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The Media Science Technology

The Future That Hasn't Arrived 383

Posted by timothy from the would-settle-for-unlimited-cell-minutes dept.
jonerik writes "MSNBC has this article on an exhibit starting this week at Philadelphia's Lost Highways Archive and Research Library. Entitled Radebaugh: The Future We Were Promised, the exhibit focuses on the artwork of the elusive A.C. Radebaugh, a commercial illustrator whose works promised us a glittering, shiny tomorrow from the '30s to the '50s; a helicopter in every garage, massive streamlined cars, vacations on Mars - in short, pretty much everything we didn't get. The exhibit collects examples from Radebaugh's portfolio, auto designs for Chrysler, DoSoto, and Dodge, ads, and 'Closer Than We Think!,' a syndicated weekly comic strip drawn by Radebaugh. I want my jetpack, dammit!"
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The Future That Hasn't Arrived More

The Future That Hasn't Arrived

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  • Well, where is it? Someone have an answer???

  • You mean? (Score:5, Funny)

    by tomhudson ( 43916 ) <barbara.hudson@b ... minus physicist> on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:23PM (#5443937) Journal
    Omigod ... you mean that vacation on Mars was just a brain implant? Quick, get me a JohnnyCab!

    • Re:You mean? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:29PM (#5444003)
      "Quick, get me a JohnnyCab!"

      A courteous, polite cabbie that speaks English. Now that's science fiction!

      • Re:You mean? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by shadowbearer ( 554144 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @12:02AM (#5446733) Homepage Journal
        "A courteous, polite cabbie that speaks English"

        Hah! I resemble that remark. LOL Or at least I did....

        You have no idea....

        "How come it's taking so long? Drive *faster*" - while you're backed up in rush hour traffic on the shortest-time route thru town.

        "I can't *believe* this fare!" - After you've run them miles around the city seeking their bar buddies, waiting for 10 minutes plus outside each bar while they fight their way thru crowds...and they're exhorting you to go *faster* so they don't miss their friends...while the dispatcher keeps wondering if you've dropped them off...

        "Can I share this fare with my friends/buddies" - Ok, there's 14 of you, some will have to ride on top, and one or two in the trunk.

        "What do you mean I can't put the 4x8s of plywood on top?"

        "I'll pay you when I get my paycheck. Here's my address." - Yeah, right, dude. That's why I dropped you off somewhere else and you entered with the key...

        "What do you mean you won't drive me out of town, it's only 20 inches of snow! Plowed? No, I don't know if they've plowed..."

        "I have to go 60 miles in 40 minutes....what do you mean you can't?! I'm LATE!!"

        Ad nauseum

        (not intended as a troll, just an ex-cabbie's rant ;-)) )

        SB

    • Farenheit 451? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by billstewart ( 78916 )
      Let's see, big screen TVs with mind-numbing programming on them, nobody bothering to read, everybody believing what the TV tells them instead of thinking independently? What was this "Future that hasn't arrived"?

      I'm so happy to be a Beta....

  • Vaporware (Score:3, Funny)

    by BryanL ( 93656 ) <lowtherbf AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:27PM (#5443971)
    Ah yes, articles on the ultimate in vaporware. Do we have a vaporware icon?

  • Oops! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The future is down. A trouble ticket has beens submitted.

  • I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MCZapf ( 218870 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:28PM (#5443993)
    When did we start thinking about the future so much? Did people in the middle ages, for example, ever think much past the end of their own lives? I'm guessing they did, but I don't think they could have imagined a world much different than their own.

    When we think of the future, we almost always think of technology. We think of starships and other things that are waaaaaay far off, so maybe the industrial revolution spurred this new way of thinking. Anyway, I'm justing typing randomly. I'll bet some historian will tell me I'm totally wrong.

    • Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:38PM (#5444102)
      "When did we start thinking about the future so much?"

      The Industrial Revolution, because...

      "Did people in the middle ages, for example, ever think much past the end of their own lives?"

      ... then started to have this thing called "free time," time that wasn't devoted to the task of living, and also...

      "I'm guessing they did,"

      ... it wasn't until then that the common person could see the effect technological (and political, for that matter) innovation could have on a person and people within their lifetime. Before industrialization, nobody thought about the future that much because there was no reason to; their lives were just like their parents, whose were just like their parents, whose...

      • Re:I wonder (Score:3, Insightful)

        by micromoog ( 206608 )
        The Industrial Revolution, because...then started to have this thing called "free time," time that wasn't devoted to the task of living...

        Actually "free time" was greatest when everyone was a hunter/gatherer, was reduced somewhat when society was driven by agriculture, and was reduced more during the Industrial Revolution. Basically, standard of living, health, and opportunity have increased, but you gotta work for it.

        • Re:I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)

          by JudgeFurious ( 455868 )
          That's kind of interesting if you think about it. From everything I understand (my understanding being subjective) what you say is correct. If so think about what came out of your basic hunter/gatherer civilizations. Just about every one had a fairly rich pantheon of gods and a culture that, to my way of thinking at least, seemed to be brimming with imagination.

          Then you head towards your agricultural civs and people start to embrace a monotheistic religon and everything narrows in terms of what they believe. It gets even tighter when you get to the industrial revolution.

          Then if you look at how we all get a large portion of our collective imagination fed to us by a relative handful of individuals who make their living doing this from writing books, making movies and television shows it kind of makes you think. It's like we can collectively imagine more because we've got a group of people helping us do it. Writing things that fire our imaginations and creating things we can watch that help us see the possibilities. It may appear to us that we've got enough free time to dream up what will be and to build up expectations but most of it's borrowed and adapted to what we want.

          I'm probably way off base with my thinking but good post. It got me thinking which should count for something.

          • Re:I wonder (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Galvatron ( 115029 )
            Just about every one had a fairly rich pantheon of gods and a culture that, to my way of thinking at least, seemed to be brimming with imagination.

            Which hunting and gathering tribes are you thinking of, here? The "rich pantheon[s] of gods" that I can think of all came from agricultural societies. Examples: the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and so forth.

            I admit I haven't studied a lot of hunting and gathering tribes. All I really know came from reading "The Forest People," about the Bambuti pygmies. The extent of their religion was some nebulous notion of "the forest" as being some kind of benevolent entity.

            There's much more reason to believe that agricultural societies would have more developed (as in more complex) religions, because they could support religious specialists. In hunting and gathering tribes, everyone had to do everything. Agricultural societies has some artisans, some priests, some administrators, etc.

            Back to the original topic, one reason to expect that people in the Middle Ages wouldn't have thought much about the future is that there was no reason to expect things to change! Your father could no doubt tell you that things had been exactly the same when he was your age (okay, colored slightly by "back in the good old days" memory). Today, how many of our parents had computers when they were our age? How many had flown in an airplane? We went from Kitty Hawk to Apollo in less than 100 years! There are good reasons for us to expect the future to be different from the present. This was not true in the Middle Ages.

      • Re: Read this essay by Bertrand Russell (Score:5, Interesting)

        by benzapp ( 464105 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @06:56PM (#5444860)
        I think this essay [zpub.com] by the great Bertrand Russell not only outlines the historical point you have made, but why the cult of efficiency and productivity which infects our society is so destructive and devisive.

        Perhaps you read it, but for those out there who have not quite realized that the promise of technology, more free time, has not materialized, please read this essay.

        • Re: Read this essay by Bertrand Russell (Score:5, Insightful)

          by teorth ( 582980 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @08:51PM (#5445696)
          Perhaps you read it, but for those out there who have not quite realized that the promise of technology, more free time, has not materialized, please read this essay.

          Well, it has, in absolute terms, but not in relative terms. The problem is that human psychology makes us view things using relative metrics instead of absolute ones. If you earn a 20% raise this year, but all your friends earn 100% raises, do you feel richer or poorer compared to last year?

          If you want to have a 1950s comfortable standard of living regarding possessions, health care, entertainment, food, etc. you can do so by working far fewer hours than a 1950s human had to. But if you want a 2000s standard of living... ah, then you still have to work, or otherwise procure income. But at least work tends to be less menial and physically taxing than it did in the 1950s, on the average at least.

          It's a question of whether you measure standard of living by absolute standards or relative ones. No matter what the technology level, it will be always true (in capitalist societies, anyway) that someone who works hard will, on the average, earn more than someone who works little at the same level of technology. So of course the idle will never win ... in relative terms. But if you view things in absolute terms, the idle American today can live far more comfortably than the average hard-working American in the 1950s. (The same is even true of the third world; a citizen of country X today has a more comfortable existence than a citizen of X in the 1950s, in almost all cases - calorie intake has more or less doubled, for instance, and life expectancy extended by a decade or more. Again, in relative terms the poor countries of 2000 will be behind the rich countries of 2000, but they can certainly be comparable with the rich countries of 1950 in many absolute, objective metrics.).

          Nevertheless, I do agree with you on one point - there is more to life than the rat race. But you are free at any time to downshift and live a comfortable and leisuirely life, and viewed in absolute terms one has far more capability to do so now than in the past. It's only the relative viewpoint which seems to suggest that one cannot "afford" to be idle.

          Terry

      • Re:I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)

        by garyrich ( 30652 )
        "When did we start thinking about the future so much?"

        The Industrial Revolution, because...

        "Did people in the middle ages, for example, ever think much past the end of their own lives?" ... then started to have this thing called "free time," time that wasn't devoted to the task of living, and also...
        ==================

        Close, but no cigar. In the mediaeval era, it was thought (by everyone who had time to think about it) that there was no reason to consider it. God controlled everything. The law of gravity worked the way God wanted it to towards his own ends. Since the seond coming was expected "any time now" God would likely change those laws anyway. Progress and creating a better world for those who come after us were somewhat foreign ideas. This world was considered just a trial and a test to see who would end up in heaven/hell - it's supposed to be unpleasant. Making it less unpleasant is like cheating on the test - better you should spend that free time praying....

    • Re:I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sbaker ( 47485 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @06:11PM (#5444463) Homepage
      In the middle ages, the world would have seemed to be utterly unchanged - for the previous few centuries at least. In that situation, why would you ever expect change? Predicting a very different future back then would have been just silly.

      We have seen such spectacular growth in just about every part of life in perhaps two lifetimes - we now see life in terms of change. Shall I buy an ATI Radion 9700 graphics card - or should I wait a few months and get an nVidia GeForceFX? (Oh - wait...bad example!)

      I expect change - I *rely* on change. Predicting the future is now a survival trait and humans are nothing if not adaptable when it comes to surviving.

      We have codified change into things like Moores Law. We are suprised and perhaps even a little fearful when things don't change fast enough (see dozens of /. articles about the immenent failure of Moores Law for example).

      Actually, I think what's most interesting about this exhibit is just how LITTLE change he predicted. Cars still have enormous chrome fins - people still dress exactly the same as they did in the 30's, 40's and 50's - everyone still commutes to work. For us, looking at these, we see a weird mix of antique design with machines and buildings that we still havn't managed to engineer.

    • Re:I wonder (Score:4, Interesting)

      by glenebob ( 414078 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @07:09PM (#5445008)
      "When did we start thinking about the future so much?"
      Hmmm probably right about the time we started to feel the pressure of day-to-day life. We're pretty good at imagining the good parts of the future and pretty bad at imagining the complications. In other words, a long long long long time ago.

      Certainly we were looking to the future long before the middle ages. Christianity, for example, is based on the hope for a better future; specifically on the hope that a saviour will change things for the better. Apparently there was a common belief that life could be better.

      "When we think of the future, we almost always think of technology ... so maybe the industrial revolution spurred this new way of thinking."
      It isn't really a different way of thinking, it's just that technology has largely replaced magic and other nebulous things as the future improvent of choice. I think that shift to technology likely did happen during the industrial revolution because that is the time that technological advances started coming at a rate noticable to the common person.

      I find it interesting that we continue to look to the future for improvement in our day to day lives, even though technological improvement has almost exclusively resulted in a more complicated life style, the oposite of what we hope for. It always lets us down at the most basic level.

    • Re:I wonder (Score:3, Insightful)

      by de la mettrie ( 27199 )
      Did people in the middle ages, for example, ever think much past the end of their own lives?

      While most common (European) Medieaval people may not have been able to imagine a future different from their present, they certainly did think past the end of their lives. Remember that Mediaeval Christianity emphasized the afterlife (heaven or hell) as the central aspect of human existence, physical life being a brief, painful trial of the soul. Only after the Renaissance and then Enlightenment did the Western memepool's focus shift to the human being and its needs in the real world: the "pursuit of happiness".

      Quite possibly this was the time where the entire concept of "progress" and indeed "the future" originated. It is no coincidence that timekeeping beyond the counting of seasons and ruler's reigns did virtually not exist in the aptly named Dark Age. There are historians who theorize that several decades of history (at around the time of Charlemagne) did not in fact take place! Such theories are possible only because the documents of that time are few and seldom are dated at all.

  • Mining the Moon (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Ryan.Merrill ( 548437 )
    Well at least one thing might come true if China has its way. Mining the Moon [losthighways.org]


    The story of China mining the moon was on slashdot a few days ago. China Wants to Mine the Moon [slashdot.org]

  • ObSF (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ray Dassen ( 3291 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:31PM (#5444028) Homepage
    William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" [sjsu.edu].
    • Art imitates art imitates art too. When I found this article a couple of days ago, I told my friend Winston Smith [winstonsmith.com] that I had located one of his major influences. He was so happy! He said that he had "thousands" of Radebaugh's illustrations sitting around that he'd painstakingly culled from old magazines and books (his source material), and was thrilled to find out that we'd found the creator of the famous flying cars, etc. He said he'd never been able to find or read a signature on any of the illos before.

      I do believe I made his day. Maybe he'll thank me on the end page of his next book too!

  • Promised? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Willow_mt ( 550444 )
    "The future we were promised."
    How can anyone promise a future that is certain? I mean, in almost any case there are more than 1 possible outcomes in a situation...
    • How can anyone promise a future that is certain? I promise you that everyone who read your last post will die, although I don't promise it will be any time soon.

      Someone who is actually female :-)

      Is it true then? You really do get free karma for putting 'I am female' in your sig?

  • What happened to fly cars and * (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Demon-Xanth ( 100910 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:32PM (#5444041)
    Next time you're driving around, note the number of cars driving like idiots, barely running, NOT running, and with dents.... ...now put them above your house.

    You wanna keep them on the ground now don't you?

    • Well said - here in the US, we tolerate rolling heaps of trash on our roads, unlike many other countries. I remember hearing something about how in Japan, they have tax incentives in place to encourage consumers to replace their cars with newer ones regularly. An artificial stimulant to the market, sure, but it certainly strengthened their position in the worldwide marketplace...
    • Well, flies have wings, and cars would only tie them to the ground, so...
    • Next time you're driving around, note the number of cars driving like idiots, barely running, NOT running, and with dents.... ...now put them above your house.

      You wanna keep them on the ground now don't you?

      If you take humans out of the equation, then I can see flying 'cars.' I don't think any human could keep up with rush hour in a 3d space and parking garages, please show me the human that can day in and day out fly into a parking garage without hitting something.

    • What happened to the Jetsons? (Score:4, Funny)

      by poopie ( 35416 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @06:20PM (#5444545) Journal
      The jetsons promised a really cushy future where we all sit around in chairs that move us where we need to go (like a segway with a seat -- or a wheelchair?)

      ...and we have little to do most of the day because robots do it all for you.

      ...and a single salary supports a family of four!
    • Actually, it sounds more like "Harley Earl" and the Buick commercials running on American TV. As someone who has spent two decades in marketing, I feel I can say those commercials suck, but they do ask the same question:

      Where are all the cars we were promised?

      What we were NOT promised was the computing power that took up a city block in the 30s, in a laptop. Nor 500 channels (and still nothing on). We were promised alot of cool looking things that were already invented. They just would look stream lined.

      All and all, I am pretty happy with what we actually got, and where we are going. I don't want my neighbors to be flying helicopters either. Its nice to look back, but I see more about who we are and were, rather than what we missed. I don't miss the good old days 'cause I think the good old days are now, I guess. Even with all the problems.

      And to those of you that did not actually READ the article(ie:75% of you), and the cool Flash presentation of his art, this stuff makes the Jetsons look practical :)

  • Those futures aren't worth complaining (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rocko Bonaparte ( 562051 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:32PM (#5444042) Homepage
    I am assuming the root of the matter is the disparity between what was predicted in art (science fiction) and what actually happened. I always felt there was too much of a preoccupation with space travel in the past. I guess this makes sense, given the Space Race took up a good amount of people's attention. However, there were two areas that were overlooked: The Internet and advancements in genetics. Both caught the forward-thinkers of the past by surprise.

    There were many assumptions of huge talking robots, but not as many about the computers we have today. Our computers are not as powerful, but they're a commodity, available to everybody. Also, cloning was a pipe dream; something to happen in the year 2500 or whatever. And here we are, playing around with cloning cats.

    It's not so bad, really, though I could use a good mail-order robobabe right about now.

    • Re:Those futures aren't worth complaining (Score:5, Interesting)

      by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) <bittercode@gmail> on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:56PM (#5444305) Homepage Journal
      I think about that every time I read a Heinlein novel where people are flying all over the universe in space ships and using slide rules to check their navigation.

      .

    • Re:Those futures aren't worth complaining (Score:4, Insightful)

      by samwhite_y ( 557562 ) <icrewps@yahoo.BLUEcom minus berry> on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @07:03PM (#5444946)
      One of the common mistakes when futurists try to make guesses about the nature of society a few decades from now is that they presume that trends that have been true will continue to be true. There are many examples of this.

      During the 50s and 60s, there was a steep up ramp in energy consumption. Because of this, there were many dire predictions in the 70s that we would soon run out of energy. But the steep curve leveled off and the "energy crisis" never happened.

      From the late 1800s to the 1960s, our ability to go faster and farther was also on a steep upward curve. Futurists naturally extending this trend assumed that travel to the planets would become commonplace and that personal air transport would soon become a cheaply available transport solution.

      From the early 1900s to the 1960s there was great increase in leisure time. Some futurists postulated a future existence where only a few people worked and most just goofed off.

      From the 1800s to the 1960s there was a tremendous improvement in using machines to replace humans when it came to various tasks. Again, it was natural to extend this trend to the point that robots manufactured most of the goods consumed by society. Also, during this period there was a large growth in household convenience devices. Extending this trend, it was natural to assume that there would soon be robots that performed all your housework,

      Sometimes it is more interesting to examine what was missed. For most of the modern age up to the 1970s, there was not a great improvement in the speed (and quantity) in which written communication was delivered. It still took at least a few days for mail to arrive and international mail still could be a matter of weeks. In order to disseminate information (such as research), large mass printings had to be created and distributed in a very manual way. TV improved the communication process somewhat, but for information with a more limited audience, the basic infrastructure and approach for delivery had not changed for quite some time. That is why "email" and "website" was not on the minds of most futurists.

      Also during this period, the mechanisms by which numeric and financial calculations were performed did not change much. It was both expensive to do the calculations and expensive to disseminate the results (My childhood was still in the era where we had to consult large logarithm tables to assist in doing simple arithmetic - something they were doing back in the 1700s). Thus it was not a natural presumption that computers could manage all the details of various financial transactions. In particular, EBay and PayPal were not envisioned.

      So my challenge to futurists is to look a little deeper and try to anticipate changes that are not already occurring and extrapolate those. But that is not happening. Every futurist these days seems to be obsessed with small-computerized gadgets linked in high-speed communication networks that allow users to access broadband entertainment. A completely natural but probably mistaken prediction based on current trends.

  • My favorite (Score:5, Funny)

    by wideBlueSkies ( 618979 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:33PM (#5444045) Journal
    I remember when I was a kid(think I was 3), I saw a 2 page magazine spread featuring a car which could convert into an airplane. The caption was something like "Soon you'll be able to avoid traffic jams by flying over them." ... "this car can convert to an airplane in 15 minutes".

    I don't remember the manufacturer or anything. I think this was sometime around 1969 or 70.

    So for the next couple of years I'd keep asking my Dad when we were going to get our airplane car. I used to do this often, while we were sitting in trafic.

    Looking back as an adult, I realize that the man had a lot of self control.......

  • No kidding! (Score:5, Funny)

    by creative_name ( 459764 ) <pauls@ouLISP.edu minus language> on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:33PM (#5444048)
    Forget flying cars and vacationing on red planets, I'm still looking forward to when 640K isn't enough.

    Oh, wait....
  • "the exhibit focuses on the artwork of the elusive A.C. Radebaugh,"

    How dare you call Mr Radebaugh an anonymous coward!

  • Dude, Where's my flying car?
  • See "The Gernsbach Continuum" by William Gibson -- short story circa 1980, in which the streamlined technotronic future imagined by Hugo Gernsbach breaks into the real world. (The story appears in Gibson's excellent Burning Chrome collection.)

    On a related theme, see Miami Modern [southbeach-usa.com]. Excerpt:

    "Perhaps nowhere was the postwar craving for the futuristic more evident than on Miami Beach where, during the 1950s and 1960s, wildly inventive hotel designs emerged to satiate the requirements of the prosperous new middle-class on vacation. Resort area architects attempted to realize through their buildings what we of a more cynical age now concede to be science fiction. These architects created a unique futuristic look in Miami Beach that became known as Miami Modern--MiMO."

    Yet another related screed about hyper-modernist architecture, one of my favorite essays by Tom Wolfe [tomwolfe.com]: "Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can't hear You! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!"

  • What is it... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Violet Null ( 452694 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:37PM (#5444092)
    With the pessimism? Sure, we don't have flying cars or jetpacks or vacations to Mars.

    Instead, we have computers literally millions of times faster than anyone imagined we'd have. Read some old sci-fi, and notice how the authors tend to make reference to people plotting the navigations by hand because it'd be too complicated for a computer?

    We've got our personal communicaters, in the way of cell phones. Hell, with cell phones with cameras and video screens on them, we've already got our Dick Tracy wrist geenees, too.

    We can genetically modify animals.

    And, perhaps most importantly of all for the writers of the early sci-fi, we haven't destroyed ourselves as a species yet.

    So why all the bitching about flying cars?
    • Two words: traffic jam. See, the fantasy, for me, is that I'm the only one with the flying car, just like Nick Fury. If everyone had one, though, the suckitude of traffic jams would gain a new dimension. Don't look up, ground crawlers!

  • Inertia of Public, Companies (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nairnr ( 314138 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:38PM (#5444103)
    Why don't we have the future tht we are all shown at Worlds Fairs, and other trade shows? Too Damn Expensive!

    First off, companies have to invest in and develop such shiny stuff, and then the public has to lay down their hard earned cash. That is the biggest reason we don't all have jetpacks and personal helicopters.

    On the upside, a lot of these fantastic visions do come to some level of fruition. When car companies make concept cars, some features may trickle down into production cars.

    As a public, I don't think we typically want to change how we live drastically. Few people want to embrace something like the Kyoto accord to reduce pollution because it hits them in the wallet.

    A lot of Dot.Bombs went this way because they were counting on investors and the public to embrace new technology because it was COOL and drastically would change how we manage our lives. Didn't work.

  • Tom Tomorrow Addressed this (Score:3, Funny)

    by pyrrho ( 167252 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:38PM (#5444105) Journal
    ...here [salon.com]

  • sigh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sstory ( 538486 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:39PM (#5444113) Homepage
    I do dearly love that artwork, and I will have lots of it when I graduate and have $$$. I even like the musical version. Remember those wonderful modernist pieces of music in EPCOT, and such?

    But we weren't "lied to" or "promised" something that didn't happen. It was just a wonderful utopian vision, and like all those, it never quite happens. Tragedy of the Commons, yada yada yada.

  • Abandoned road plans. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rrkap ( 634128 )

    Here's a couple of links to cool historic planning maps for San Francisco [pacificnet.net] and Los Angeles [pacificnet.net]. The will to do these things didn't last long enough to finish though.

    Another interesting "roads of future past" link is interregional highways [roadfan.com], which shows what the interstate system was meant to look like in 1944, before it was called the interstate system.

  • Perhaps copyrights and patents have made it impossible for us to cooperate on research and the open sharing of information. Perhaps regulations have made it impossible for us to use nuclear power, even though is it so much safer than even many solar technologies. And how about forcing everybody to pay for public education, perhaps this has set us up poor quality schools because there is no accountability. Or what about high taxes, and laws that pretty much force us to use dollars - that have made it impossible for people to accumulate wealth for R&D, education, and experiments unless they're already wealthy. Lets face it, the USA is not really that free, it is more free than many places, but it is not really that free - if it was I think we would all have alot more than we do now.

  • The Missing Element in all Futuristic Art (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ShortedOut ( 456658 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:42PM (#5444152) Journal
    .... is they focus on technology but forget one thing... Population... everyone conveniently forgets that the future holds TONS more people in it than now. What will that population want as far as technology goes? Futuristic cars? Pfft. Please, Houston/Dallas/LA, etc are parking lots as it is... imagine when there's twice as many people living there.

    Know that empty lot next door? Wave bye bye.

    That field of wildflowers? It's an apartment complex now.

    I'd just like to see some fanciful futuristic art that depicts technology that looks like it was designed with a large population in mind.
    • Dang, if I'd had some mod points I would have bumped the parent up...

      You raise an excellent point. Sometimes I wonder if the appearance of vast, open space is intentional, making an association with the idea of "utopia", or if it was a simple oversight. On the other hand, suppose a piece of "utopian" atrwork DID in fact show a crowded, modern (as we know it to be) society... would the very elements that make the illustration utopian be lost amongst the clutter, hidden in the background?

      It's amazing how a pice of artwork's perspectives and presentation can totally warp reality. For instance, look at some conceptual drawings of planned communities, or even some overhead satellite images. They seem to have a vast, open quality that is most often fairly accurate... until you drive through these exact same communities. While they may look just like the sales brochure, and the streets and parks are exactly where the satellite map said they would be, they always seem more crowded when enveloping you in 360 degrees.

      Conversly, consider artwork that accompanies visions of Distopian societies. I offer the comic series Transmetropolitan as an example. The cover and story artwork shows exactly what you pondered: A society with energy/matter replicators and communications devices and other technological advances galore, BUT replete with all the overcrowding and societal ills and technological misuses common to a typical urban setting. I've encountered a few other works where "distopia = overcrowding", but can't recall them to mind here.

      (oh yah, FWIW, in Transmet they don't have flying cars, either...)

  • The 1950s Overemphasized Mechanical Developments (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Schlemphfer ( 556732 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:44PM (#5444171) Homepage
    If you think about it, most 1950s guesses about the future centered around dreams of mechanical engineering. Jet-packs, personal helicopters, etc.

    It turns out that complex mechanical stuff is harder to design and mass-manufacture than formerly believed. So today's reality in terms of mechanically oriented consumer items in no way measures up to 1950s hopes.

    At the same time, while 1950s soothsayers dreamt too big in regard to mechanical developments, they dreamt way too small in regard to communications developments. And, if given the choice, I'd much rather have email and web broadband access for $45/month than my own personal $20,000 helicopter. I suppose I'd rather fly to Mars than own a cell phone, but the technology behind a cell phone is in many ways more miraculous than anything that's been developed for affordable space flight.

    The future we live in is in some respects a disappointment compared to 1950s hopes, but in other respects it's infinitely cooler than anyone could have dreamed of.

    • Amen!

      Would you want to live in the future of 2001: A Space Odyssey?

      Sure they had a moon colony, but they also had a Cold War and no Google.

      I see the biggest shift from the old visions of the future as the increase in chaos and decentralization. 2001 showed a Bell System videophone. Today we have anarchic WiFi hotspots. The flying cars would have been built by General Motors if they'd made it big. Instead today we have networks of volunteers self-assembling to create complex and useful products like Linux and Apache.

  • Things we were promised, but didn't want (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bonker ( 243350 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:44PM (#5444181)
    Promise - What we Got

    EngSoc from Orwell's '1984' - Department of Homeland Security
    Doublespeak, also from '1984' - Politically Correct Speech
    Debate over Human Cloning from 'Brave New World' - Current debate over Human Cloning and Stem Cell Research.
    All-Powerful CIA/FBI from 'Snow Crash' - Patriot Act enchanced federal bureaus.

    I could go one for quite some time...

    • All-Powerful CIA/FBI from 'Snow Crash' - Patriot Act enchanced federal bureaus.

      er... which version of Snow Crash did YOU read ?

      In my version the FBI was a piss-ant remnant of a previous era.

      Good old Uncle Enzo had more power than all of the FBI put together..

      M@T

  • Greed and lack of management by visionaries... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Wonderkid ( 541329 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:45PM (#5444197) Homepage
    The reason these exciting and liberating developments have not arrived is because of the political and business models that have driven (or hindered) progress since about the 1950s. a) Businesses, including Sony and Microsoft, create products that are intentionally flawed and never feature perfect, therefore, forcing consumer into a lifetime of upgrades. In addition, they keep changing standards, which again, defers utopia. Far worse, other types of business (I have met execs from these firms) exploit the consumer, in particular the poor, and they end up purchasing products that rather than liberating them, cause them strife. The cure for such strife is then purchased from another company that just happens to be part owned by company responsible for said strife. (Example, Longs Drugs sells very unhealthy processed foods sold to the naive underclass, which cause illnesses that are cured by the medicines for sale on the other side of the isle.) b) Politicians are paid by corporations to restrict the development of any product that will damage the growth potential of said corporation. For example, in the 1950s, the US auto giants purchased the public transport companies in major US cities. But rather than use imagination and efficiency to create the promised utopia, they ran them into the ground so they could sell people cars instead. Well, look what it did to LA and London. Fortunately, the latter is now cleaner and more pleasant to live in thanks the recent and somewhat utopian congestion charge imposed by our visionary Mayor. More buses, newer buses, better buses! and reduced fairs have made the city so much nicer just in a few weeks thanks to a massive reduction in traffic and greater reliance on public transport.

    The sooner corporate greed and lack of compassionate visionary leadership go the way of the steam engine, the better we all will be. And folks, that time will come soon, as world opinion on the oil war is proving. The Hydrogen Economy is the future. And flying cars will arrive soon too. Only one problem to solve on that, an affordable, effficient, safe and quiet engine. But humanking will do it, we always do!

  • Moron drivers (Score:3, Funny)

    by Trollificus ( 253741 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:46PM (#5444210) Journal
    "a helicopter in every garage"

    Good lord, most people can't handle driving in two dimensions. Give them a third and there will be anarchy. ;p

  • it is interesting to look back on... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:46PM (#5444211) Homepage Journal
    It is interesting to look at past predictions of the future because they can tell us how difficult it is for us to truly think creatively. In most cases, we are so limited by out prejudices and assumptions, that we can't really predict anything past next Thursday. I really believe the value of these predictions is to remind us of who we were, rather than tell us who we are going to be. For instance in many mid 20th century science fiction, the 'simple' tasks of cooking and cleaning were handled by robots, but the 'complex' tasks of navigation still had to be done.

    OTOH, exhibits like this speak to the great optimism of human nature. Though it took Europe five hundred years from the time of Marco Polo to the time that they colonized a new continent, we were in the mid 20th century certain that we could conquer the solar system in fifty years. The same holds true for helicopters, jet packs, and everything else.

  • You, You, You (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pnatural ( 59329 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:47PM (#5444214)
    I want my jetpack, dammit!

    And tens of thousands of children want just enough food so that today isn't the day they starve to death.

    Think about it.
    • I've thought about it, and I've decided... you should really sell your computer and buy those kids some food. Every post you make, another kid dies.

      (I'm logging in from the library, so neener neener neener.)

  • Closer Than we think...? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by golo ( 95789 )
    The "Closer Than We Think" series is great.
    The above-ground transparent pool [losthighways.org] for example. And this one [losthighways.org]reminds me of the segway.

  • Not all futurists are wrong. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Big Mark ( 575945 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:47PM (#5444227)
    Ever read Arthur C. Clarke's book, "1984: Spring"? It was a collection of essays on the future and what he thought it would turn out to be. Some of it was total bollocks, but - in the early eighties, nearly twenty years ago - he predicted the meteoric rise of the cellphone and the way it would revolutionise modern living.

    Well, for most of you at least. I ain't got one yet...

    -Mark

  • "give"? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bigpat ( 158134 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:50PM (#5444249)
    Who exactly was going to "give" us these magical toys? The Government? Big corporations?

    Flying cars are not largely a technological problem, but a regulatory one. One that looks less likely to be solved anytime soon as long as most people still fear things that can fall out of the sky. I would add irrationally afraid, since people seem more than willing to assume the much greater risks of getting into a car every day. Even though tens and tens of thousands of people die in cars each year, the plane crashes still make the headlines... why is that?

    If you want a flying car, go make one. You'll be breaking the law, most likely, if you succeed, but you can do it with todays technology. But I wouldn't wait for anyone to hand you one... The current air traffic control system is just simply not expandable to handle the sorts of air traffic that could result from a lot of people using flying cars. The proposals of one sort or another all seem to envision very complex systems of centralized ground control, which seem untenable for wide scale use. Imagine thousands of airplanes being centralling controlled by ground computers... bad bad bad idea.

    Until the governement gets out of the way on legal use of the airspace, then most of us will have to stick to the ground.
  • They're banned in San Francisco.
  • We are barely moving towards environmentally safe cars. Think of the horrible traffic accidents in the air!

    Looking at the available technologies (fuel cells [yournextcar.org],battery electric [yournextcar.org], and hybrids [yournextcar.org] to name a few), there isn't a lot of choices right now on the market. One of the more interesting ones I saw were the bi-fueled [ford.com] vehicles, takes ethanol or gas and runs the same. Don't forget to check out GM's alternative [gm.com] vehicles in addition to Ford's [ford.com]. You can easily grab a Toyota Prius [toyota.com] or Honda Civic Hybrid [hondacars.com] like I did [gortbusters.org].

  • Disneyland, Take Notes! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mr. Fusion ( 235351 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:57PM (#5444315)
    Has anyone noticed that "Tomorrowland" in Disneyland is starting to looking like, well, yesterday? Many of the attractions are either outdated (Astro Orbitor), closed down (RocketRods), or just altogether too plain (Innoventions). Space Mountain is great for thrill seekers and my personal favorite, but wasn't Tommorrowland supposed to show off the crazy inventions of the future?

    Yesterland [yesterland.com] is a good place to see all the old, semi-forgotten attractions that seemed ahead of its time. Anyone remember those hovercraft bumper cars? [yesterland.com].

    Plus, Disney's got plenty of room to play around with right now. The old CircleVision attraction, the building right across from Star Tours, has been closed for a while and just sits there, probably only being used for storage. And whatever happened to those submarines in the lake?

    Disney, take heed! Don't just devote an attraction to the newest technologies. The industry moves too fast these days to keep up. Instead, why not show mock-ups of these sorts of retro-tractions? I can think of a ton of cool interactive exhibits they could produce (think Jetsons), even with their cost-cutting mantra of recent. Now if only they'd bring back those RocketRods!

    -Mr. Fusion

  • Look at the second picture in his portfolio (The Exhibit --> Portfolio) of the "subway" hanging above the highway. This is pretty similar to a monorail. Look at the vehicles in the picture, they all still have drivers and wheels. The "subway" has an air intake, meaning that it uses an engine to locomote, not electricity. The cars have honkin' big attenae, but that's a small oversight. All the car bodies are curved, not boxy; anyone noticed a trend in automobile design today? Heck, Radebaugh wasn't that far off...
  • Parable of the talents.

    Parable of the mustard seed.

    Only the filthy rich can afford to be so stupid.

    Why do we think they should be running the country?

  • We have a lot of these inventions and predictions in use today. Sure, maybe not how they were invisioned in the past, but they were just guessing. What we have in use today is practical and functional

    Who would have thought 30 years ago that we would be able to communicate en masse via a teletype machine and convey a message not only across distance but also time?. Who would have thought we could cook food in under a minute, or that we could record TV shows WHILE simultaneously watching another show? Or that we would have the signal beamed down from an orbiting satellite to our homes and offices? Or that we could store 6 hours of music on one little shiny plastic disc?

    the jetpacks and the rocket cars made for good water cooler talk around the office, but none were too practical in everyday life.

    The past should be impressed with our future....provided we live long enough to have one....

  • Did our future get lawyered away? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by theonetruekeebler ( 60888 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @06:09PM (#5444439) Homepage Journal
    The flying car went the way that civil aviation in general is heading: sued out of existence, or prevented from moving forward due to the prospect of being sued out of existence.

    Progress is dangerous. If I make a product that will kill one user in a million, and everyone in America buys one, I'll face two hundred and eighty wrongful death suits, class action suits, branding as a mass murderer, and ghod help me if one of those failures happens during sweeps week.

    Flying is fairly simple, but the consequences of error are rather specatular.

    Cars were invented before lawsuits were so widespread; this is part of the reason Ford isn't bankrupt from all the innocent bystanders crossing the street in front of their potentially lethal products.

    But the tort system in America is biased towards the right to be stupid and my obligation to accomodate your stupidity regardless of what you're doing with my product. So no, I'm sure as hell not going to build you a flying car just so you can sue me when you fuck up.

  • What's the point of flying cars? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by alen ( 225700 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @06:23PM (#5444575)
    If people fly as bad as they drive then it would be a deathtrap. At least you can make roads and drivers have an incentive for driving on the road because most cars don't travel off road very well. Imagine some of these idiots flying out of approved lanes and doing all kinds of aerial acrobatics to shave a few minutes off their commute.

  • The future that HAS arrived (Score:3, Funny)

    by Halloween Jack ( 182035 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @06:27PM (#5444621) Homepage
    Here's the thing: all those things that were promised did, indeed, come to exist. All of them.

    We've got robot butlers, flying cars, rocket belts, daily shuttles to the moon (that don't blow up), cures for cancer and the common cold, cigarettes with vitamins and minerals instead of tar and nicotine, universal peace and brotherhood, slimming pills that really work (and aren't amphetamines) so that everyone looks good in their unisex leotards, teleportation, 3D TV, sex in a pill, and direct election of government officials. And we had the Internet by 1959. Actually, we sort of handed it down to you; what we've got now is... well, "virtual reality" is a crude description, but it's the closest that your unevolved "English" can come.

    One other thing that we've got: big-ass cloaking devices. Next time you drive across Nebraska, or Montana... you know, those "empty" places that people started abandoning after WWII, for some reason... look off in the distance. You'll see a faint shimmering, which you'll probably tell yourself is just a "heat mirage".

    Riiiiiiight.

  • Total lack of safety. (Score:4, Funny)

    by RatBastard ( 949 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @06:46PM (#5444777) Homepage
    Looking through the Syndicated section I see a total lack of concern for safety. Mailmen with rocket pack but no helmets or flight suits. Space hospitals with no failsafe systems. etc... Amazing.

  • Introverted technologies versus Extroverted... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Woodie ( 8139 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @07:19PM (#5445089) Homepage
    I think that in certain respects what really occured was a domination of introverted technologies. The _personal_ computer for instance. Yes, now with the World Wide Web we can connect with one another - but do we really? A great many technologies that have taken off are largely introverted in nature; even when they seem to make it easier for us to communicate.

    Genetic engineering is another inward facing technology. I'm not saying it won't open doors to us, but it largely focused on exploring inward frontiers. This is a very personal technology - one which with augment or change us in very intimate ways.

    With extroverted technology (exploring boundaries outside ourselves and immediate surroundings) taking a back seat, what do you expect to happen. Personal transport hasn't evolved too much in the last 20 years. Cars today aren't so much different than they were - and when was the Concorde designed and built? How about the Shuttle?

    This probably has a lot to do with market forces. It's a lot easier to build and sell small personal things - not to mention more profitable.

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