No sooner have I “mentioned”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001180.html 1960s expectations of what the future would be like — “future cities in which we’d all be whizzing about in our personal aeroplanes” — than I read “John Kay in the Financial Times”:http://www.johnkay.com/trends/318 doubting whether our age is, as commonly supposed, one of unprecedented technological advance:
bq. I began to doubt the conventional wisdom when I discovered a Hudson Institute report from the mid-1960s that predicted technological changes from then till 2000. Its prognostications about information technology were impressively accurate – it foresaw mobile phones, fax machines and large-scale data processing.
bq. But in other areas the Hudson Institute was wide of the mark. Where are the personal flying platforms, the space colonies, the artificial moons to light our cities, the drugs that make weight reduction a painless process? Progress in IT has fully matched the expectations of three or four decades ago. But advance in other areas has, by historic standards, been disappointing.
Worth a glance.
{ 11 comments }
John Kozak 01.21.04 at 12:28 pm
Seems to me that the nineteenth century was that of radical techological change, and things have slowed down since then.
But reconsidering these 60s forecasts, recently we have got molecular biology, and might get nanotech, quantum computing and other technologies not foreseen back then which may well be far more transformative than flying cars (I suppose we needed first hand experience of the ghastliness of large scale car use to realise what a non-starter that idea was?)
“Progress in AI has fully matched the expectations of three or four decades ago” Pish. Where are the AIs?
Bob 01.21.04 at 2:20 pm
Compare also the widely cited paper by RJ Gordon: Does the New Economy Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past at: http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/economics/gordon/GreatInvention.pdf
Casmir Radon 01.21.04 at 3:48 pm
Less than worthless without the ability to read the article he is basing his piece on. There’s not even a real reference to it. I mean, shit, Star Trek predicted mobile phones, fax machines and large-scale data processing in the mid 60s but I ain’t romancing hot green Orion slave girls am I?
Carlos 01.21.04 at 4:43 pm
There’s body paint.
Alexander Field claims that the 1930s — well, 1929 through 1941 — were the most technologically progressive decade of the last century. He makes a good case.
C.
Sebastian Holsclaw 01.21.04 at 5:16 pm
For all I know we might not be in one of the middle of some of the fastest paced technological changes, but reading his article does nothing to change the argument. First, it is clear that he is taking the very most optimistic predictions and noting their failure. Second, his litany of things predicted and discovered has some pretty glaring omissions. The internet may be hugely more important than a flying car, but it was predicted by no one 40 years before its existance, and almost no one even 15 years before. He also fails to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary. We typically don’t need flying cars, because wheeled cars are quite adequate for most purposes–and much cheaper. (Flying car-like things do exist, they are just quite expensive).
The predictions on medical science are even weaker. He seems to be quoting about a cure for cancer back when there was the idea that cancer was mostly one or two diseases. Basically we were so ignorant about medical science that certain problems appeared much easier than they really were.
I think the same may have happened with AI. It was commonly believed in the 1950s and 1960s that when a computer was designed that could beat the best chess masters, we would have AI. We have learned that it is possible to design a computer which is narrowly expert at one matter without making any major progress on general intelligence. I suspect we understood intelligence so poorly at the time that we underestimated the difficulty of designing it.
In a different vein there are biological technologies which were not seriously predicted 50 years ago. Oil eating bacteria, who would have guessed?
Ken 01.21.04 at 8:10 pm
“He also fails to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary. We typically don’t need flying cars, because wheeled cars are quite adequate for most purposes—and much cheaper. (Flying car-like things do exist, they are just quite expensive).”
We don’t “need” regular cars, either, but they’ve turned out to be really useful.
Flying cars would allow us to have homes, workplaces, and shops separated by hundreds of miles. “Sprawl” wouldn’t be miles of strip malls; it would be homes, office buildings, and stores strewn across entire states with wilderness in between, and no roads or highways needed to connect them
It would mean that you could live practically anywhere in the country and still be able to have a decent job, regardless of the state of the “local” economy. There wouldn’t really be “local” economies in the sense we think of them now… Louisiana, for instance, would be a “suburb” of Houston-Austin-Dallas, instead of being a job-deficient economy of its own; Houston-Austin-Dallas, meanwhile, would scatter to dot the eastern half of Texas with isolated homes and businesses surrounded by wilderness.
And with the population scattered in that fashion, high-body-count attacks become less difficult.
“(I suppose we needed first hand experience of the ghastliness of large scale car use to realise what a non-starter that idea was?)”
I don’t see much ghastliness in large scale car use. It’s not Utopia, but it sure as hell beats the alternative.
And large scale aircar use would have the advantage of there being much more room to play with, given three dimensions and all; combine that with the population dispersion that would become possible, and I don’t see any “ghastliness”.
How to get there from here? The best way I can think of is to replace the FAA requirements for private pilots with mandatory liability insurance. The insurance companies would then reward skilled pilots and the use of more easily controlled and foolproof aircraft; a market for better aircraft would develop, a bigger population of potential pilots would drive down the cost-per-unit, and a virtuous cycle would develop.
In any event, every industry should be subject to the same rules as the computer hardware and software industry were. No permission needed to sell new products, no permission needed to buy any products, no license needed to work in the field. Just let products go to market, and new ones build on old ones, without delays from having to play Mother May I being inserted into every step of the way. That’s how we kept getting new inventions in the 19th Century, and how we can pick up the pace and get real technological advancement in the 21st.
And, if we apply that to medicine as well, we might live to see the 22nd.
Ken 01.21.04 at 8:12 pm
“And with the population scattered in that fashion, high-body-count attacks become less difficult.”
That should, of course, read “… become more difficult”.
Sebastian Holsclaw 01.21.04 at 8:25 pm
Ken, those type of flying cars already exist. I know a number of people who live in LA and work in the San Fransisco area. They typically work in medicine, fly up on Southwest for $60 for 3 day stints, take 4 days off, work 4 days, take 3 days off.
Antoni Jaume 01.21.04 at 9:21 pm
When a car motor fails, the car doesn’t fall from a mille high.
If two cars meet it may be easily quite bad, when two flying engines meet it is difficult for it to do no harm.
Flying requires more energy.
Et coetera.
DSW
Ken 01.22.04 at 2:11 pm
On the other hand, cars won’t be nearly as densely packed in the sky as they are on the ground, given three dimensions to play in and a lack of buildings and things in the air to route around. Also, unless you spend all your time flying over a big city, which will happen less and less as overall population disperses, you are exceedingly unlikely to hit someone on the ground if you crash.
Dan S 01.22.04 at 9:54 pm
IANAATC (an air traffic controller), but it seems like the addition of an extra dimension does not outway the danger of having every idiot FLYING IN THE AIR. Think drunk driving, for starters. The energy thing antoni mentioned is a good point too.
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