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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.
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The crux of the matter is that the payphone isn't the important part of the story. Rachel's unnatural nature is. While the payphone is becoming less common they're not entirely gone either.
Also, one can imagine a scenario where a police detective knows how the technology works, and actually makes a point of avoiding technology that's personally tied to him where actions he takes could arguably be used to demonstrate that he's compromised in some fashion. If you will, he uses the payphone because it's not his phone, so it's harder for a cursory investigation to identify that he made that call in the first place. Admittedly this would be something of a retcon since I doubt that it was even a consideration when the film was made. On the other hand we don't have flying cars, a postapocalyptic landscape, or extraterrestrial colonies either.
Enjoy the story, don't focus on the inane details, they're not important in this case.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Mr Harford, like myself, is British. Britain is an old country, and we live in cities built in some cases several hundred years ago - in same cases with the same buildings still there. Not unique to Britain obviously, am simply using this as an example he should be familiar with.
We still use roads built with gauges governed by ancient carriages. London streets still wend and wind because many were simply not designed for motorised traffic, yet we still use them.
It's not at all a stretch of the imagination to consider that cities a hundred years from now will be built on the recognisable and still in use bits that we see today.
Blade Runner is artistically styled specifically to be a false future that blends 1940s noir and high tech, which means you end up with a lot of paradoxical technology elements.
If it was meant to be a coherent high-tech universe, it wouldn't be able to pull off the noir styling it's famous for.
The author really should have tried to make his point with a pure science fiction story that didn't intentionally try to map older styles into the future. I wonder how his analysis would hold up with Star Trek.
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.
Much of Science Fiction takes one or a small number of technological advances and examines how it will impact society, humanity. In Blade Runner it's looking at how the addition of manufactured "humans" will impact people. We examine it through Deckard and how he comes to view them as fully human.
The payphone isn't important to the story and is simply part of the visual style of the film.
Blade Runner is a poor example to use for the topic of the article, we don't have replicants so we can't compare how they "got it wrong". If you want to look at how science fiction gets technology wrong, look at something from 50 years ago about how computers are going to change society, then compare it to how computers have actually changed society.
But even then you're wasting your time because science fiction is not about making accurate predictions, it's about examining current reality by contrasting it with a potential/imagined future.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Science FICTION!
It isn't supposed to be future reality. It is a mutual day dream to amuse us.
People also imagine inconceivably-complex technology when they think not just about machines that can automatically flip burgers, but machines that can automatically do all the mining, run the refineries, handle the orders, run the farms, slaughter the cows, manufacture the fry cartons and burger wrappers, maintain itself, and maintain all the infrastructure to run the entire economy without a shred of human input. They imagine this is just five years away--they've imagined it was feasible already and just not taken up yet since the 1800s--and so conclude that jobs are going away forever.
That's not a blind extension of peoples's ignorance, either.
I've repeatedly brought up that the cost of products is the wage-labor cost, and technology reduces the amount of time (labor) and thus the cost. Market forces set the price as cost plus profit, and those same forces will push it down toward the new cost insofar that further reduction in prices won't increase profits even if all your competitors do it because they won't draw enough of your customers away. Thus people end up working the same hours, getting paid wages, with prices set by those wages (payrolls, really--wage, benefits, tax), and necessarily get an increase in purchasing power. They buy more stuff, which requires more labor to produce, ship, and retail, thus jobs to replace those lost.
The usual answer?
People just claim that won't happen anymore because no human labor will be involved at any stage in the entire production process of anything. Very soon. Like, as soon as self-driving cars hit the streets.
Magical machines of inconceivable design, but they must exist because we can fantasize about them.
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For an even more extreme version of this, look at Heinlein's novel Starman Jones. Published in 1953 and set in a future when humanity has spread out into the stars, the Astrogator's Guild has its 'secret books' that are essentially nothing but tables of conversions between decimal and binary, and the astrogators' job is to manually take star sights, translate the data from them into binary, then toggle the binary values into a computer that is hardwired to perform only the computation of integrating the previous sights with the current sight against the position of a wormhole to return values for maneuvering corrections, which are then converted back from binary and applied manually to the engine controls. No concept of the computer being tied into sensors and engines, with the crew able to enter a desired course through an interface that doesn't require conversion into binary and have the computer perform the feedback loop to guide the ship to the wormhole without requiring the navigators to overwork themselves acting as the computer's interfaces.
Another example is the Traveller RPG; published in 1977, and set in a future where human and alien civilizations spanned a significant part of the galaxy, ship's computers take up a minimum of 14 cubic meters of volume in the ship -- a starship of 400 tons displacement with a medium-size computer system would have it taking up 56 cubic meters of volume -- four 'tons' in the design process -- and this computer can only run eight programs simultaneously. It's like having ENIAC on your ship.
The whole idea that SF predicts the future is just marketing speak for SF books and movies. It succeeds occasionally, but so does religious prophecy: make enough predictions, and you score some hits, but at the cost of many more misses.
As far as Blade Runner (and most SF) goes, the writers seldom sit down to prognosticate. Most of them think of an interesting premise and see where it goes.
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"...we humans...often tend to leap to technologies that are sophisticated beyond comprehension."
An iPad can be easily operated by a 3-year old. You call that sophisticated?
What has grown beyond comprehension here is the fact that we are now forced to make technical devices idiot-proof in order for the masses to use them.
Put down the sci-fi bong and quit taking hits off fiction and fantasy.
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.
Even non-entertainment predictions are often made to entertain -- and the ones that come to widespread public attention are almost always made to entertain because, well, they're more entertaining. An actual realistic projection of future tech not made to entertain would be a dry, boring read that got tossed a trash can.
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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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