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The Future That Hasn't Arrived
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Mar 05, 2003 04:21 PM
from the would-settle-for-unlimited-cell-minutes dept.
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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You mean? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You mean? (Score:5, Funny)
A courteous, polite cabbie that speaks English. Now that's science fiction!
Parent
Re:You mean? (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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Vaporware (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Vaporware (Score:5, Funny)
No, but one is in development and should be available RSN!
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I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
The Industrial Revolution, because...
"Did people in the middle ages, for example, ever think much past the end of their own lives?"
"I'm guessing they did,"
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Re: Read this essay by Bertrand Russell (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re: Read this essay by Bertrand Russell (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re:I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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.
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Re:I wonder (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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.
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ObSF (Score:5, Informative)
Obligatory art reference (Score:3, Interesting)
I do believe I made his day. Maybe he'll thank me on the end page of his next book too!
What happened to fly cars and * (Score:5, Interesting)
You wanna keep them on the ground now don't you?
Re:What happened to fly cars and * (Score:3, Insightful)
What happened to the Jetsons? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:What happened to fly cars and * (Score:5, Funny)
Or that weird kid from Jr. High that smelled oddly of cheese and could be Afterburner on one quarter. We're a generation of video game players. Our hand eye is second to none. Hell, in theory I could run nighttime bombing ops from a F-117 and probably make it back to the base in one piece if the simulators are even half-accurate.
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Re:What happened to fly cars and * (Score:5, Funny)
The part where you click on "Restart mission" after smacking into the ground is remarkably inaccurate ;)
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Those futures aren't worth complaining (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
.
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Re:Those futures aren't worth complaining (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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My favorite (Score:5, Funny)
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.......
Re:My favorite, The Aerocar (Score:5, Informative)
It was never mass produced in quantity, but there are a few in flyable condition today.
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No kidding! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, wait....
What is it... (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Inertia of Public, Companies (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
The Missing Element in all Futuristic Art (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The 1950s Overemphasized Mechanical Developments (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Things we were promised, but didn't want (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Greed and lack of management by visionaries... (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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)
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)
And tens of thousands of children want just enough food so that today isn't the day they starve to death.
Think about it.
Not all futurists are wrong. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, for most of you at least. I ain't got one yet...
-Mark
Disneyland, Take Notes! (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Did our future get lawyered away? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Total lack of safety. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR???? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR???? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR???? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR???? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Car Aerodynamics (Score:5, Interesting)
What works in a windtunnel doesnt always work on the road where there may be a tailwind, side winds, etc.
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Re:Car Aerodynamics (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Car Aerodynamics (Score:5, Informative)
Spoilers are to increase turbulence at the rear of the car, thereby shifting flow separation further back, and actually reducing the pressure drag. If you don't know what pressure drag as opposed to frictional drag is, then this explanation will make very little sense to you...
Properly designed spoilers really do work (but only at the particular designed speed ranges). (note: large third-party spoilers on the back of hondas don't work
A rough undersurface of the car is also actually desirable (again, to INCREASE turbulence, though this time it increases drag) - the more turbulence, the less ground-effect lift will be generated, so you car doesn't take-off!
Foils (often mistaken for spoilers) on F1 cars and some rally cars, are upside wings, designed to increase downforce (at the expense of greater drag), thus increasing traction at the wheel.
Note: IAAFD - I Am A Fluid Dynamicist. Almost all the fluid stuff taught in secondary school is at best lies-to-children, downright wrong most of the time.
Parent
Smooth underside *is* beneficial. (Honda Insight) (Score:4, Informative)
However, a smooth underside would seem to be beneficial for air resistance and thus to fuel economy. Honda's engineers and fluid dynamicists and whatnot agree, as their most efficient car (the Honda Insight) has a smooth underside [openfrontier.com] to reduce drag.
In particular, note where the article states "Another important aerodynamic detail that greatly contributes to the Insight body's low coefficient of drag is the careful management of underbody airflow." And the numbers they quote for power required to push the car through the air are equally revealing-- "In comparison, the Honda Civic Hatchback, with roughly the same 1.9 square-meter frontal area as the Insight, has a Cd of 0.36, and needs around 32 percent more power to operate at the same speed as the Insight. "
So there you have it. Without the smooth underside, rear-wheel covers, and a tapered back-end-- you need 32% more power to push a car with roughly the same frontal area. I'm not sure I'd say "A rough undersurface of the car is actually desirable" without qualifying it by adding "for a race car, but not for a normal automobile."
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Re:Looks like the server went back to the future. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Science: The Future That Hasn't Arrived (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Come on already (Score:3, Funny)