Sadly, this sounds very close to my drunken New Year’s Eve e-mail rant when the calendar turned to the year 2000. Fourteen years on and still we don’t have these. :mad:
The further development of many things was hindered by the Depression and WWII.
And the Middle Ages! There was a thousand years wasted, I’ll clue ya!
The camera I use looks nothing like a Leica camera, and is operated completely differently.
The one you use looks like this:
http://en.leica-camera.com/assets/media/img24302.jpg
The one I use looks like this:
Good news! We really will have self-fastening laces in 2015, just like Marty said!
Just don’t mention Velcro.
I can imagine that desert-dwelling primitive people who have never seen an automobile before might view an air-conditioned SUV as a movable cooling device.
Dude, you’re the one claiming that a Leica film camera from the 70s is exactly the same as an iPod. Because they both have lenses, and a button you push to make the picture happen.
Just like a horse and buggy is the same as a Camry, they both have wheels and a power source and a control system and accomplish the same task in the same way, getting passengers and cargo from point A to point B.
I think you have me confused with someone else. I said the Leica film camera from 1956 looks exactly like the latest Leica digital cameras and handles the same. This was deliberate, so that people who owned the lenses made from 1956 to the present day can go on using them. These lenses provide much higher quality images than can be obtained from a phone-camera. Yes, the smart phone is wonderful, but it does not replace the Leica by any stretch of the imagination. They are completely different tools.
Perhaps you meant Daneel, not Lije?
To paraphrase something David Brin said in the introduction to his novel Earth, 50-year projections are the hardest because the society you have to start with is the one now and (a) the culture never changes as expected, and (b) the projections you make about the future depend upon what you’ve been used to in the past… and past performance is no guarantor of future results, right?
So a kid in 1950 is reading science fiction and speculation written by adults who, like Melchior says, are at the tail-end of a wave of technological innovation that has swept aside the old world order for hundreds of millions… and in their projections, these authors expected this state of affairs to continue, even though the evidence of human history showed that the previous 300 years were a complete anomaly.
So they wrote that the problem of fusion power would be as simple as the problem of fission, that the problem of space flight was as easily solvable as the problems of heavier-than-air flight, that atomic energy was the end-all, be-all of both ills and cures, etc, etc etc.
And they were wrong. These problems are far more intractable than realized, especially in a world where the priorities have shifted from the sort of technological one-upmanship exhibited in the 120-year period between the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1850 and the Apollo program to a world where we’re doing better at growing the asset base for all of humanity.
So, in some ways it’s reality that’s disappointed you (these problems are harder than originally thought) and in others, it’s our fault in that we don’t think it’s worth to fund a “Manhattan Project” out of our tax dollars to make fusion (for example) work. Or colonizing the moon. Or jetpacks.
We live in a world where smallpox is eradicated, there are almost twice as many obese people as malnourished, the GDP’s of the majority of countries are on a positive slope… and to get that, we traded the jetpacks and the moon colonies. And I’m fine with that choice.
For now. 
If you look at it vehicles have not really changed in the past 15 years.When you look back in history every 10 years or so vehicles look so different.
The vehicles of the 50’s and 60’s look nothing like the vehicles of the 70’s and 80’s .Likewise vehicles of the 20’s and 30’s look nothing like the vehicles of the 50’s and 60’s .Even vehicles of the 2000’s an 90’s look nothing like the vehicles of the 70’s and 80’s.
Yet for the past 10 to 15 years vehicles don’t really look different or even a sign they are changing.
Amiga Trombone writes about the the rate of technological progress has slowed in the last 50 years
But I think OP is confusing scfi with technological progress has slowed.
We don’t have phaser guns ,laser guns or plasma guns because of energy and material science problem.No battery can hold that much energy and no material can deel with that much energy.There are laser guns in labs but they are big and have to be hooked up to power source.With today’s technology the gun would have to be hooked up to power source and small handled gun would explode in your hand.
In future with nano batteries and new material ( do not explode in your hand) it may be possible.
cloaking devices. Only small parts of the EM spectrum they have bent some waves light around the object to give aillusions it is cloaked.
Now on to force fields. There is only four known forces Gravity ,Electromagnetic ,The Strong Force and Weak Force.We know of know other force.
A replicator ( like the replicator in star trek ) works by rearranging subatomic particles, which are abundant everywhere in the universe, to form molecules and arrange those molecules to form the object.That is beyond today’s technology.
Way too many subatomic particles to move around and for computer to keep track of them all.May be if we had quantum computers they would be powerful enough? But today’s computers are too crude.
Well teleportation we have no idea how to do it not say teleportation disassemble and reassemble you.So that is scanning human body and destroying you thus killing you and some how send you from point A to point B and reassemble you that is copy of you.
Flying cars well we don’t have anti-graity.
I think in a way the Internet is somewhat overrated. I mean true, I was born in 1990 so it’s been widely used for all but the first few years of my life, but what is the Internet other than a glorified telegraph system?
Is it impressive? Of course, but no more so than television, radio, antibiotics or genetic engineering. I consider it but one of a dozen or so incredible 20th century inventions.
Yeah a car from 2003 still looks amazingly modern. I disagree that 90s cars look the same though, the majority of them still have that boxy look and technically even a 1999 car is pretty old compared to a 2014 car.