Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the future really has fizzled. Did anyone predict that I could be talking with people around the globe who share my interests, instantaneously, without leaving my bedroom? Or that I could find information on nearly any topic just by typing a couple words into a search box?

Heck, I'd much rather have cars, with their noise and pollution and gas-guzzling, than horses with their shit.

I think the problem is that we quickly become habituated to any real increases in standard of living and think they're no longer remarkable anymore. It's more a problem with human brains than with technology. I'd be pretty pissed off if I lost my computer, Internet, cell phone, car, dishwasher, and cushy job where I type code into a computer all day instead of having to do actual physical labor. They don't really register as amazing achievements on a day-to-day basis, but when you look at 1964 and what you'd have to give up to live back then, they look pretty darn good.

I think you’re missing the basic premise of the article. He’s saying there was a future that was “promised” which involved jet packs, flying cars, et al. That future never materialized and that is the topic of the article.

That doesn’t downplay what we have accomplished. In fact the author’s primary point seems to be a lot of these things didn’t materialize because people simply weren’t really interested in them. Where as they are interested in say...an iPhone.

It's a 50/50. I quite agree that the internet is a mind-blowing thing, and I had to smile when I went to see Star Trek last week and couldn't help thinking that my phone is smaller and more functional than the Starfleet communicators (although I imagine the latter have better signal quality and the battery doesn't go flat every day).

But our physical environment changes a lot more slowly than our digital one. I don't get a 'woah' moment as often as I'd like, but things are improving slowly. Certainly, some of this is down to my individual design sensibility. As context, I felt 'disappointed in the future' a lot during the 1990s, until one day I opened a magazine and saw a picture of the new VW beetle. Actually, 10 years on I still think it looks futuristic.

"Did anyone predict that I could be talking with people around the globe who share my interests, instantaneously, without leaving my bedroom?"

They had tablet PC's and the equivalent of internet blogs and forums in "Ender's Game," so I assume other authors had similar ideas.

Writers began "predicting" this sort of thing about the same time they started signing up for online services in the early 80s.

Indeed; Jerry Pournelle somewhat famously predicted in _Byte_ that by 2000, anyone in the Western world would be able to ask a question and get the answer, if the answer was known by anyone.

We've pretty much had that since 1998 or so. :)

See, I'd credit Heinlein with predicting the internet back in the fifties and sixties.

What works are you thinking of? When I think of Heinlein in that period, I remember a protagonist talking with a trucker about the truck's antigrav propulsion, then whipping out a slip-stick to figure out how far down it would be pushed under load. (Citizen of the Galaxy, I think.)

Stranger in a Strange Land had some "news nets" or somesuch that seemed pretty close to me. That's sixty-one. I poked through though, and everything that I was thinking of specifically turned out to be much later.

Well, "network" had a different meaning back in 1961. :)

Stranger is one of the few (only?) Heinlein things I haven't read, mind. Need to get around to it.

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