I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
When I was a kid in the 50s, I watched in awe as futurists talked about the individual jet packs we’d all be wearing 20 or 25 years from then. I couldn’t wait to be just like Commando Cody who zoomed around in the Republic Pictures serials. Then in 1969, we landed a man on the moon, and my heart raced as I envisioned our inevitable colonies on Mars and the mining we’d be doing on other celestial bodies. I just hoped I would live long enough to hop onto one of the space vehicles that were sure to be in mass production by the turn of the century.
Well, here we are in the last half of 2010, more than 40 years removed from “one small step for man” and nearly 60 years past Commando Cody’s peak, and I’m still waiting. No jet packs are available on Amazon, and I can’t find a travel agent with tickets to anywhere but here on Earth.
So what happened? Where did all the glamorous and exciting and innovative opportunities of the future go? If you discount entertainment and communications, we’re still doing things pretty much the same way we did them before. Cars still crawl along highways, and, while airplanes may be faster, they still fly as they always did. In fact, it wouldn’t be too hard to argue that airplane travel has regressed in many ways. (I won’t even get into train travel.)
So instead of jet packs and weekends on the moon, we have computers, cell phones and high definition television. I have no problem with those creations, but it seems to me all our best minds are now on a quest to make these devices faster and smaller (or, in the case of TVs, bigger), and we can be entertained 24 hours a day virtually anywhere on earth. We seem to have given up the excitement of the real world for the “advances” of the virtual one. Who has time for all this futuristic nonsense when Facebook and Twitter are so now?
I’d love for my kids to be as excited about the promises of the future as I once was, but I’m not sure Universal Wireless Access is something you can sit in your room and daydream about.
Don’t get me wrong; I love my iPhone and my other toys, but I waited over 50 years for this? The future is a gyp!
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Feb '10
Re: I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
We must solve the very physical, very concrete (as opposed to the relative virtuality of much of our modern technology) problem of our energy supply before we can ever hope to achieve many of the things that were promised by past futurists. As it stands, without a big breakthrough such as cheap nuclear fusion, we may even be faced with a future of even more limited energy than we are used to.
Not that, in the big picture, we'd necessarily be any happier with ever more energy and technology; just look at how we complain and gripe about air travel. Still, it just seems wired into us to continually adjust to what we have and to seek more and better, and just the sensation or perception of advancing technology (as opposed to stagnation) could be a factor in our happiness.
By the way, I "typed" this from my Android phone accessing a test server; the rest of you Android, iPod and iPad users should soon also have this great privilege to wonder why it takes so much longer to fill up 200 words... :-) The preview doesn't yet work, however.
And, I edited it after the fact with our new editing feature, also running on a test server.
Edited on Aug 4, 2010 at 2:13pmMay '10
Re: I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
Energy’s an issue. But I think there are a lot of cultural factors, too. In no particular order:
Overall, we’re a more risk-averse, less-free, less entrepreneurial culture. And the fact that much élite education is centered around demonizing our own culture leads to a general enervation and negativity among many of our élites. Could we go back to the moon these days? I wonder sometimes.
May '10
Re: I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
I think what we have is not the coolness of gadgetry, but it's democratization. Bill Gates is approximately one million times wealthier than me, but we use the same gadgets, live in homes built on the same principles and with the same comforts, eat pretty much what we want.
The difference is I don't need a security detail.
My grandfather was much, much poorer than a Rockefeller. He grew up cutting peat for fuel and it was a 12-hour pull by row boat to the nearest doctor. He probably ate much more fish and potatoes than he really wanted.
Jun '10
Re: I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
From a practical standpoint, Confucius and our Busy System Admin (appreciate all you're doing) have pretty much nailed it.
In the abstract perhaps, I wonder if culturally we've entered into some weird twist of The Neverending Story. The main thread of that movie was the battle between the freedom of imagination and the pragmatic call to keep our feet firmly on the ground. The danger of the latter is the advance of the big black "Nothing" which swallows up the world of imagination. Maybe we're not that far gone, but perhaps the parallel is there.
There's a place for both the pragmatic and the imagination. Sometimes the pendulum swings in favor of one or the other. I may never get to ride in a flying car, but that doesn't mean the future isn't bright.
May '10
Re: I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
Ha, I was going to do just that, and point out how much easier life would be if we had transporters like in Star Trek. One my list of modern annoyances cross-continent flights are probably number 1. They're survivable, but nonetheless, I'd be happy to see them obsolete before the end of my lifetime.
That being said, even in Star Trek the transporters were hyper regulated. Somehow I suspect the government would find a way of making them inconvenient for the common man.
Re: I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
I blame the liberals.
Well, actually, joking aside, I sort of do. As the late 20th century developed, so did the idea of the "expert" and the specialized discipline. The notion of the educated tinkerer and inventor -- Edison, Einstein, people like that -- was replaced by the specialized expert. We don't have polymaths anymore, and it's the polymaths -- the people that see connections and opportunity across a wide swath of disciplines -- that make the future, that invent stuff, that get us to the moon.
When a truck company owner, Malcom McClean, wondered why it had to take so long for his trucks to be unloaded and reloaded every time they went to the seaport, it inspired him to create the shipping container, which has done more to bring us the 20th (and 21st) century than any other invention.
What we need, I think, is more people in garages messing around with stuff, and more kids in school learning engineering and physics. Not to become, necessarily, engineers or physicists, but to become educated polymaths who may invent something amazing.
May '10
Re: I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
I thought about this a few weeks ago when the Back To the Future hoax was circulating. Things aren't becoming different, and so the hoverboard just won't come to be. When the railroad came to Pennsylvania they cut the travelling time from Philly to Pitt from 3 days to 13 hours. You could argue that it was just bumping up efficiency, but it's to the point of being revolutionary.
That said, I don't think people's minds are at rest. Here's a graph from WIPO on the number of patent applications filed for the last hundred or so years. It probably shouldn't be read into too much, since the patent's appeal has shifted a lot over the years, but it's a nice crude benchmark. If asked what great innovations have come in my lifetime, the only big thing I can think of is "the internet." Yet the innovations we've had have made my life a lot different.
With the complexity of technology, it's hard for people to visualize innovation anymore. Today's innovations are largely in the shadow of chemistry and electronics, with the results being apparent, not the mechanics.
May '10
Re: I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
You guys are all too pessimistic. Progress occurs, cost of capital is an issue, but the biggest problem is that when you buy your jet pack/rocket belt, you will screw up, get hurt, and sue the manufacturer (you'll be represented by John Edwards). Why should anyone sell such a thing when humans are guaranteed to screw up?
Nevertheless, here is the Popular Mechanics summary of the companies that are marketing jet packs and the attendant technical issues (everyone should subscribe to PM, it costs me maybe ten bucks a year):
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/4247253?click=main_sr
May '10
Re: I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
One recurring theme of James Burkes' wonderful TV series, Connections, was that the truly revolutionary changes were not anticipated, and indeed often could not have been anticipated. Dreaming about the future is useful, of course, since it motivates the efforts that eventually have unanticipated benefits. No dreams, no new knowledge, materials, or processes that spark some other guy to take things in a new direction.
What I find especially disturbing about your post, Pat, is this observation:
"So what happened? Where did all the glamorous and exciting and innovative opportunities of the future go?"
I'm not thinking about the future I dreamt of as a teenager, I know what happened there. I'm wondering why my teenagers don't dream of a glamorous and innovative future. Has the idea of a "wonderful future" faded away? Are we really that cynical these days? I hope not, but perhaps I'm just foolish old dreamer...
Jun '10
Re: I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
There are lots of reasons why our current view of the future is so different now than when those of us approaching codgerdom (I'm a child of the 50s and 60s) were kids, and other commenters have done a nice job of identifying them. However, I would suggest another, which is the malaise that conquers a society in the grip of relativism. The great conservative Catholic, Michael Novak, had this to say in a 2005 NRO column:
“No great, inspiring culture of the future can be built upon the moral principle of relativism. For at its bottom such a culture holds that nothing is better than anything else, and that all things are in themselves equally meaningless. Except for the fragments of faith (in progress, in compassion, in conscience, in hope) to which it still clings, illegitimately, such a culture teaches every one of its children that life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.”
Could this be part of how we now see the future? I think so.
Re: I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
Thank you all. I'm feeling so much better now!
Jun '10
Re: I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
Pat Sajak:
Thank you all. I'm feeling so much better now!
----
In the words of John Derbyshire: "We are doomed!"
Aug '10
Re: I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
Here's the thing - stuff like universal wireless access, facebook, etc, were once considered futuristic nonsense.
Go back and read E.M. Forster's short story from 1909 entitled "The Machine Stops".
This story is quite likely the first work of science fiction to describe what, for all intents and purposes, is today's Web 2.0.
Of course, Forster was warning that this sort of 24/7 electronic connectivity wasn't necessarily a good thing. But that's not my point!
My point is, one man's "boring tech of today" is another man's "fantastic tech of tomorrow!"
Aug '10
Re: I've Seen the Future, and it's a Gyp
Another possibility: Why don't we have jet packs and flying cars? Maybe it's because somewhere along the way people realized those are really awful ideas:
www.cracked.com/article_15655_5-awesome-sci-fi-inventions-that-would-actually-suck.html