Many future predictions from the 1950s were based on the promise of unlimited electricity. Once this comes to pass, we can have hovercars and whatnot.
Instead, we got "unlimited" information. Although this doesn't translate as well into physical products, the world still looks/feels wildly futuristic if you orient your perspective correctly.
The world feels wildly futuristic? Can you explain? I was born in 1966. Computer games and the special effects in movies look better, but to claim the world looks wildly futuristic is an exaggeration.
And yet pretty much everyone still gets up, drives a car alone to work, does their eight, nine hours, drives home alone in that same car, eats, watches a little TV, and goes to bed.
I was born in 1963. Where's the 30 hour work week I was promised? Why am I still driving a gas vehicle by myself to work? Geopolitics? Same shit, different day. Sure, we got an unlimited flow of information, and that has most certainly revolutionized many things. But I argue that the day-to-day lives of most people doesn't look a whole lot different than when I was born, it's just better accessorized.
The numbers suggest that we could live 1950-style lives working only eleven hours per week[0]. Instead, we inflate our consumption and keep working 40 hours, living in houses more than twice as large[1], commuting ever-longer distances[2], paying daily (or more than daily) for others to prepare food we could have prepared ourselves, and just generally choosing to live many times as large. We adapt so quickly that we don't even realize that we've nearly-quadrupled our lifestyles, but that's where the 30-hour work week went.
Instead, we inflate our consumption and keep working 40 hours
"We"? I'd happily work at software rates for 20 hours/week. And, yeah, I understand the fundamental shift in a lot of things before that's a practical option. I'm not even disagreeing with you, I think you're spot on. But those that have simple, inexpensive lifestyles still don't have the option of working less. So though even I consume more than I used to, I also try to shovel as much as I can into the retirement accounts.
Housing is the main cost, and it scales with average take-home income — which is why two-income-no-kids families aren’t as well off as one might expect from looking at single-income families from the 1960s. If you can somehow disregard housing as a cost, and have health insurance anywhere except the USA, 20 hours per week is fine.
I’d manage on 10 hours per week minimum wage in the UK, but that doesn’t really count because the UK government effectively subsidies everyone earning less than (I think) £24k/year with things like NHS healthcare and a functional police, fire brigade, and army.
Housing is the main cost, and it scales with average take-home income
Shows you what happens when you're well-ensconced in your own personal bubble. It didn't occur to me until you pointed it out that the reason I could easily live on 20 hours/week is partially due to the fact that our $650K house cost us a third of that, because we bought it twelve years ago. Living on 20 hours/week and making the payment on a $650K house might be a little tight. Fine, make it 30 hours/week. :-)
"When was the last time you had to spend 15 minutes planning out where and when you would meet when because your group is splitting up when on a trip?"
I do these things all the time as many of my hobbies are outdoor activities. For example, at Arapahoe Basin, a ski area in Colorado near Denver, cell reception is non-existent. So you need to have a plan for people to meet up when we get on the mountain, where to meet for lunch, where at the end of the day. And even at ski resorts with cell coverage, it is far easier in a group to discuss how you are going to meet after the run because people will invariably get separated. E.g., if I'm at Vail, "Meet on the skier's left side of Northwoods, do not go all the way to the base."
I always bring paper maps when backpacking and hiking. Sometimes when you are going camping, you have to have this all planned ahead of time since once again cell coverage may be non-existent. And someone always knows where I am going and when I should be back in case I need a rescue. I also go caving as a hobby, and all of these things are especially important there.
There's some planning when skiing (for reference, I ski at A Basin yearly too; great place), but I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. Usually it's pretty easy to plan, esp. at A Basin to say, "meet at the midway restaurant".
And from a technological standpoint, all the maps that you can have printed are all online as well, so in the same way that Yellow Book entries are now database rows, maps are either primitive PNGs or interactive terrain maps.
Sure and the planning at A Basin depends on the situation. If everyone is leaving from the same car, its easy. But if you have 3-4 car loads of people leaving and arriving at different times, you want to make sure a plan is in place before people have started arriving.
You don't need cell coverage to look at maps on your phone. The GPS in your phone will work without coverage. Use Gaia GPS and/or Avenza Maps, they're far, far superior to paper maps. GGP is right, we live in the future.
Obviously, it doesn't hurt to bring a paper map, but you'll find that you're not going to use them at all. We live in the future.
> Obviously, it doesn't hurt to bring a paper map, but you'll find that you're not going to use them at all. We live in the future.
I disagree for multi-day or technical trips. I have done expedition style trips where I am camped in the mountains for weeks. I have been using a Garmin 60CSx GPS for years and love it. It has topo maps on it, typically at 1:24k, and they are invaluable. I have tried bringing a phone, but I don't like phones because touch screens are a royal pain with a hand that is gloved or in mittens. Phones also don't take AA batteries like a GPS or headlamp and are battery hogs. So you need to bring along more junk to keep them charged.
For within the US, the National Geographic Trails illustrated maps are awesome. They are rip proof and printed on waterproof paper. And they are large when unfolded, so it's easy to quickly scan and find things unlike trying to scroll around on a small phone screen.
For lots of hikes and climbs that are more on the technical side, your route information ("beta") is probably going to be written on paper. When you are climbing something that is very steep or in canyon country, GPS is useless. You need visual information on the route you need to take and that may be a photo or sketch. And this is easy to keep folded in your pocket and remove with a gloved hand. On a summer weekend in Colorado on the summit of a more difficult 14er (think Crestone Needle or Capitol), you will see many people with printed guides from 14ers.com. So its just not me. I don't see many people using their phones for navigation (but they do for pictures).
And in a cave, there is no substitute for a paper map. But that's a different ball of wax.
>When was the last time you used a paper map?
When was the last time you used the yellow pages?
How much money have you spent buying encyclopedias in the last 20 years?
How much time searching for someone who has a mediocre copy-of-a-copy of bootleg tapes of that one amazing concert by the band you liked?
How many hours have you spent on the phone with a company because you lost the user's manual to their product?
When was the last time you had a conversation to the effect of "what was the name of that actor in that movie" and you were unable to get the answer?
How big is your rolodex?
How many of those were our real problems and main concerns all these decades back? Who even thought those were actually problems worth fixing?
Meanwhile stuff like homelessness, unemployment, stupid media with fake news, clowns for presidents, war-mongering, pollution, daily grind, costly medical bills, and so on, are all here.
No rolodex? Don't need one, tons of people can say, I don't have a job, or just have the shitty, no prospect jobs people (including college kids) can get today that doesn't require one.
The main thing we have, that's actually futuristic, is instant global communication and/or the internet. And it's not like that's doing us many favors lately either. We had totally other dreams for it in the 90s.
Internet connected fridges, yeah, they can keep those.
This list made me realize just how much cognitive dissonance I live with being a bit of a paranoid person who likes to use old school methods for some things. I'll respond in order.
I use a paper map all the time. All gps/location features are disabled on my phone, so if I am headed somewhere I usually scout the route on my pc. Most of the time time I just write down the exits, but sometimes I'll print the map and directions out. I always have a paper atlas in my vehicles though (along with forest service topo maps, a habit from my days living in the mountains). If I am in a bind (eg lost), I use openstreetmaps or gmaps if I have to, not to look at where I am but where I am going. (remember no gps/loc features).
I use the yellow pages for kindling and coupons still quite frequently.
My family used to have a huge collection of encyclopedias, and when I have more bookshelf space I really want to get an updated one if any exist. Right now I have a passed down partial collection of the 1971 Funk & Wagnalls, and a complete 1986 Funk & Wagnalls. Pre-internet much of family time was spent arguing and using encyclopedias to support the argument.
As for bootleg recordings, for me private ftp and warez was the end of physically buying bootlegs in the 90's.
I have spent plenty of time on the phone with a company because their user manual was out of date, does that count?
Ok you got me on the rolodex.
All the time because I have a hard time remembering movie names and actor names for some reason. If you remember the movie it's easy to check imdb, but if you don't you have to spend time trying to remember one actors name and then sift through their filmography.
Also all the time, because I am a stickler for having plans in place in public. For example when I take the family to an amusement park, everyone is briefed by me on objective rally point(s), exits, comms, and time sync, among other things before being "let loose". Some military habits die hard.
I got a big scifi moment when i received a video-call from my dad while driving on the highway because he wanted to show me the vacuum robot driving around his house.
How about a "robot" beating the world's best chess player after 1/2 days worth of training or the ability to virtually cure HIV/AIDS (that certainly seemed impossible in the eighties) or music without instruments or singers and only wildly flashing lights (the value of EDM is debatable, but it would certainly feel futuristic to someone from the 60ies) or the ability to speak in real time video to someone on the other side of the world while taking a stroll through the park (star wars had holigrams, but they were pre-recorded material and not real time)
Your music example is a great one for shpwcasing how little things change. Sure the sound is different but everyones still bopping along to a 4/4 rock beat
The world of medicine and scientific research has undeniably improved. Transplants, medical imaging (MRI or CT), almost any drug you will probably take, genomic science, disease diagnosis, cancer immunotherapies, electron-microscopy, and a lot more were either non-existent or crude in 1966. You are much better off getting sick today (assuming you can afford it).
What dictates our experience, our "feelings" about the world?
One could argue our experience is primarily dictated by the physical objects surrounding us. This viewpoint wouldn't see a vast difference between 1966 and today.
Another viewpoint is that our experience is construed mostly _socially_, i.e. that we build our world based on our interactions with others. From this perspective, the world today would feel vastly different.
I'm 24. Many of my "meatspace" friends I first met online, often as a result of being in similar online communities, and then we progressed to a real-life friendship. Much of my social experience is based around circles of people living thousands of miles away from me, who I likely will never spend an extended period of physical time with.
Although our physical reality still seems similar, social reality has shifted dramatically beneath our feet.
Venkatesh Rao, a writer of one of my favorite blogs, Ribbonfarm, has a (rather complex) essay[1] explaining this idea of "feeling like the future" -- he argues that technologists, in fact, work very hard to make new technologies feeling _normal_, and that we don't _want_ to feel like we're living in the future, as it's, well, uncomfortable:
> we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak. To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea.
Rao, in another essay[2], also argues more specifically for my idea posed above: that the internet as a social technology has had novel, futuristic implications for our experience of life.
> When you first explore the online world, with your feet firmly planted offline, it can seem ephemeral and insubstantial. But once you tentatively and gingerly plant your feet online, it is the offline world that starts to seem ephemeral and insubstantial. The world of offline-first people (or worse, offline-only) seems like a world of people living lives without real views. Lives full of unacknowledged and unprocessed yearnings.
I don't know how much sense this'll make to you, given my parents are around the same age and they still struggle to understand how Twitter, chatroom technology, online dating, Yelp, etc. has changed the feeling/experience of reality.
At times, I resent the technological changes, as they seem fundamentally dehumanizing. But sitting from our present-day vantage point, these technologies seem like inevitable results of the Internet as it continues to change how we interact with our fellow human beings. The current political moment in the USA is already the sort of futuristic Thing driven by these technological changes, and I expect that, at the very least, politics will continue feeling more Weird (i.e. futuristic?) before it feels Normal again.
It is incredible, and most people didn't see it coming, but compared to the scifi stuff I read and watched as a kid, the future doesn't feel all that mind-blowing, at least so far.
Part of it is living through it and adjusting to the changes, but I was also born into a world that had TVs, telephones, microwaves, VCRs, satellites, space programs, and personal computers. Computer networks and games existed back then. Miniaturization and Moore's law was known about.
I think living through the early 20th century might have been more mind blowing.
It's because there's a difference between cool and usable.
For example - compare a Virtual Reality 3D city you can scroll around on your computer, visiting different houses, "chatting" with them, then reading what they posted on their public refrigerator door, then maybe reading some books from their shelf, watch a movie together then you "walk" to a library ... To the internet (Facebook + Wikipedia).
What's cooler? Obviously #1.
What's more usable? #2.
If you could go back in time to the 70s, what would you show on a futuristic movie?
#1, since the you want to "wow" your audience, who won't have to deal with such mundane issues as vertigo, or rapid navigability, or searchability.
But it's not that we can't do #1. We not only could do it, but there were many tries (VRML was supposed to be the "next big thing" since the 90's). It's just that our current UI is better.
Does that double life expectancy take into account infant mortality rates? It's not like people living into their 70s was that unheard of back then, it's just that it was easier to die younger.
And yeah, I'm living through it, but it still feels largely like the world I was born into with some additional advances in computing. A huge part of the world is based on incremental improvements on stuff that has existed since the earlier 20th century.
But it's not _wildley_ futuristic. I'm not taking a flying car to a space elevator to visit my relatives on Mars while my house and pets are left in the care of my android maid.
Wasn't it Buzz Aldrin who said he was promised Mars colonies but got Facebook instead? For some of us, that tradeoff doesn't seem terribly futuristic.
We carry supercomputers in our pockets for the primary purpose of broadcasting pictures of food we are about to eat. If that's not wildy futuristic (and perhaps a bit dystopian), I'm not sure what is.
I get your point, but space exploration and robots everywhere aren't the only types of "wildly different" futures. People just have latched onto those two things as facile benchmarks.
You don't get hovercars just from too-cheap-to-meter electricity. If energy cost were the main obstacle, upper-income people would already have hovercars, because spending 4x more on fuel than people driving wheeled vehicles would be fine for them.
Some 1968 futurology predictions seem like they might have come to pass had energy remained as relatively cheap as it was in 1968. Others of them were frankly ridiculous regardless of the price of energy. According to the Amazon review, disintegrator rays and anti-gravity belts were a couple of the predicted developments from "Toward the Year 2018." There was no scientific phenomenon known in 1968 by which either of these could be implemented. It's like the predictors reasoned "science fiction was prescient in predicting artificial satellites and travel to the moon, therefore its other popular tropes will eventually come to pass too."
There's a lot still to explain about the universe: dark matter, baryon asymmetry, dark energy... But I'm not convinced that new insights into these problems, if/when they arrive, will unlock significant new technological capabilities, any more than the discovery of neutron stars led to new superhard/superdense materials for human use. I think it's quite likely that humans never tame a more energetic primary energy source than nuclear fusion[1], nor send messages or vessels faster than light, nor manipulate gravity with the facility that we manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum. The engineering permitted by classical and quantum mechanics, modulo additional limits imposed by relativity, is vast. But it can't deliver everything that science fiction imagines. Inertial compensators, gravity manipulation, tractor beams, teleporters, disintegration rays, time travel, FTL: nope, probably not.
[1] Storage and use of antimatter for compact power sources seems like it may be eventually plausible, but it would function more as a super-energetic "battery" charged by other primary energy sources.
> If energy cost were the main obstacle, upper-income people would already have hovercars, because spending 4x more on fuel than people driving wheeled vehicles would be fine for them.
In 1968, the USA used helicopters in lieu of light trucks all over Vietnam, thousands upon thousands. Getting an heli ride was a mundane experience for a conscripted grunt. If anything the practice scaled down a lot since due to proliferation of MANPADs. But point is, a helicopter was not something mind blowing or novel on the scale of a flying car.
Nor would an RC model shatter anyone's imagination then, another common thing. If anything, a non-controlled, autonomous or semi autonomous drones that are appearing now would be far more impressive.
Sure, the military had lots of helicopters. Also, portable radios, intercontinental aircraft, and space rockets.
These were not a relatively affordable part of daily life, though. Now if I'm in a crunch, and the roads / subways get clogged down for some reason (not a rare event), I can theoretically quickly get from my office to JFK airport on a helicopter for $100 (more like $30 from 1968), if I share the flight with 3 other people. Also, for the same money I can get a half-decent RC quadcopter with a homing ability and a camera that spies from 1968 would kill for.
No flying cars, though. Blame air safety regulations.
Instead, we got "unlimited" information. Although this doesn't translate as well into physical products, the world still looks/feels wildly futuristic if you orient your perspective correctly.