Often in articles I would see people make predictions about what life would be like in the year 2000. And most of their attempts to predict what life would be like in the future were so very wrong. I would like to know why were people so optimistic back then about what they thought the future life around the year 2000 was going to be like? Why did their predictions fail to become a reality? What things do we have today that would be futuristic to someone from the 50s or 40s?
Just off the top of my head… space station, personal computers, cell phones, Internet, self driving cars.
For exactly the same reasons our predictions about the 2090s will fail to become a reality.
Your can’t predict new inventions, new innovations, new ways of combining old inventions. You can’t predict social changes. You can’t predict the ways that 7 billion people think or interact. The world will always surprise you because it is orders of magnitude more complicated than any individual’s thoughts.
People saw technology change their world far more radically from 1880-1930 than in all the years since. They went from horses and dirt roads to electricity and airplanes. Why shouldn’t they expect the trend to continue? Optimism makes more sense when you know enough history to realize how awful things were in the past. Technology had manifestly made lives incomparably better so they had to hope it would continue.
And it did. We lead everyday of unbelievable luxury compared to the Depression years. Our world is in fact built on technology and it is far more wonderful than anyone imagined it could be. We’re just spoiled rotten.
Didn’t you get more or less the same answers the first dozen times you posted this thread?
Er…because the future is hard to predict? Is this a trick question?
As for what would seem futuristic: smartphones, or generally any kind of tech that is incredibly tiny. In the 40s and 50s everything was built of discrete components. The idea that you could get an entire music library into a chip the size of your fingernail would be astonishing. Not <i>impossible to imagine</i> – there were certainly sf writers who imagined very dense information storage, but it would seem futuristic, certainly. Probably in a similar way the ability to do productive searches on a global basis for information and get results almost instantly would seem futuristic. In those days, information tended to be stored on physical media – in books, on tapes, punched cards, things like that – and it would simply take time to physically move that media in order to read it. You’ll notice that in stories, films and TV shows of the time, even when the incredibly brilliant computer is asked a question, it takes a certain amount of time to ponder it, and even the Enterprise computer has to say “working…” for a few moments before returning some information it ought (by modern standards) to have found before Mr. Spock’s vocal cords stopped vibrating. They could certainly imagine a future in which, someone, information was stored in such a quickly-readable form, and so well pre-indexed, that you could open up Google and type “Jimmy Carter rabbit attack” and in 1.2 seconds get articles, images and even video from an episode in 1979 or so. But, again, it would’ve seemed amazingly futuristic.
So, they would be really impressed with our informatoin processing ability, and the ability to squeeze all kinds of media applications and communication protocols into a tiny piece of plastic and glass you carry around in your pocket. GPS functionality would’ve seemed really cool and futuristic too, e.g. Google Maps on your smartphone, the ability to find a pizza joint anywhere in 2 seconds flat, et cetera. The unbelievably smallness of capable cameras would be amazing, too, the fact that a tiny cheap box can take movies of a quality well surpassing the best movie theater in 1985.
There’s a lot that would have disappointed them, too. Travel, for example, is not really much faster, and somewhat more expensive. Nobody lives on the Moon, nobody has been to Mars, we still burn coal, oil and gas for most of our electricity, people do not live much longer, neither heart disease nor cancer have been cured, although we can treat them for longer and more successfully, televisions have become much bigger and fancier, but what’s on them isn’t really any better or more interesting. Cars do not drive themselves or go 180 MPH, houses are still built by guys with hammers, there are no supersonic airliners or commercial submarines. Probably the most powerful shock would be that computers are much faster and more capacious and incredibly tinier than they were in those days – but they’re not much smarter. You can’t talk to a computer and have it understand you, except in saying the very simplest commands. No computer can have a conversation at even a 3-year-old’s level of competence. No computer is even close to being the least bit inteligent, or self-aware. I think that would really astonish anyone from the 40s and 50s who was aware of the development of computers, and thinking futuristically. He would be astonished that “artificial intelligence” in any meaningful sense is no closer in 2014 than it was in 1954, despite all our advances in hardware.
Some of the things they might notice we don’t are the absence of some things they might not have expected to go away, like supermarket stocking and price sticker attaching workers, travel agents, telegrams, typists, public payphones, phone books, telephone operators, gas station attendants, bank tellers, photo processing labs, ward heelers, encyclopedias, door to door salesmen, typewriters, TV and radio repairmen, boys with paper routes.
They based their predictions on further advancements of mechanics and electronics. They didn’t foresee computerization and worldwide instant communications.
We can wonder about but can’t really foresee the next frontier. It could be neuroscience and the changes that could bring on are almost unfathomable. Or maybe there is something else that will be the next game changer. We can’t be any more confident in our predictions of the future than the futurists where when they making the predictions.
you are making the mistake that futurists have some thing special.
they are just mental masturbaters who know how to get press.
I think it was because the global population increased to such an extent that resource availability could not meet growing middle class demands. Environmental damage, global warming, and wars made matters more complicated.
SF writers largely foresaw huge leaps in transportation technology and almost utterly failed to predict the information technology revolution. Think of all the 1930’s and 1940’s SF with spacemen using slide rules to compute hyperspace jump coordinates. By the 80’s, IT had advanced enough to produce works such as Neuromancer and Ender’s Game that portrayed a not-exact but pretty good vision of a mass-market Internet. At that time, it existed but access was expensive, slow, and mostly reserved to government agencies and major universities.
Right, this is why raw materials are so much more expensive nowadays, and finished goods are even more expensive.
Except in real life we have the opposite of that. Yes, some things are more expensive than they were back in 1954. Lots of commodities and finished goods are much, much cheaper. And I’m not just talking about things like consumer electronics, which barely existed as a market in 1954. I’m talking about things like pots and pans and scissors and chairs. The reason steel mills all over the United States closed down is not that steel was too expensive, it was that steel was so cheap and abundant that there was no way to make a profit producing and selling it.
Of course the reason futurists can’t predict the future is because the future is produced by billions of people all acting independently. Even a really smart futurist can’t predict the output of millions of engineers and businessmen and writers and social activists.
And so futurists take present trends and draw a line tangent to the existing curve, and call it good. A futurist can’t predict inherently unpredictable things. If a futurist in the 1970s knew the computer industry so intimately that they could predict the computing revolution and the internet, they’d be the next captain of industry, not some guy writing for Omni at ten cents a word.
Because they were busy answering questions about the future and the past:
What did the world look like in the year 2000? - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board - What did the world look like in the year 2000?
What will the human race be like in 1000 years? - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board - What will the human race be like in 1000 years?
What was life in the 1990s like? - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board - What was life in the 1990s like?
How can I make "the future" come to reality? - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board - How can I make “the future” come to reality?
It's 2014 and where's the future? - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board - It’s 2014 and where’s the future?
55 and Older members: What did you think the year 2000 would look like? - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board - 55 and Older members: What did you think the year 2000 would look like?
What will it be like in the year 2050? - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board - What will it be like in the year 2050?
If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared today, what would be the most difficult thing to explain - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board - If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared today, what would be the most difficult thing to explain
You’ve asked variants of this same question a few times now. What are you looking for?
There’s a minor american writer from the 50s who pretty much depicted personal computers connected to the internet in one of his works. I’ll try to find the name and title.
You should check out PaleoFuture, all about the predictions of the future that both failed and were relatively accurate. If you’re clever you may be able to extrapolate enough information from it to be slightly more accurate in new predictions.
I tell you what, I’d never have guessed the popularity of social networking, and even now I couldn’t tell you where it might be ten years from now. Facebook could be as dead as Myspace by then, or it could be bought out by Apple and be the only game in town.
The other thing about predictions is that to be popular at the time they need to be fantastic. Cars getting more reliable lasting longer is not a sexy prediction and will not catch the public’s imagination.
The problem is that the trend did continue. People don’t understand exponential growth. Yes, those fifty years saw more change than all of the years before them… but the same can be said of any fifty year period in history. But futurists extrapolated out linearly, assuming the same rate of technological growth, instead of an exponentially-increasing rate, and so their predictions fell ludicrously short of the actuality.
Except not all changes are exponential, plenty of them are sigmoid. If you plot the fastest speed of human travel it starts out with running, then chariots, then sailing ships, then railroads, then airplanes, then jets, then rockets to the moon in 1969. Plot that curve as an exponential and you’d predict FTL by the YEAR 2000. Except that’s not what happened, the Apollo missions are the fastest humans have traveled.
Yes and no. It worked both ways. You can find articles from the early part of the century using quite logical extrapolation to show that cars and airplanes would merge and use electric engines that ran on wireless power. That’s a linear extrapolation that made complete sense at the time but today is used as the defining characteristic of lousy, even ridiculous futurism.
We carefully cherrypick predictions. We cull out the ones that look ridiculously wrong to make fun of and we cull out the ones that have any approximate relation to today’s world to laud. We’re the ones who are at fault, because in both cases we’re the ones who are acting like lunatics. Put the predictions in context and they look much, much better most of the time.
You get unqualified optimism only if you hand-pick your futurists very carefully indeed. There have been plenty of futurists, from at least the Dada era on, who would be amazed that our society even exists any more in 2014. Admittedly, such views weren’t always held by the masses.
There was a comedian on the radio a few years ago doing his routine - “it’s the 2000’s, where’s my flying car?” In the 1970’s, everyone was supposed to have a flying car by now like the Jetsons, and a household robot. A phone in your pocket so you can make and receive calls from anywhere? That’s just so far-fetched it’s stupid. get real…
I’ll second the thought - it’s because a lot of this was extrapolation, without a lot of imagination. We’d gone from buggies in 1900 to the beginnings of the interstate in the 1950’s - that could only get better and faster, right? Planes now had rudimentary autopilot, why not cars? Rockets should follow the same trend as airplanes, from barely proof-of-concept to routine passenger flight in a few decades.
It’s the lack of imagination about the innovative stuff that makes the difference. As mentioned, nobody predicted home computers or the internet. (IIRC, Asimov had a story in the 50’s about a society so dependent on pocket calculators they’d forgotten basic math by hand). We had record players, but who predicted video on demand or even DVD-level technology?
Futurists missed the information tech boat; wonder what we’d miss if we try to predict today? Biological breakthroughs? The world has been on the verge of a bio-revolution like the computer one for the last two decades, but it’s still gone nowhere. Mind control of devices?
Some inventions ar refinements that sneak up on us. Cars typically have silly little spare tires because tire technology has gotten so reliable that a flat tire is a very rare event for many people. Sci-Fi used to be full of “automated kitchens” that made your meal, but instead the prepared-food business has grown by leaps; you can buy prepared meals of various forms in supermarkets.
As for travel - in fact, thanks to deregulation breaking cartels, air travel is incredibly cheaper and easier, relatively, than it’s ever been. We may not have supersonic flight (another failed extrapolation) but we have jets that can go almost halfway around the world nonstop. The volume of people flying and the low cost has basically destroyed the greyhound bus business, for example.
But if you asked that early-century futurist how long it would take to set up a meeting between businessmen in New York and Tokyo, he would have taken the distance between those cities and divided it by the speed of his futuristic vehicle of choice… completely overlooking the possibility of a far faster meeting over Skype. Even though the future he predicted was ahead of the reality in some specific details, in the overall picture, reality is far ahead of the predictions.