I recently watched the ‘Trip Down Market Street’ video. Anyone from 1906 San Francisco would recognize our cities as cities, but they might wonder what we did with all the horses.
I think it would be the 1880’s.
In the 1890’s and 1900’s you get the first glimmerings of the precursor technologies to the modern world – electrical power transmission, automobiles, radio, airplanes, movies, photographs. There really was an explosion of new technologies that opened up the promise of an amazing new future. If H. G. Well had used his time machine to travel from 1895 to the present, he might at least be able to guess at how things work. I’m not sure a well-educated gentleman from the 1880’s or 1870’s would be able to do that.
Futurism is a weird thing and most people don’t look at it correctly. People in this thread have already outlined many of the huge advances but also the lack thereof for many things. Advances come in fits and starts and the failure of some anticipated advances would be just as startling as those that were accomplished.
You really need to look at what you do routinely to find out where the true advances lie and where they don’t.
Here is my diary for the day:
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Woke up in a house built in 1865 in a regular bed. No gain there.
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Washed some clothes (washing machines in the home are cool but hardly brand new or high-tech). Ate some stuff out of a regular refrigerator.
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Drove 32 miles to work. My SUV is impressive in its power, gas consumption, pollution level, safety, and reliability but it gets you from point A to point B the same way a Model T did. The interstate highways I traveled on make a huge difference in time and that was one of the biggest game changers and one of the most unappreciated aspects of American engineering and planning. 32 miles took me 32 minutes which is more than most people ever traveled in their life through human history. Cars from the 1960’s can still make the same trip almost as well however even if they aren’t as reliable. If I had to take a plane to get somewhere today, there is a big letdown. Airliners are basically the same except for incremental improvements since the 1960’s. There is no supersonic let alone hypersonic jet travel available commercially. I do love the availality of good, cheap GPS systems though. Give me one of those and I can never be truly lost which isn’t the way it worked out for me much of them for the first 34 years of my life. That is good technology.
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Went to work. I support all kinds of high-tech stuff there but it is a billion dollar facility that makes biomedical parts for people that need replacements right away. I have a big office but no secretary. We are high on cutting edge technology and not many people around. That would throw people off even as of 15 years ago. Still, it isn’t foreign to some people from the 1990’s.
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Got home. Checked my voice mail - that is cool. It is better than paying for an old fashioned answering service with nosy operators and dealing with a switchboard. You don’t have to worry about changing the tapes either like you did with answering machines in the 1980’s but the idea is the same.
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Checked Facebook - There is a real game changer that only took off in the last few years. Somehow I live 1800 miles from where I grew up yet I have an instant feed to everyone that I have known since birth. That is handy yet odd in its implications. One website knocked down geographical boundaries on its own. That is a hard concept to understand until you have done it for a while. I might as well move to Mars now because you won’t miss a beat from what everyone else is thinking or doing.
For the non day to day things, there is an assortment. The availability of different types of foods to the masses is incredibly greater in the U.S. since even the mid 1990’s. I never even saw a bagel until 1992 for example let alone sushi but it goes well beyond that. I don’t think most people these days outside of a few areas would like the food choices back then. I love space travel but it has been a huge letdown over time. The U.S. is decommissioning the shuttles now with replacements that aren’t all that ambitious.
In short, you would be amazed yourself with what people would be impressed with and what they wouldn’t. The same will be true for everyone a few years from now. That is the way the psychic science of futurism works because it isn’t just based on raw technology but also human psychology.
In 1985, UK comedian (the late) Kenny Everett starred in an episode for the science documentary QED entitled The Magic Picture Show all about the current state of visual effects in television, and what the future holds.
It speculated on two things that, at the time I watched it when it originally aired, I was amazed at what they were predicting, thinking to myself that it was an impossible unlikelihood that they would eventuate.
One of those things was photoreal virtual reality video games. It showed it pretty much how it was subsequently envisioned in the late 90s, with wearing goggles in a space while action occurred and you fought them off with handheld joystick weapons. Though the virtual reality aspect hasn’t come to pass, the photoreal, motion detected, and 3D virtual environments are now the default.
The other thing that they showed was the way they made the handheld HitchHiker’s Guide To The Galaxy prop look like an animated portable encyclopaedia, using painstaking rotoscoping of painted cels. Now we not only have a portable online encyclopedia, but we have handheld devices that can access them, and a lot more besides, with video, audio, and automatic updates. iPhones and the Internet are way more elaborate than anything Douglas Adams had imagined way back in 1978.
So I would put it at 1985.
Yes, but, but but…
Google is massively impressive almost beyond comprehension. If you had Wikipedia alone, that would be incredibly impressive as well. That was a gigantic gain that happened in a very short time yet few people saw it coming. However, it requires technology+exploiting human psychology to make either of them work. This applies to web itself as well. If you told people as recently as 1990, that we would all be journalists and multimedia contributors and journalists within 15 years without signing up for anything in particular or being paid for it, there is no way anyone would believe. You have to step back in time to realize how weird this is. Millions of people, including us here, feel the need to write and edit stuff for free including encyclopedia articles. Why in the hell would anyone do that? I don’t know. I even pay for the privilege here as a Charter Member. Try outlining that in a business plan circa 1985.
However, you mention 3D as well. It can be somewhat cool or a gimmick. It hasn’t taken off nearly as fast as the information explosion especially on the social media front. If it had, you would have avatars walking around you right now interacting with you in real time and people wouldn’t be bitching about having to pay extra for a 3-D movie when all they care about is the story and not the marginally improved 1950’s style glasses that go with it. 3-D technology falls much more into the letdown category.
I meant 3D in CGI video game computer graphics, not as in stereoscopic movies.
I did too. The developments have been remarkable but not revolutionary and easy for anyone to understand. Most people still use a 2-D screen to play 3-D games but the human brain has been able to that since the first drawings were made. I think it is cool but 3-D technology would need to be completely holographic to keep pace with other technologies that have grown really quickly in order to seem revolutionary to a person from 50 years ago.
That is the point I am trying to make. Not all technology grows at the same rate. Much of it grows quickly and unexpectedly which is what everyone gets amazed by, some of it progresses steadily but incrementally like 3-D technology so that you will see gains over medium timescales and some stuff like jet airliners doesn’t change much at all in today’s terms. The vast majority of things are perfectly easy for someone from 50 years ago to understand.
This reminds me a bit of the movie Blast from the Past where the family in the bomb shelter since the mid 1960s coming out in the late 1990s were blown away at the technological changes in the past thirty years, pretty much everything on the list above surprised them.
(Granted, this is a work of fiction we’re talking about, they were surprised because the script said they were surprised.)
And I remember my first introduction to the PET, my first high school computer class, grade 10, 1987. I remember I could barely keep my laughter to myself at how old and antiquated the school’s computers were! (My family had TRS 80 computers for the first half of the 1980s, and just started on their first PC when I entered grade 10). In 1981, I was all flabgobnosted over the Commodore 64, I lusted over and coveted it then like I do iMacs now. (“It’s colour!!! My TRS-80 at home is just green on black! And look how easy it is to do graphics on this! Me wantee!”) FTR, in grade 11 my school upgraded their computers to Macintoshes - it was my first introduction to a Mac, and I remember the infatuation I felt for it then (like the one I had for the Commodore 64 6 years earlier) - obviously continues to this day, with my goal being to get an iMac.
From the perspective of a man from 1961 living in modern NYC:
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Woke up in 40 story glass and steel high rise
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Turned on a full color flat television projecting a realistic 50" picture.
Ladies and gentlemen…the President of the United States of America…
- Head explodes.
… and here I am thinking “1725”. :o
Wikipedia continues to amaze me. The other day, I needed a list of something, and I thought, why bother with Google? I bet Wikipedia has it already. Sure enough, they had it. It’s also completely free, and it was made by people in their free time. The total lack of cash flow still blows me away. And then, when I’m bored, I click on “random page” and I am astounded at the obscure and esoteric information available. One time, I picked a famous person at random, and tried to see how many ancestors or relatives I could chain-wiki. I think I got to the great-great niece or something.
I was wondering if the OP was somewhat inspired by this recent xkcd.
Oakminster succinctly explains the “birthers”. But how did they all get transported in from the 60s? 
Daily diary:
- Got up, pooped, and flushed it away with water that was good enough to drink (before I pooped in it, of course.)
- Made instant coffee in 2 minutes with a microwave, with powdered cream and sugar. All ingredients cost pennies.
- Ate a couple of doughnuts that were flown in from another city.
- Had a couple of cigarettes lit with a disposable lighter.
- Watched two movies on a 43" plasma TV, at the same time thanks to the “recall” button on my remote, on two different channels that were brought to my home by a single fiber optic cable.
- Typed a bunch of stuff on the internet that will have, on average, ~1k views each. It would probably take me about 5-10 years to see 1k people on the street, much less talk to any of them.
Science Made Stupid by Tom Weller was published in 1985. It included a Wonderful Future Invention Checklist. So far we’ve added Space Station*, Flat-Screen TV, Flat-Screen 3-D TV, First Black President and English Channel Tunnel.
*At least if the present semi-permanent International Space Station counts.
I am not knocking incremental progress but you have to get to #5 on your list before you hit anything appreciable at all. You could have 1 - 4 in different forms going back to the 1800’s even in the same location if you had money. Not everyone did but those weren’t a foreign concept to most people. Your TV is cool but who really cares about the word ‘plasma’. It is just a bigger version of television that has been widely available since the 1940’s - 1960’s depending on how you define it. Incremental improvements are good but it would only take someone used to seeing a TV in any form to understand your new version. If you have your computer hooked up to your TV, that is really different. You don’ wait for people to broadcast things. You just watch what you want when you want including live webcams from around the world, recent concerts, or broadcast TV that you missed. You simply couldn’t do that 15 years ago at all except in the most primitive ways.
It doesn’t really matter where your baked goods came from either. Global supply chains as a whole are incredibly impressive and a huge advancement even over the last two decades but you could have always had baked goods made at home or nearby so that might be considered a downgrade by some. I can’t argue with #6. Information distribution is basically unfathomable even as of 15 years ago.
If you had a lot of money, you could add more. Household robots are available and fairly popular in the Roomba line of vacuum robots. Air cars have been available since the 1940’s. A company is developing a new line outside of Boston now but they tend to suck as both planes and cars so most people won’t have one soon. You can buy personal submarines and personal rockets with enough money and there are people willing to sell them to you. There are some mag-lev trains in the world. There are also some ray guns available depending on how you define it. Two way wrist radio and two-way wrist TV is available fairly cheaply if you want to use a strap but past futurists seemed to have a weird wrist fetish and most people don’t want that. A smart phone with walkie-talkie features or videoconferencing is what most people prefer.
To those of you who pooh-pooh the technological age we are living in, I just saw a picture today of the space shuttle with the shadow of the International Space Station falling across the shuttle’s wings from above. The picture was taken by someone living on the ISS and posted to the Internet from outer space.
I’m not sure flying cars are that big of a deal. We have a big enough problem with people drinking and driving. Imagine what would happen if people were flying their cars impaired.
But wait … Google is working on cars that drive themselves, and I used to work on a project where cars were communicating with the infrastructure and each other. Maybe not flying cars, but I’d say we should conquer two-dimensional driving before we move on to three dimensions.
Just a few weeks ago I saw a video on a device that lets doctors spray new skin on a burn patient that heals without scars in a matter of days.
Don’t be so quick to disparage the current time by looking at what we don’t have.
Imho, up to #4, some people in some parts of the world today don’t have it.
Wow, that’s horrible. You know it takes only a few minutes to make real coffee? And you can buy real milk at the store? I know they were obsessed with food pills and concentrates back in the old days, but that’s because they were idiots.
On the other hand, check out this picture, taken on Nov 15, 2010: APOD: 2010 November 15 - Home from Above
That picture is proof that we’re living in the future.