Comments on: Where is the future that we were promised?

By: DaveO

DaveO — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:14:48 +0000

I forgot to add that we also can’t buy an inexpensive yet practial car (like the Geo Metro) that gets like 60 mpg in the US anymore. I mean, look at the new “Smart” (my wife and I call them “Dumb”) car. It’s much tinier inside than even the tiny Geo Metro, yet it only gets something like 40 mpg. What the hell? This is how we’ve advanced in the last 20 years? There’s hybrids too, but they are much more expensive than a Metro even in today’s dollars, and can only at best get the Metro’s fuel economy but only by incorporating an electric engine and expensive battery. Why is it that we used to be able to achieve the same thing without having to go through the extra cost and complexity?

By: DaveO

DaveO — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:08:47 +0000

In many ways I think we’re even worse off than the ’80s. So many things that I loved back then are now gone or are going away. There’s the Concorde (which is already mentioned in the article), with no new supersonic travel available to the public to replace it. There’s the fact that we don’t build awesome super-tall buildings anymore (like the WTC and Sears tower). A lot of the long (1000′+) fishing piers on the atlantic coast are going away (either by not fixing them when a hurricane comes or by dismantling them to make way to build houses or other boring stuff). They don’t build new waterslides or much in the way of water parks anymore (I mean like in local municipalities, not the corporate ones like Six Flags), and a lot of the existing ones are being taken down. Public swimming pools are hardly being built anymore, and when they are, they don’t have diving boards or even deep ends anymore. Even worse, they’re taking the diving boards away from the existing pools. Arcades seem to be going away too. We can’t buy any car that I like in the US with a manual transmission anymore. There are many other examples that I can’t think of right now but I think I got my point across.

BTW, it’ll be funny to watch Back to the Future part II in 2015 to see how basically all the futuristic elements that are supposed to happen in 2015 haven’t happened at all.

By: Paul Renault

Paul Renault — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 14:13:58 +0000

I finally had a second to read this essay last night – on my iLiad which permitted me to write comments as I read it, which I came here to post, but as it turns out Nature magazine beat me to the punch!

“Patents versus patenting: implications of intellectual property protection for biological research – Zhen Lei1, Rakhi Juneja2 & Brian D Wright1

Abstract
A new survey shows scientists consider the proliferation of intellectual property protection to have a strongly negative effect on research.”

Suppose that Banting and Best had patented insulin – how many people would have died until the patent expired? Or that Einstein while we’re at it, had had crippling patents and copyright on their research (or DRM!). Where would we be now?

By: Mads Buchter

Mads Buchter — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:41:24 +0000

I simply don’t agree with this view of the world as intellectually arrested. New knowledge and new technologies are crashing in on us at a completely unprecedented level. As I see it, there are many levels of knowledge: There are things you know, things you think you know, things you know you don’t know and things you don’t know you don’t know. The problem here is that many of the advances generated in our time are so specialized that for most people, they fall into this last category. Never-the-less they are constantly changing the world we live in, as the original breakthroughs in technology or understanding did not. No one was cured by the discovery of DNA. People are cured every day with the knowledge we are still accumulating.
Yes I have a basic understanding of Big Bang Theory but can I truly claim, that I understand what’s going on at Cern? And that it is really nothing compared to Einstein’s partially faulty ideas. I don’t think so.
Cars are still cars, like the were 30 years ago – only faster, safer and cheaper. And there are a hell of a lot more of them. They don’t light your cigarette anymore, but they do tell you exactly, where you are, show you where to go, tell you when you’ll be there and if your passenger forgot his seatbelt.
A tank is still at tank like it were 30 years ago. It just gives you night vision, can turn invisible, turns away grenades with reactive armour, aims itself and doesn’t miss at 2 miles.
Of course a one ounce MP3-player doesn’t do anything, that a one pound walkman couldn’t and maybe it even does it worse. But the same thing could be said about grammophone players and symphony orchestras.
Mybe humanoid robots aren’t all that common. And while were bitching about that on the internet, the unhumanoid ones are doing most of the work.
The furture has a nasty habit of sneaking up on you. If you don’t pay attention you won’t notice that it’s right there in your living room in the form of a movie with enough CGI to knock the socks off Cecil B. DeMille.

By: K Satyanarayan

K Satyanarayan — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 04:16:39 +0000

How about changes in the world of finance, for better or worse?

Would someone from an earlier generation have known of microfinance a la Grameen Bank, or have believed that it would be possible for the ultra poor to raise loans that they can pay back and for the lenders to the poor to do so humanely yet profitably?

While this may not qualify as change in a positive sense, would someone from an earlier generation have known of or been able to understand, let alone justify as viable, products like a CDO, a CDS, or even just a NINA loan?

By: balachandar

balachandar — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 03:44:49 +0000

yeah. i still feel the same. i am not innovating. i still see the things which i study are even studied by my nephews.

i agree with. you know, in india, we just landed on moon which was done few decades back from US, russia, japan. we are still way ahead in this race.

By: Martin Varsavsky

Martin Varsavsky — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:24:17 +0000

Whatever

By: turn.self.off

turn.self.off — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:03:14 +0000

“If we move on to other areas, such as entertainment, in the 80s you could watch a movie at home on video; the picture was worse than that of a DVD, but it was for all intents and purposes the same thing. Music sounded much better on a vinyl record or a CD than it does compressed into an MP3 file or on a hard drive. Speakers were of a much higher quality than they are today. Only the screens were significantly worse than they are today, but only those in homes, and not the screens in theaters or of the TV projectors that already existed and were as good as those currently available. The advances are in electronics, not in optics. High quality optics appears to have regressed, and not advanced. Digital photography brought with it convenience, but not quality.”

yawn…

By: Martin Varsavsky

Martin Varsavsky — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 18:51:47 +0000

@ Anthony: If I had to write about what the world will be like when my 2 year old is 30 I would be very cautious as to what the fundamental changes will be. The flying cars is a funny example cause when subsequent generations have the same idea of what the future will look like...the future is not happening.

By: Bizzen - IT & Business » Blogarkiv » Reboot dine tanker: Hvor er fremtiden vi blev lovet?

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 10:33:35 +0000

[...] Hvis du har tid til læsning, tid til eftertanker – så giv dig i kast med dette blogindlæg, der har overskriften “Where is the future that we were [...]