When I saw the title of this thread, I figured it would be about why we don’t have World Peace, Universal Education, World Hunger Whipped Now, and I had this great post I had all worked up.
But then I read the OP and found that this is about really important issues like why we don’t have personal aircars or cool futuristic fashions … my 2c-worth now seems so inconsequential 
Carry on!
I don’t know about this one… a girl jogging in spandex shorts and a sports bra would seem pretty damn futuristic to them.
Oh yeah. Laser Dingos. They were introduced in The Amazing Octopus before being spun off in their own miniseries. I have #s 1, 2, and 4 through 8. Still looking for 3 (the one where Carolyn Creek is hypnotized by the Dingo Queen) and 9 (the legendary “lost final issue” that was rumored to contain in Quisenberry’s dialogue encoded congratulations to the Russkies for launching Sputnik and was therefore pulled from circulation). Mmm, good times.
I recall reading an SF story way back when in which someone took a covered tray out of a compartment and stuck it in another compartment; a few minutes later, voila! A fully cooked meal. The story didn’t say how it was done, but it predated the microwave by decades.
Possibly because too many people concentrate on what they want right now instead of what they will be leaving behind for the future generations.
I’m still upset about the fact I don’t have a Robot Maid yet.
But on the bright side, I don’t spend all day making “Spockets” by repeatdly pushing buttons either.
Regarding houses…the house built by Monsanto (for the 1969 NY World’s fair) was really cool! So what do I get offered today? A House that is made tolook like it was built in 1600 AD! Damn it! I DON’T WANT tolive in a house built for Will Shakespear-why this conservatism in houses? I really had a good laugh when a real estate agent told me that people wanted FIREPLACES in their new houses! Why wouldyou want a relic of the 14th century in your home? And windows designed tolook like they were made in Tudor times?
I want a plastic house,with self-cleaning windows!
Anybody knowif the plans for that 1969 World’s fair House still exist?
And, as I say, clothing seems to have come to a dead end…we haven’t had anything new (at least in men’s clothes)since 1900!
I must agree with ya here, ralph124c … hey, that wouldn’t be a robot name would it?
I want my high-tech easy-clean with robot-maid house, too!
ralph124c, if the various attempts at renewal of men’s fashions in the last 50 years are any sign, it’s better to leave things alone.
As to the retro-ing of home architecture, that probably has more to do with disastrous attempts at “modernism” in the mid-20th century. Y’know, imitating Frank Lloyd Wright or Antoni Gaudí w/o really “getting” them, as if it were just a fashion statement. This resulted in some fugly structures that were not really practical at all; add to that a natural nostalgia for what you were “used to” and you get a self-reinforcing cycle. The irony being, of course, that the “conservative” houses are not being built like the old stuff, just to look like it.
As to Ponder Stibbons comment – well, we could get into a nice circular argument on this. Maybe we have not arrived at all these nifty “world of tomorrow” things because we have not yet achieved the kind of social and economic improvement of society in general that would truly unleash man to produce them, or it could be that concentrating on short-term consumer goods prevents us from addressing Real Progress.
[Musing mode On]
But then again, as mentioned earlier, in the material side of the equation we are still far ahead. In fields like medicine, communications, IT, these ARE (in Simon’s words) the days of miracles and wonders. It’s just that the sort of pop-cultural “futurists” that ralph talks about somehow never quite got around to exactly HOW would the “society of tomorrow” achieve the implied level of political stability, economic growth, and social enlightenment for a society where every joe schmo owns a flying car and a robot maid. It was apparently just supposed to happen, as if it were predestined. Also, there was much of a tendency among them to oversimplify and give little thought to what XYZ prediction really implied in terms of basic technical/social developments to make it possible at all.
They also failed to consider that cost-effectiveness would remain a criterion for having things get done
Many of the pop-futurists had bought into what is, actually, a set of early Industrial-Era ideas about “progress”: an identifiable and quantifiable “positive direction”; an underlying impetus to move in that direction; fast motion along that axis for its own sake is a value in and of itself; and that the natural result (or goal) of the Renaissance/Scientific Revolution/Industrial Revolution/Democracy/whatever should be runaway exponential “progress” forever in every single field.
However, it looks more like “progress” actually works by punctuated-equilibrium: breakthroughs separated by periods of at best gradual incremental change, with no predestination to having “the best” come out ahead every time if “whatever works” will do.
So our supercomputers are not AI’s with actual personalities a-la HAL9000; but real AI scientists would have told the futurists it was not a matter of just cramming in more power until somehow AI “awakened”. And so what, it’s no big deal if we can’t build an artificial Really Smart Person when we already have a bunch of those being born the old-fashioned way every year, and can cost-effectively just give them better tools. So it took only 50-some years to go from the Wright Flyer to the DH Comet and 707 with 1st-class service, but another 50 years later our airliners are not hypersonic suborbital 1000-seaters and the food is lousy… well, real aerospace engineers would have told them that depended on a particular material or powerplant being invented some day. And our airlines could not afford to own and run a spaceplane if they wanted to.
OTOH, the Web, WiFi hotspots, mobile phones so affordable you can give them to 12-year-olds, personal GPS units, SSRI antidepressants, ACEI antihypertensives, DVDs, etc., were not around 20 years back. So there is fast progress going on – if we know where to look.
Thanks, JRDElirious for putting things in perspective…you might pick up an interesting novel (“THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE” which is set in the 1870’s(the premise of the novelis that the digitalcomputer wasinvented in 1820, and in common use). Sort of a weird mix of Victorian England and 1950.
Anyway, as I say, I am puzzled by the reactionary trend in American life, which has given us:
-Electric lamps built to resemble oillamps of 200 years ago
-Mock-Tudor stylehouses
-Men’s suits (ever wonder about those extra p0ckets on the left side of your suit jacket? That was to hold your cab tickets, as you waited for a horse-drawn cab in the streets of London, CA 1890!
-Bathroom fixtures that wouldno be unfamiliar to Thomas Crapper
I could go on and on, but I just don’t see why we don’t embrace the future and discard this weird nostalgia we have for the styles of centuries past!
Thing is, how do you embrace something that does not have a defined shape? Is the future straight-lined angular, shiny and metallic? Is it fluid-flowing-streamlined and matte black composite? Is it “organic”-shaped, multicolored and multitextured? Is it characterized by minimalist naturalism, or technoflash?
These things have to just be allowed to happen when/if they do. A lot of the retro trend has to do with how in the past, a change in style was often inevitable after a change in technology, rather than a choice. A Tudor-era house HAD to look like a Tudor-era house, given the construction technique: they did not have to put in a lot of imagination in “choosing” how it would look. BUT now we have technology that allows the things to look like whatever you want them to look, and just as little imagination. So we seek out what we already know, what with deliberate “borrowing from the past” being a key part of Western culture since the Renaissance.
Also, like I said, attempts at deliberate modernism or futurism have tended to alienate the public. It becomes associated with rooms where you have no idea how to open the window, appliances on which you can’t even find the on/off switch, clothes in which you can’t really sit down, etc. A modernist or futurist aesthetic has to be allowed to emerge by itself.
I think Mr. Stibbons has a good point.
That’s why I made the remark about “upgrading the politicians.”
The future may still hold some surprises for us, kiddies.
Personal Jets-
As has already been said, having all those incompetent drivers own flying machines would be a nightmare.
Houses-
Ralph, join the group of Dopers angered by the world’s rejection of Buckminster Fuller. He said the same thing about houses, in the 1930’s. He designed several types of houses that could be mass produced cheaply and assembled easily. They looked weird and the world ignored him
http://www.retrofuture.com/bucky.html