivable slip, and Blade Runner is hardly the only film to make it. It's that, when asked to think about how new inventions might shape the future, our imaginations tend to leap to technologies that are sophisticated beyond comprehension. We readily imagine cracking the secrets of artificial life, and downloading and uploading a human mind. Yet when asked to picture how everyday life might look in a society sophisticated enough to build such biological androids, our imaginations falter. Blade Runner audiences found it perfectly plausible that LA would look much the same, beyond the acquisition of some hovercars and a touch of noir.
Science fiction stories, if they're good, sacrifice versimilitude for the sake of being understandable by the audience. Blade Runner had the option of using something like these science fiction tropes: the "Dick Tracy" wrist radio, portrayed in the police comic since 1952, or the Star Trek communicator, used in 1965. But instead they might have chosen to portray a community in which down-trodden people would still be limited to pay phones, or it simply wasn't important to the story and would have been a distraction from the main story thread.
People gave me a hard time because Pixar's A Bugs Life (on which I am credited) had the wrong number of legs on the impossible talking anthropomorphic ants and Antz had the right number of legs on its impossible talking anthromorphic ants. But it wasn't important to telling the story, and we just did not care.
The LA portrayed was vastly different from what viewers knew at the time, in that video wall mega-advertising was everywhere. Although this is taken for granted today, it was a stunning departure from the reality of the day when the film was produced.
Also, the weather of LA was overturned. In the movie it always rains in California.
Bruce Perens.
OP assumes in Blade Runner that all things progress linearly. That because we have smart phones today, we will still have it tomorrow. Perhaps the "sharing economy" takes off and pay phones give you what you need wherever and whenever you need it easier.
The funny part I always found (even when Star Trek was new) was that they had PADDs not PADD. Why plural? why would you carry around a stack of PADDs? it never made sense. The concept that one PADD could only have one document seemed ridiculous to me even at the time, let alone now.
I had an idea a while ago about the the failings of retro-futurism.
StarWars, StarTrek, The Expanse, Firefly, and pretty much any space opera are all based around the idea of spaceships with people flying in them. Like space is just an extension of the oceans and seas. But that's pretty silly. Robots do a hell of a lot better job with fewer requirements and no need to bring them back. The more and more autonomous they get the less we even need to be in contact with them.
We won't have people handling drills on Mars getting core samples. We won't have gunners tracking tie-fighters like AA flak cannons. We won't have navigators plotting courses on a bench with calipers and charts. These are all visions of the future which are simply wrong. As wrong as Decker using a payphone. We need to let go of the sci-fi tropes born 50 years ago in the 70's.
And then it came to me: Make a show where EVERYTHING on the spaceship has to be done by hand. Valves need to be opened, there's a switchboard operator for the intercom, there's a guy that turns the big steering wheel, pilots in the fighters need to manually target the guns. And you never tell the audience (But you drop plenty of hints) that the entire crew are all programs and computers. The main characters are some sort of AGI or bullshit awakened programs. The background characters are more like cron jobs and scripts. There's some mystical god-like creature in cryostatis which must be preserved, an actual human. The bots operate on a genetic algorithm system of judging fitness to see who lives and who is selected to procreate. They're all military conscripts and expendable second-class citizens. On the ship there's exactly 2 rooms people do things because that's the main processor and the backup. Quick-clones are a thing as copying programs is trivial. A fighter pilot dies and a copy shows up wondering how his last clone screwed up. This sort of computer-metaphor list goes on and on. I think it'd make a good show.
I find the payphone dig unfair criticism. For one, it was hard to know then if airwaves could carry all the signals needed for consumer cell-phones. It took a while to perfect signal compression and other issues.
Second, it was hard to know if miniaturization of electronics (Moores' law) would continue. In fact, by many accounts it's stopping now. It's not really a law, just a recent pattern, with no guarantee of continuing.
You may then argue that if one assumes miniaturization slows, how come they have androids (strong AI) in the flick? But that assumes miniaturization is/was needed to get decent AI. There's no inherent law of the universe that says AI has to come from miniaturization. Perhaps a new algorithm or computing substance could be discovered to get AI without relying on shrinking parts. For example, if most the android's entire body is a "brain", then it's merely a big computer to get big computations. Or maybe an organic substance that's good for artificial brains but NOT for cell-phone miniaturization.
The accusers are biased by actual history where our AI advances HAPPENED TO come from mostly the same advances that our phones used. That wasn't an obvious or required assumption back then.
On a different aspect, the article made an interesting point in that the first electric motors didn't help factories much because the factories simply replaced the centralized steam systems with electric motors. It wasn't until factories decentralized power distribution that the real advantage of electricity played out. The environment around the gizmo has to change to fit the new technology before its benefits show.
Jet planes were similar: early attempts mostly just slapped a jet engine on a propeller-intended design, meaning performance often wasn't good enough to justify the extra cost and maintenance it required. It's only when planes were reworked around jet engines and the new speed that real results came. Most wind tunnels of the time didn't even have enough power to simulate jet speeds. They had to build new ones.
Table-ized A.I.
What you'll find is that the bounds of technology and the line over which lies "miraculous" territory get pushed back simultaneously, because they're inextricably linked.
To me the single biggest everyday miracle is that I can put a string of text into Google and get hundreds of thousands of hits back spanning the sum of human ... well let's say data rather than knowledge; and that it comes back in what for practical purposes is instantaneously while at the same time millions of other people are doing exactly the same thing.
When I stop to think of it, which is fairly often, it strikes me as the very next thing to magic, even though as an engineer with a degree in computer science I have at least some idea of the things that make this possible. Yet it is the most ordinary and unremarkable thing to my children, who have never known a time without it, it's the most unremarkable thing imaginable.
Earlier generations of engineers probably felt the same way about radio.
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