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: 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.

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.