More specifically: it’s 2014 and what happened to the future I was promised? I remember growing up during the 90s reading old 1950s magazines that by the 21st century we will be having: flying cars, jetpacks, food in pill form, robots, holograms, virtual reality, rockets, moon bases, and so on. 2014 doesn’t impress me now. What ever happened to the future we were promised?
Something else happened. Those predictions weren’t based on much more than shiny optimism, but optimism is only one part of the process of invention.
Specifically, that thing is
flying cars: we realized that drivers are dangerous enough in two dimensions, adding a third would be a nightmare
jetpacks: been available for almost a decade now, if you have more money than sense
food in pill form: it’s here, but people don’t like it as much as they like food
robots: we have dozens of these in our houses, they just don’t look like Rosie. A single “does everything” automaton has failed to satisfy, so, like people, our robots specialize. A coffemaker can make your coffee for you ready when you wake up. Your automatic shower cleaner sprays to clean your shower when you’re done. Your bread machine bakes your bread while your Crock-Pot makes your dinner and your Roomba vacuums while you’re at work…
holograms: we have those. What would you like to do with them?
virtual reality: ditto.
rockets: ditto, I think. I mean, we’ve had rockets for decades. I’m not sure what futuristic rocket you’re thinking of here
moon bases: budget cuts
Why doesn’t it *feel *like we’re in “the future”? Because it’s gradual to those who go through it. While a literal frog will not literally boil if you start him in cold water, it’s still a good metaphor for social and technological change - being around for the leaps and mini leaps means we see each new thing as an adaptation of an old thing. When those writers were speculating, the audience couldn’t conceive of the middle steps, and so it seemed much more amazing than it turns out to be when you’re alive to watch the development.
The internet with streaming media is pretty damn impressive. Not to mention the world’s knowledge at your fingertips. My guess is that you are just jaded. Not counting flying cars, we pretty much have all the other stuff you named.
I don’t think anybody in the 1950s predicted that ordinary people would have computers vastly more powerful than ENIAC in their pockets.
We have microwavable bacon and DVR, not to mention wacky waving inflatable tube man.
–We’ve got those wireless portable phones that Robert Heinlein wrote about in Space Cadet and \Operation Moonbase.
–We’ve got the Universal Mind/Logic Named Joe/Whatever Else You Wanna Call the Internet predicted by H.G. Wells, Vannevar Bush, Murray Leinster, Arthur C. Clarke and others. It’s just that no one really thought about it a lot, or its implications. But it turned out to be more real and a bigger upsetting factor to everyday life than most other predictions
–we’ve at long last got Picture Phones/televisors in the form of Skype and similar stuff.
–We’ve got Vision Tanks/3D TV, also at long last. But not that many people seem to want it.
–We’ve got Watchbird/Robot Tanks/automated kill vehicles
–We’ve got little portable electronic datapads/books/journals, as seen in movies, the old Star Trek, and other series
I don’t really miss flying cars (as I’ve noted elsewhere, I don’t need drunk drivers cruising into my house at 3AM) or jetpacks (expensive, short-lived, noisy, and dangerous).
I’m disappointed at the lack of Man Moving Into Space, although we’ve had plenty of robotic exploration of the solar system. I just wish they’d publicize the results more. This stuff deserves to be the subject of lots more TV specials, planetarium shows, and magazines.
I don’t think most of us expected teleportation or time travel (both of which would create enormous problems). I never understood the wide coverage of conveyor-belt roads in Wells, Heinlein, Asimov and others. It seemed a pretty pointless exercise.
We ain’t got humaniform robots, but we gots lotsa computers built into everything We’ve got Siri and Watson. I don’t think we’ll ever quite have Hal (or Lije), but we’ll get something that approaches them in different ways.
I don’t feel short-changed not having a flying car. In the 1920’s New Soviet Man was promised much the same thing
Compared to 90’s the year 2014 isn’t overly impressive; but compared to the 70’s the year 2014 is awesome! 
You don’t realize what is was like to only have 4 or 5 channels on the TV, having to get up to change them and then having to adjust your antenna manually. And there were no DVR’s; you had to be somewhere at a certain time in order to see a program you wanted to watch. The cars were unreliable, phones were attached to the wall, pong was the only video game and girls didn’t shave there private parts and post them for the world to see. 
Now we can drive in our fancy cars and have live streaming porn available 24/7 on mobile devices at 4G speed while choosing from multiple internet hookers. My car is flying. 
And, we’re probably about a year or two away (maybe less!) from having Dick Tracy two-way video wristwatches!
What more do you want?
This belongs in IMHO and the proof is that there have been dozens of threads like this in the past. From what I’ve read of them, they all give the same correct answers as the people here. A) It wasn’t a realistic future; and B) The future we have is much better.
I can add a bit of nuance onto that because it’s a question I’ve become fascinated by.
Why wasn’t it realistic? Because it couldn’t be. The Future, capitalized, was pretty much a straight-line extrapolation of contemporary technology without any regard for new discoveries or any limitations in the old technologies. A flying car is the best example. People were postulating flying cars long before cars existed; this makes sense when you see drawings of steerable balloons. Getting from here to there was a huge problem in the 19th century. Trains were hurriedly being built, but the road systems were totally inadequate everywhere. Roads weren’t even paved outside of city centers. The movement to pave roads sprang up in the late 19th century and was spurred by fanatic bicyclists. It took America almost until WWII to have a full national road system of decent marked paved roads with maps. Flying cars that got you straight to your destination were a dream of want and lack; they were superseded when reality caught up.
The technological side was worse. The requirements of a good airplane and a good car are virtually antithetical. For performance and safety you want a heavy car with a light engine but a light airplane with a heavy engine. Mixing them gives you a bad version of both. The switchover is ridiculously convoluted. Planes have wings and those can’t be used on roads. They need to fold back or get taken off - every single time. A wing that can do that has safety issues far beyond a fixed wing craft. Cars can operate in bad weather; planes took many decades longer to do so safely. Learning to fly is much harder than learning to drive. It’s an order of magnitude harder to walk away from an airplane crash than an auto accident. And on and on. I’m no expert on flying cars but there are jillions of sites online that will talk about every detail and why they never got farther than the pages of Popular Science.
The same can be said for every other aspect of the Future. Food pills were thought of in the 19th century before scientists understood anything important about how food actually worked in the body. A few thought they did and made announcements, but they were wrong. Food pills can’t work. Robots turned out to be a zillion times harder than engineers thought. Space turned out to be harder and more expensive and more dangerous. The people who extrapolated rockets off their experience with airplanes in WWII were delusional, even if it made for exciting scenes in Star Wars.
They were wrong for one simple reason. Nobody can see the future. Look around you. Tell us what the Future will be like in 2064. You can’t. Any attempt you make will be laughable then. The changes wrought by a billion minds working independently will always outdo anything a single mind can come up with, not merely in quantity and quality but in direction. The world zigs and zags in unpredictable ways because of the unpredictable interactions of those billion minds. The dumbest thing in the history of science fiction is Isaac Asimov’s Psychohistory. The Future is all Mules all the way down.
We’ve had flying cars for over a century now. Most people just can’t be trusted to drive them, is all.
smart phones is better than anything they predicted in the 50s
i really pity people of the past for how bored they must have been while pooping
They had to have an analog experience with paper media.
I carry a phone which has vastly more computing power than they used going to the Moon. I’m typing this on a Mac computer which weighs about as much as a paperback novel. My television is playing a satellite feed on which I can see films made 75 years ago. And I can go to the store and get almost any type of food I want in ranch flavoring.
Perhaps not the best possible future, but still not too bad…
One thing I can think of is that giant conveyors with moving parts are only efficient if moving a constant large volume to a fixed point. If fewer people travel, or travel to wildly varying destinations, one winds up using lots of energy and imposing wear and tear on this enormous machine to move only a few people – at that point, it would be much more efficient to build small machines that move a few individuals at a time to different destinations, and leave the road fixed in place.
You know, like we do now.
The sum of human knowledge is available on your phone- which is also a supercomputer. Even Star Trek didn’t see that one coming.
In some later Future History story, Heinlein mentions the failed roads leaving huge scars in the earth. I’m wondering whether it was set up to fail, as some kind of point he was making or whether more time and thought showed him what a terrible, unworkable idea it was.
Rather than a shining example of the ingenuity of classic SF, it stands out as an example of why linear extrapolation into more and larger needs to be stamped out as a blight on humanity.
I think even those posters who are commenting seriously on the Internet as Future are understating the case. To be sure, even if it were one-way, simply putting such a huge amount of knowledge at all our fingertips would be of enormous importance–and not just knowledge. I’ve mentioned elsewhere how amazing it is that we have better and easier access now to vast amounts of art and music than did the people for whom it was contemporary.
But it’s not one-way; it gives us the ability to communicate in real-time with people all over the world.
I think it’s very difficult for anyone who has grown up with the internet to really grasp how isolated many people were before its advent. Even in the 70s and 80s, if you grew up in a small town, you generally knew hardly anyone beyond it–maybe a few people in the neighboring towns, or distant relatives in distant places you rarely communicated with. Sure, we had phones, but calling anyone outside your town was relatively expensive, and if you didn’t already know them and have their phone number, you’d have to get an operator to help you find them–you didn’t meet new people by phone. Towns were like islands, and not many people went to sea.
The internet is bringing the islands together. A child of the internet age can play with friends on another continent as easily as if they were next door neighbors. They can share ideas and images in an instant. Communities form with no regard for geography–just look at us in this thread: people from all over the US, from the UK, and possibly from other places carrying on a casual conversation. Whole new social dynamics and modes of interaction are evolving around us…and people just shrug, because they’re evolving with it, too immersed in the change to see it.
The strangest thing about the Future is that we’re so blasé about it living in it.