Ask Slashdot: Is Today's Technology As Cool As You'd Predicted When You Were Young?

"How does the actual, purchaseable consumer technology available in 2019 compare to what you -- back in the 1960s, '70s, '80s or '90s -- thought consumer technology might look like around the year 2020?" asks Slashdot reader dryriver. Is today's consumer technology as advanced, inventive, groundbreaking and empowering as you imagined it would be 30, 40, 50 years ago? Or is the "technological future that has now actually arrived" different, in various ways, from how you'd hoped/imagined it might be a few decades back?

If so, what was different in your "future technologies imagination" than what is available to buy today?
Each generation received different dreams from the pop culture of their time. Back in 1969 an 18-year-old Kurt Russell starred in a Disney movie with a malfunctioning mainframe. By 1984 one TV series showed David Hasselhoff with his own talking self-driving car. But how close did your own personal predictions come, asks the original submission.

"Do today's technological gadgets manage to live up to how you imagined tech around the year 2020 would be, or do they fall short of what you hoped/imagined might exist by today?

Comments

Re:Not really

[fred911]

I have to disagree. Many of us swim in more bandwidth than we ever expected to be as cheaply available. Especially those of us who thought 3kbps V.42bis brought us was the cats meow!

I'm still waiting

[93 Escort Wagon]

for the paperless office.

Seriously, on more than one occasion back in the 1970s I heard how companies like Weyerhauser and Georgia Pacific were worried about how the advent of computers was going to destroy their business within a few years. But whenever I've looked around the various offices and labs I've worked in, and all I see is paper and more paper.

Re:I'm still waiting

[AHuxley]

The paperless office the world enjoys now is getting accessed by criminals, police and governments via open networks and junk crypto.
At least secure paperwork makes them have to physically enter a building.

Technology yes, how it's used no

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Today's world is fabulous technologically speaking. I remember MIT's first attempts at self-driving cars in the 80s. I worked on one of the first telephone with voice recognition (it sort of recognized 10 digits after hours of training). I dreamed of a portable computer I could take with me everywhere, and being forever-connected to the rest of the world.

Now all these things are a reality, and so ubiquitous people feel the need to wonder if they're cool on Slashdot!

What I didn't expect is the reasons why these technologies came about: as I kid, I thought research was done to better humanity, and give more people access to education. Wrong! It's done to squeeze money out of people and put them under surveillance. It's also used by religious crazies, conspiracy theorists, and to post videos of cats.

In short, all these mavellous things have been invented for nefarious purposes, and used mostly by an ever-dumber population. That's a letdown...

Re:Yes

[shess]

The free and open internet was great while it lasted.

Did not expect the virtue signalling, SJW, censorship, shadow banning, reporting, account removal, payment processor problems the internet would have.

That side of political control for speech on the internet was something out of Communist nations.

I didn't see that people would actually be getting killed by swatting, that doxing would be a thing, that people would make an avocation out of hounding others to suicide ... and yet others would get un-self-consciously self-righteous about virtue signalling and the terrible problem of the scary SJW.

[I mean, seriously, you're virtue signalling by complaining about virtue signalling? No shit?]

Mixed bag

[sg_oneill]

Computers have evolved beyond I think anyones wildest expectations. We have seriously star trek level machines in the palms of our hands. And holy shit the internet.

Space travel has been a *major* disapointment. Hopefully this push to mars gets us back on track, but its like we hit the moon, got some space station action happening aaaaand then had 30-40 years of lost years.

Cars kind of feel boring, but if we're honest the modern car is miles ahead of anything we knew in the 1970s. No flying cars however. No hover cars. And the monorails are terrible.

We still haven't cured cancer yet!

Re:I just turned 50. Hell yes.

[zidium]

In this article, every single person born in the 1970s or before says YES!! Esp the guy who loves his TV!

Every single person born from 1980 onwards except maybe one person says NO WAY!, including me.

I was part of the internet revolution of the late-90s early-2000s. Things went to shit circa 2006 and never recovered. Just gotten worse and worse and worse.

I had hope with The Snowden Revelations of 2012, but nothing happened so now I'm just exceptionally apathetic.

I'm really starting to believe that Gates, Zuckerberg, et. al. maybe are just figureheads for enslavement tech released by the deep state. Have YOU ever tried to innovate and seen how fucking hard it is to get your product seen?!

Re: Social networks

[peppepz]

Another sign of the times is that back in the old days, it would have been obvious to me that your reply was sarcastic. Nowadays I can't be so sure ;-) .

Re:I just turned 50. Hell yes.

[93 Escort Wagon]

I’m in my fifties, and I think the most useful tech from a practical point of view is live, GPS-enabled maps. I used to drive around with a Thomas Guide on the passenger seat... but no more.

Not very sexy, I must admit.

Complete devolution

[UnConeD]

No. Hardware evolved at an insane pace, with every new generation exponentially faster and more capable. Software was exciting too. You could download some warez and open up a whole new realm of possibility. Data could be stored and converted into various common file formats and exchanged using open protocols.

Now if it's not mobile crapware it's infested with trackers and trojans, and software compatibility is so poor that the most common way of sharing something is to turn it into a noisy JPEG. Everything still superficially speaks the same protocol, but it's just used to wrap ad-hoc formats and ill-defined APIs that can change without notice. If you can even get at the raw data at all.

Instead of tricorders we got shitty selfie-tablets that can't last a day without a recharge. Instead of empowerment and distributed networking, we got nanny admins and centralization. Instead of a rich medium for computation, we got a kitchen sink of broken ideas, so convoluted it requires a monopolisti company to farm the collective attention of the world in order to pay for its upkeep.

Cyberpunk dystopia is here, and it wants you to like and subscribe.

Re:Not really

[ShanghaiBill]

Homes today are 1000 sq ft larger than in 1973

Aside from the internet, not as cool

[bb_matt]

I was looking back at some photos of New York City in the 30's - the Chrysler building. It struck me just how modern it still looks today. Photo's of gleaming cars in the show room lobby, the art deco style - it still inspires modernity. And lest we forget, the USA from the 20's saw an unprecedented rapidity of invention and innovation.

The future had already started, long before I was born and a ton of cool stuff was being produced and would be produced in the following decades.

I was born in the UK in 1968 and when I was a kid, it struck me just how advanced the USA was when compared to our very troubled country. There was the future, that was where all the cool stuff came from. But the UK was catching up and we got our first home brewed mass produced personal computer - the ZX80. The library up the road from me switched from paper cards to swipe cards in 1978. I had sci-fi comics and TV shows that promised an amazing future.

Sadly, the arms race seemed to be overtaking the space race and all thoughts of a cool technological future were put abruptly on hold, as we contemplated a 3rd world war.

But back then, I expected we'd see flying cars, jet packs, a moon base and androids. Maybe even world peace.

The reality is, incredible marvels of technology have been produced, but they have become mostly invisible and ubiquitous.
A great deal of it is just a series of continued improvements on existing technology.

The single most amazing thing that was somewhat predicted in science fiction, has been the internet.

In the grand scheme of things, 50 years is a very short time and most of the technology we have today, existed when I was born.

Re:No, it fucking sucks.

[TeknoHog]

Back in the 90s, all the cool kids used to laugh at us nerds for having a (social) life around computers and electronic gadgets. Fast forward about 15 years, and those cool kids start flocking to Facebook and getting addicted to "smart"phones. Eventually, it doesn't help if you stay away from FB yourself, the web is ruined for everyone.

On the actual tech side, the industry has become a kind of push-pull feedback system. Traditionally, tech was developed in a forward sense to become more capable, but due to DRM, a lot of effort is spent on pushing back on those capabilities. You're paying more to get less, because of all the anti-tech tech that has to be developed. For example, DRM in game consoles means you cannot program the hardware you own, with the PS3 as probably the saddest example. And as a consumer, you've paid for somebody to develop that DRM.

One symptom of both of the above issues is the appification of the web. I'm guessing things like Instagram want to keep users on the app rather than the web interface, in order to have more control on ads and tracking. I'm part of the problem as I use Instagram to promote my work, but the practical experience is kind of clunky: after using a real computer to make a video, you have to use a toy machine that runs the IG app to post it (I use Android-x86 on an old netbook).

To me, a central part of the dream/prediction was that computers become universal tools. For example, in 2000 I remember arguing that instead of the digital TV network, we should instead build better Internet infrastructure, because that would also work for TV programming, plus a lot more. Well, we spent a ton on the digital TV tech and people had to buy new receivers. Of course, about a decade later they had a new cycle of upgrade to watch things like Netflix. Meanwhile, I'd been using computers to watch movies and TV series since 2001, but I guess I was spoiled by fast campus Internet, and didn't realize how long it would take to get similar speeds to the masses.

Well, that was kind of a detour -- the TV did get integrated with the computer eventually. But the general appification/smartphone trend is what's breaking the ideal now. You can't use a single general-purpose computer to do everything online, because some things are only published as smartphone apps (and running Android-x86 on a VM doesn't quite cut it). I guess people really want different appliances for different things, such as "smart" TVs for watching Netflix.

Still, I'm mostly happy with how the tech has progressed. I can mostly stay away from the social media rat race and focus on doing my own thing on faster and better hardware. At the same time I'm a bit wary of how things are going. I try to hold on to good hardware as I'm not sure if general purpose computers will be available forever.