Spaceship Earth at Epcot used to show something that looks very much like a child Skyping with a friend in Japan. I think they’ve gotten rid of that now since nobody is very impressed anymore (though I may be wrong as it’s a long time since I went Drinking Around the World.)
Two words: magazine rack.
As mentioned before: bad road coverage and expensive cars. I don’t really remember when getting a car meant that you were starting to move up in the world, but I’ve recently seen a lot of old, dead relatives posing next to their cars, so I’m aware of the idea. I think conveyor belt roads were easier to imagine than that everyone (the little wife included) might have a car. They were also easier to imagine than a paved road system, with maintenance*, going nearly everywhere.
The underlying assumption was that government planners would determine where working class people needed to go, because they were obviously never going to be able to afford individual vehicles. And as the population kept rising (the stories were also pre-birth control pill), there would be fewer people who could afford it, less space for the roads, and more people living closer together.
Things have changed. Now you mostly find belt walkways in airports, which are larger and more spread out than was expected. I mean, the Denver Airport also has a tram to get you from one side to the other.
- Streets do not last forever. Various coatings and overlays can extend their lives, but eventually streets need to be reconstructed. The old authors knew that once a city, county, or state government had a given number of streets to maintain, they’d be spending millions yearly just to keep the streets drivable. And we do. Gas tax. Started June 6, 1932 (federal).
It appears that the futurists of 50 years ago weren’t much better than today’s futurists, that’s all. Of course, it’s a pretty daunting task to take on.
What has happened in the past 50 years has been pretty damned incredible. And unless we blow ourselves up in the interim (some concerns never change), I expect the next 50 to be even more incredible and no less predictable.
It’s a stretch, it seems to me. We certainly have “people mover” conveyor belts, but they’re short haul things in airports and amusement parks and the like. As imagined in Golden age 9and pre-Golden Age)n SF, the belts were enormous and had multiple “lanes” that let you change speed by changing from one belt to another.
To an era that had “pater noster” elevators*, this might not seem that big a deal, but today it looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
More important, thought, keeping that enormous Belt moving constantly would require a huge amount of energy and require virtually constant maintenance and lubrication. And for what? I can’t believe its passenger-moving efficiency would ever approach that of an ordinary passenger bus or train. But Heinlein and Asimov describe humongous belt systems.
I remember Heinlein’s story The Roads Must Roll, but I can’t remember conveyer-belt roads in Asimov’s fiction (and I never read much of HG Wells’ stuff). Can you remind me in which stories they appeared?
And personally, I’m really amazed at the technology in my iPhone and my iPad. I think self-driving cars are not too far off and I think multipurpose robots might be available in the future.
The moving walkway was introduced at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. It was the major people mover at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris. Edison filmed it and showed it in nickelodeons all over the country. You stepped onto a slow belt and then onto a fast one if you chose, just as Heinlein copied it. The assumption that moving sidewalks would be ubiquitous in the Future was a constant of prediction of the Future for the 40 years before Heinlein wrote “The Roads Must Roll.”
It’s in The Caves of Steel, the first Lije Bailey/Robot Detective novel.
Here’s a section from the Wikipedia page on Moving Sidewalks:
I think the conveyor belt roads were just different than “really good cars” and so they seemed more future-y. Cars today are pretty much the same as cars in 1935, just much much better, and roads are pretty much the same as roads in 1935, just much more extensive.
So in the lifetime of someone like Heinlein we have a switch from horse and buggy and steam trains to automobiles and airplanes, and it happened pretty quickly. So the notion that 50 years in the future, in the distant world of 1996, people were still going to be using cars didn’t seem plausible. We’d switch to some revolutionary new technology, and after that to another revolutionary new technology.
The old futurists lived through a transportation revolution, so they expected the future to be all about more and more transportation revolutions. They expected an exponential curve with regular rocket travel to the solar system in decades and FTL arriving in the 21st century, not a sigmoid curve like we had in real life. But the thing about sigmoid curves is that they look like exponential curves until they don’t. It turns out that rocket engines of today can’t generate that much more delta-V than the Saturn rockets of the 60s, which in turn weren’t that much more advanced (just much bigger) than the V-2s.
Thanks. I read that book decades ago.
And I also remember references, such as in one of Heinlein’s stories about Lazarus Long, to self-driving cars.
It’s [del]the 80s[/del] 2014, so where’s our rocket packs?
How is extra mass in an aircraft engine beneficial?
For a given level of performance (power, fuel consumption, noise, service life, etc.) it would seem that lighter is always better here.
This is incredibly simple minded. If smartphones and the internet and all that that has brought us doesn’t impress you, I pity you.
Also, things like “food pills” don’t make any sense. Yes, you can get micronutrients in pill form. But your body also needs macronutrients–carbohydrates, protein, and fat, plus fiber to keep your bowels working. You can’t compress macronutrients into pills, any more than you can compress water into pills.
But you certainly can create people-kibble and total replacement diets, the future supermarkets of 2014 will include a whole aisle devoted to food bars and pellets and powders and liquids that you will be able eat instead of regular food. But it turns out that most people prefer to eat regular food.
Also a common prediction was that prepared foods would be delivered to your house, or prepared automatically for you. Well, we sure have that. Call up the pizza joint and get a pizza in 20 minutes. But it turns out it’s a lot more efficient to manufacture prepared foods in a central factory, and ship the prepared meals frozen, to be reheated via space-age radiation ovens that can heat a frozen meal without warming the paper tray it’s sitting in. A robot that breaks eggs, mixes flour and sugar and bakes a cake in your kitchen doesn’t make sense. Either make the cake yourself from scratch, buy one from a specialist, buy a frozen one, or dump a premade mix in a bowl, mix and bake. The robot chef as the “last mile” of the food preparation chain doesn’t make logistical sense.
The number of people in 2014 who will eat mostly takeout, delivery, restaurant, frozen, or prepared meals would astound the people of 1945. As would the acres of fresh vegetables and ingredients from around the world sitting side-by-side in the same store as the frozen meals and people kibble. The futurists of 1945 don’t expect agricultural productivity to increase much beyond 1945 levels, the cornucopia of cheap food of every conceivable kind we will have in the future of 2014 would astonish them.
In grad school I knew a guy who claimed to live on protein powder and nutritional supplements, along with enough bread to give him dietary fiber.
I visited his apartment. There was no food in the kitchen, which was set up as an electronics lab. all h had was the ubiquitous powder and frozen loaves of bread dough.
Knowing this guy, it could have all been a great put-on, with him throwing out all his food, or storing it elsewhere, just to take me in. But, also knowing this guy, it could just as easily be for real.
It’s not a diet I’d like, in any case, for a number of reasons.
Weird thing about the video-phone contraptions shown in sci-fi of the 50s, e.g., Jeffersons. It was a real "WoW idea back then. Exciting!
Now We have video chats in email programs, skype, and even “Face Time,” yet how much do we use them? I personally can’t be bothered going face-to-face every time we talk; not even, really, voice-to-voice–I prefer to text. I know a lot of people like that.
Also, if “food pills” sounds more appealing than real food, you’re doing something wrong. For most people, food is pleasurable, both to prepare and to eat.
The only time I’ve ever really been excited to use a video phone is when my wife is out of town and me and the kids facetime her to say hello, or vice versa. That’s actually nice, to see her face, or the kid’s faces. Plus my littlest daughter is shy about talking on the phone but has no problem talking with facetime.
I’ve also use remote videoconferencing for work various times, but it adds almost nothing over a regular phone call. I suppose it’s helpful sometimes to see the other guy’s face so you know he’s actually kinda paying attention rather than zoning out.
OK, for future-y-ness-ness, how about this. I commute via vanpool from my home community to a large software company in Redmond. Several times some of my fellow passengers have had video conference meetings with their teams while riding the van to work. It’s a combination of wow-futurism combined with utter mundanity that would hurt the brain of someone from 1945.
I’m going to step back from the specific do-hickys and thing-a-ma-bobs that everyone is talking about and ask, “What happened to The Future?”
By that I mean - when I was young, The Future was a thing. It had a look and a feel, and people talked about it, and wrote about it, there were magazines, and books about it, and most everyone carried an image of it inside of them. It was hopeful, and better, and kinda alien and just a tad bit scary - but we were all going to get there someday.
Nowadays, not so much. Of course we have Sci-Fi, and Technostuff, and articles about the new Quantum Computers or medical breakthrough. But it is not really all bracketed and packaged as being part of The Future like in the old days, the big promised tomorrow.
I miss The Future.
The Future, Conan?
Some great comments here, including that one. (Though I personally have still managed to shun the smartphone – I still marvel at the idea of a device with a hole in it that I hold up to my ear and another hole that I talk into which works wherever I go! But I do appreciate the fact that the sum total of human knowledge is available on a glowing screen sitting on my desk.)
The general syndrome seems to be to have greatly overestimated some areas of progress, and greatly underestimated others or just missed them entirely. Perhaps just a special case of a meta-prediction I’ve heard: that futurists tend to overestimate technological progress in the short term, but underestimate it in the long term. Which makes sense – the former occurs because we are generally optimists, the latter because it’s virtually impossible to foresee fundamentally transformational changes.