Democracity, from the same World’s Fair
Their visions of the city and world of the future were all so wrong that the effort seems futile – but on this Board we can make our own speculations without putting millions into construction. Besides, after all this time these visions are still fun!
Suppose you were on the planning team for a new World’s-Fair-Style exhibition showing cities and technology and life as they will be in, say, 2059? What would you put in it?
It’d look like the city from Blade Runner…if it were built by weasely, moralistic cowards.
Er…sorry, I’ll come up with something funnier.
A perfectly sustainable, “green” community, where consumption and ambition have been wrestled down into sedate and tranquil selflessness, and the people have finally been taught to be “satisfied with less.”
This community will serve as an aesthetic green belt and low-maintenance, low-overhead habitat for thrall laborers and protein-densifiers for GIGALOPOLIS-[sup]PRIME[/sup], the towering ultradense arcology cluster the size of Sri Lanka; one of the many homes of the race of God Machines, and center of world production of relativistic starships, most of which have the prows of their mile-long hulls sculpted into the visages of gleaming skulls.
Pinup picture of Leela?
Everything connected to everything and everyone, and everything run by thought-activated control. Doors opening automatically when someone approaches, but only if that someone is allowed into the building, and intends to go into the building. Automated taxi cabs coming to find you when you want one. Grocery stores where everything you want is already bagged for you when you arrive, so you just pick it up (paying automatically) and leave. Your location monitored at all times. Zero privacy but great security.
Resistance is futile.
It seems the me the most potentially revolutionary fields of new technology today are: (1) strong artificial intelligence; (2) genetic engineering; (3) direct neural-electronic interfaces; (4) nanotechnology. Any one of which might prove to be an impossible dead end like perpetual motion. But the possibility they might be developed should play at least some role in imagining life in 2059.
As the ways these things might work are understood at least in principle, they are not black-box technologies. Black-box technologies would be things like the Shipstone batteries from Heinlein’s Friday – no reason to think they’ll ever happen at all. We can leave those out.
The whole exhibit is just a room full of mannequin people in pods with wires hooked into their head. A description plaque reads “The only limit is your imagination!” Behold…the future!
Suicide booths and Fishy Joes. Ride the walrus.
Ubiquitous technology. For example, next to my laptop is a Pilot G-2 pen. The future writing instruments will have tiny micro chips in them that estimate my mood by my writing gestures, and adjust my mp3 playlist to reflect that mood or pre-order everything I write down on a grocery list, or automatically translate my notes into a PDF file, or verify my signature on a sales receipt.
Cool shit like that.
I was gonna say Seymour the dog, but I guess that joke’s over.
OK, but it’s gotta be something of which we can make a gosh-wow exhibit. How would you present it?
Slow moving conveyour belts move people through the exhibit, Jetsons-style, as they pass large screens with projected images of some random dude going about his typical-2059-day, and mock-up animatronic models of people doing mundane tasks while the world around them morphs to accommodate their every need. The whole thing should be surreal, in the sense that the viewer knows that none of this technology will ever be developed (where is my flying car, damn-it!) but it would be really cool if it did. Fifty years ago, people actually thought those exhibits could be accurate portrayals of the future, but today we can see they were completely wrong. Lets embrace that idea, and present a bunch of fluff for people to drool over and dream about: Who cares what the world WILL be like in 50 years, lets fantasize about what the world COULD be like, and mock the old “futurama” exhibits of yesteryear while we do it.
Flying cars, naturally - flying cars are always in the future.
But never in the present.
Exactly.