The last few hundred years have seen dramatic advances in scientific and technological developments. Yet, when we imagine a future 30 plus years away, we tend to “see” scientific advances arriving prematurely. Folks in 1950 thought everyone would have flying cars by 2000, and, likewise, all diseases would be cured by then.
One thinks of Back to the Future 2 which took place in 2015. If those predictions were accurate, we only have to wait four more years for “Mr. Fusion” and flying cars.
One area, however, where that movie’s predictions seemed pretty close was advances in graphic, visual technology and information transfer. (Though, they still didn’t predict Facebook, I don’t think.) That movie came out when 8 bit Nintendo was the current technology.
I think holograms aren’t too far off. But when are we going to get flying cars and Mr. Fusion? And cures for cancer? Perhaps we’ll have to wait till 2100.
Jon: You might find interesting this recent piece of mine on the same subject – http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/why-do-futurists-get-so-much-wrong/Report
Steve,
Many thanks. I’m going to read this right now (in between doing college work online).Report
Actually, I think that those scientific predictions were not more wrong than the cultural ones in scope. If you were to tell a scientist in the 50’s that we have succeeded on the human genome project, that would be as significant an advance as curing all diseases; likewise, if you were to tell an engineer in the 80’s that we have the Chevy Volt and Virgin Galactic, that would be as significant as flying cars. It’s not that we’ve fallen short in these areas, it’s just that we’ve re-prioritized.
On the cultural side, however, it’s just easier to reconcile the differences – so you wanted immersive 3D worlds with no hardware, but Avatar and Kinect seem close enough.Report