French artists in 1899 envisioned what life would look like in the year 2000
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Re: French artists in 1899 envisioned what life would look like in the year 2000
#2It’s interesting because they got so much right but they just couldn’t quite imagine the computer so they have humans pulling levers, remotely operating machinery, being carried by advanced surveillance helicopters…
Perhaps this hints that our vision of the future should have us doing less.
Re: French artists in 1899 envisioned what life would look like in the year 2000
#3It's also interesting to see what they could not envision. For example, they obviously could not imagine that women could wear anything other than a dress.
Re: French artists in 1899 envisioned what life would look like in the year 2000
#4This might be a better source, with all of the images.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-19th-century-vis...
Re: French artists in 1899 envisioned what life would look like in the year 2000
#5It's also interesting to see what they could not envision. For example, they obviously could not imagine that women could wear anything other than a dress.
Strictly speaking, Parisian women could not legally wear trousers until 2013: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21329269
Re: French artists in 1899 envisioned what life would look like in the year 2000
#6It’s interesting because they got so much right but they just couldn’t quite imagine the computer so they have humans pulling levers, remotely operating machinery, being carried by advanced surveillance helicopters… Perhaps this hints that our vision of the future should have us doing less.
Yeah, I do think the thing that will date most 20th century science fiction is that it usually has humans actively doing most things, like mining, piloting space ships, fighting battles, etc. When it seems more likely that almost all of that will be done by AIs, with humans directing them at best.
Re: French artists in 1899 envisioned what life would look like in the year 2000
#7Which makes me wonder what people in future will think about our science fiction media.
Re: French artists in 1899 envisioned what life would look like in the year 2000
#8seems mostly right to me:
1) ok, but should be staring at iphones
2) not this one perhaps, given our treatment of whales
3) john deere tractors - it's a thing
4) could see many of our overvalued billionaires going for this
5) drone strike
6) robo hoover - available everywhere
Re: French artists in 1899 envisioned what life would look like in the year 2000
#9One of the interesting things about these photos is that, aside from all the under-water ones, many of the contraptions exist. We just call them Roomba, Kubota tractor, Audible, Philips All-In-One Trimmer, etc. One consistent facet is that many of our modern technologies are a lot more complex on the inside, but simpler in appearance. There really is one guy pushing buttons to harvest thousands of acres.
There's a complex kitchen one, and many people do have robot butlers in their kitchen today, they're just corporate chic instead of nearly alchemical, and called a Keurig. Though I would not invite such a creature into my home on account of its aesthetics I do admit its impressive.
Another observation is that we've abstracted away the robot-ish nature of a lot of these machines. There's a special factory that makes k-cups, so that our home environment can have the simpler machine. We decided to pave millions billions(?) of miles of road, and also perfectly flatten the square footage of nearly every store and warehouse, just to make the machines run smoother. I think it would be hard for a person from 1899 to understand just how much flatness we've engineered for our cars and roombas and shopping carts to work universally.
Re: French artists in 1899 envisioned what life would look like in the year 2000
#10Now I’m curious what would be a today’s vision of life in 2124.
Also, could we use these to train an AI? As in: pair 1899 predictions with the actual outcome, train a model, and later provide today’s predictions of 2124 as input?