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I feel that the author bases the hypothesis on what journalists say sci-fi predicts (flying cars) not what they actually predict. Most sci-fi deals with pretty radical views of culture in the future. Look no further than Banks' Culture-series, which deals a lot with the power-structures, norms and rules of a post-scarcity society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series In one aspect futurism often looks like an…
1.Genetic Testing -
Anticpated: GATTACA
What we got: A bunch of innocent people freed from jail. Who, today, would want to live in a world without genetic forensics?
2. Pacifying Narcotics -
Anticipated: Brave New World
What we got:War on Drugs, 80's crack epidemic. Huxley foresaw the gov't forcing people to take drugs. The real problem was the gov't trying to stop people from willingly taking drugs.I feel that the author bases the hypothesis on what journalists say sci-fi predicts (flying cars) not what they actually predict. Most sci-fi deals with pretty radical views of culture in the future. Look no further than Banks' Culture-series, which deals a lot with the power-structures, norms and rules of a post-scarcity society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series In one aspect futurism often looks like an…
On the contrary, I'm sure he'd argue that all the emphasis in more modern space operas like Banks' on the extent to which liberal civilisations with few other worries should impose their cultural norms on very different aliens is probably a reflection of contemporary preoccupations[1], much like the softer side of late nineteenth century proto-futurism was preoccupied with eugenics and utopian socialism, and by the early twentieth century it had become preoccupied with war and dystopian socialism.
It's not the most tightly-written article, but it's full of social as well as technological innovations missed by the last generation of futurists. We're a long way from the world of the Culture so it's not really the job of the author to identify exactly what that's missing, but I think it's fair to say that if we ever enter a spacefaring age, we might find even the most thought-provoking late twentieth century space opera to be more a reflection of contemporary liberal foreign policy concerns than a reflection of the biggest changes that have happened and challenges they face.
One problem is what demographics futurists tend to be. White men are less likely to imagine a future with full gender equality and black liberation than black women are, I would imagine. People living in the West will think less about the rise of the rest of the world.
Honestly, I don't get what the article is about. Was probably expecting something deeper, e.g. why our vision of the future is always so wrong and dull and not only in terms of cultural changes. Take any prediction from the 1960s for example and there will be a lot of food for ridicule. A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at 500mph and the passenger reading a newspaper in the meantime. Can it…
> A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at 500mph and the passenger reading a newspaper in the meantime. Can it get any more wrong than this? I think those are trivial errors (got the car right, missed the tablet or internet). What can be more wrong is not predicting cultural and lifestyle changes affected by technology etc in the future.
Just to make fun of the headline from the article, "We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace.", the failure was thinking giant buildings full of men tightening bolts on a non-automated assembly line was normal, progressive, and eternal. Men and women working side by side has been normal or at least not noteworthy for a couple hundred thousand years... a couple decades of men only manual labor factory buildings was the weird oddity. What I'm getting at is the innovation isn't "allowing" women to stop eating bonbons on the couch and go to work, the "innovation" is all male manual labor assembly line factories died out and blew away, so things are now back to more or less normal with men and women more or less working together more or less most of the time plus or minus geography and climate and individual worksite and individual instantaneous work task. Aside from fixations on imaginary pasts that never or rarely existed in the first place but fit a modern political axe to grind. Men and women not spending time together is really pretty weird on a long enough time scale.
This also shows up in the car predictions. Burning basically all our fossil energy resources in a century or so is really weird behavior, so the results are going to be very weird and very temporary and very dependent at any instant on the trajectory of that very rapid burn rate and very rapid economically viable depletion rate. There's a classic graph that shows fossil fuel use over the history of our species as a flat line around zero with a crazy vertical line blip right about now. You can't make long term trend predictions about a random sized and located momentary blip.
Finally an aspect of naming games. We have reasonably cheap extremely safe 500 mph self driving machines that we sit in while reading legacy newspapers just like we always claimed we'd have, we just call them jet airplanes instead of calling them cars. That doesn't mean the prediction the machines would exist was wrong, or that we don't sit in them and read newspapers today, it just means we insist on marketing them under a different name, not exactly a major miss for the prediction. So predictions of everyone having electric cars will basically be correct in that average peasants like us will use electricity in the daily grind of life, even if some marketing guy insists on calling it the electric minivan or the e-Bus or the Apple iStationWagon, OK whatever its still basically "everyone uses electric cars" in practice.
Beware: The more you understand about how inaccurate futuristic predictions are, the harder modern sci-fis get to watch. Especially so if you've seen a lot of older sci-fis about our present time.
Or not necessarily about the present time. For example a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away they had very advanced AIs but no computers or mobile communication (in any practical form) :)
Note there's hard sci fi and soft sci fi, and a soap opera / action flick which happens to be "in the future" like B5 is not really predictive. I'm just saying that very soft sci fi is indistinguishable from copy and paste style fantasy or historical fiction. Hard sci fi like KSRs Mars Trilogy ages much better than "80s soap opera, on a space ship".
Honestly, I don't get what the article is about. Was probably expecting something deeper, e.g. why our vision of the future is always so wrong and dull and not only in terms of cultural changes. Take any prediction from the 1960s for example and there will be a lot of food for ridicule. A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at 500mph and the passenger reading a newspaper in the meantime. Can it…
I feel that the author bases the hypothesis on what journalists say sci-fi predicts (flying cars) not what they actually predict. Most sci-fi deals with pretty radical views of culture in the future. Look no further than Banks' Culture-series, which deals a lot with the power-structures, norms and rules of a post-scarcity society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series In one aspect futurism often looks like an…
It's a literary form -- a subcategory of fiction. Yes, some works of SF are set in a plausibly-imagined future. Yes, some of these works may make projections/extrapolations about technologies around us. But the authors are writing in the social context of the present, and what they write about reflects the present day's concerns and perspectives, unless they are really hardcore about their futurism.
Upshot: the vast bulk of SF isn't predictive, and isn't intended to be. As a field we sometimes get something right -- but there's an element of the thousand monkeys eventually emitting a Shakespearean sonnet to this: we also get a whole lot more wrong.
Source: I do this for a living.
I feel that the author bases the hypothesis on what journalists say sci-fi predicts (flying cars) not what they actually predict. Most sci-fi deals with pretty radical views of culture in the future. Look no further than Banks' Culture-series, which deals a lot with the power-structures, norms and rules of a post-scarcity society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series In one aspect futurism often looks like an…
I'll be honest, when I see "Where are my flying cars?" used seriously, not just as a "ha ha" sort of thing, I dock a lot of points. It's fashionable pseudo-intellectual claptrap.
Real science fiction has discussed all sorts of things, and yes, that actually does include women in a wide variety of roles, including giants of the field like Heinlein and even TV such as the original series Star Trek, and I could keep going for a very boring amount of time.