He wants a glider. Not a problem. There are quite good hang gliders. There are also plenty of trolleys around, although most new ones use pantographs instead of trolley poles.
Very few saw a world dominated by giant advertising firms. Or computing becoming a branch of advertising. Even in science fiction.
There was Fowler Schocken Associates, in The Space Merchants (1952). The company behind the simulated world in Simulacron-3 (1964) builds it so they can do market testing and opinion polls. As late as "AI" (2001), the tie between search and ads hadn't appeared. In "AI", the "Dr. Know" search service is an expensive pay service.
It’s a little unrelated but I always thought it was odd that people looked to things like science fiction for glimpses into possible futures rather than into the more social and political genres such as cyberpunk.
Because cyberpunk basically got everything right. Unfortunately.
Not only from the cyberpunk movement, but also from history and the classics! Societies should rethink formal education entirely and focus on connecting the dots between different sciences and activities.
I'll play the contrarian here regarding the article: it's likely that many people did actually predict the future, but they lacked the platform to broadcast their message.
Personally I started reading hard SF in the early 70s so it was all I had then for glimpses of the future, and a lot of near-future SF then was based around post-nuclear situations, or robots, or similar, albeit with some superb exceptions from authors such as Roger Zelazny, John Brunner and others.
Cyberpunk didn't really get consolidated as a genre until the 1980s although dystopias had been written about before then. It was in the 80s that the core cyberpunk themes of computer hackers and evil corporations really came together in their current dystopian form.
SF has always been about the present time of the writer, and is usually most interesting when it perturbs some element of reality to expose something interesting about the present.
"He wants a glider. Not a problem. There are quite good hang gliders."
Off-topic I know, but 100% this. Modern hang-gliders are amazing: easy to learn, unbelievable glide performance and handling, cheap to buy and learn. The 'whoosh' of energy retention as you pull in and push out has to be felt to be believed.
The same goes for paragliders: their speed and glide makes a mockery of my intuition as a ex-physicist and they fit in a rucksack. I'm a rubbish pilot and I've still managed to fly over a hundred kilometres on a paraglider.
Which are a step up from even the most sophisticated "hang glider", assuming that hang glider refers to the kite type thing that you hang underneath and steer with body weight shifting.
I'm pretty sure even the best paragliders aren't anywhere near 40:1 L/D ratios.
Maybe not the exact workings of the modern ad industry, but I'd say that as early as Metropolis and possibly some time before, a feared future of mass production and consumption had entered the public eye. It is fascinating though, how little (ad) space advertising itself was warranted in fictional works till relatively recent (late 70s/early 80s) -- Blade Runner made it look as beautiful as it would be inescapable.
By the time Alien came out, corporate evil was certainly well established. Everything on the space ship had Weyland branding, and the corporation treating its employees as expendable was par for the course.
I'm struggling to come up with an older example of prominent ads in sci fi, but I'm drawing a blank.
For another glimpse at the feared future of mass production and consumption watch the "Out of the Unknown" series 1 episode "The Midas Plague" from 1965:
It's episode 12 in the zip file. A lot of the stories for the series came from well known science fiction writers of the time. All four years of the series are on the Internet Archive. The Midas Plague is a comedy, some of the other episodes are truly frightening.
Great book, although I'm not sure 'predicted' is the right word. By that logic 'Flow my tears the Policeman said' is a prediction that by 1988 the US would have had a second civil war.
The lenses that we view the questions also change. In the 1950s, people likely imagined that by the 2020s, roads would be rebuilt with technologies like magnets or rails to support self-driving cars. But they didn’t anticipate the inertia in infrastructure development. Our roads remain largely the same, and this stagnation is what we need to band aid with for autonomous vehicles today.
> But they didn’t anticipate the inertia in infrastructure development
On a related note, I think one reason that SF was so uniformly positive about space flight was that if you were writing in the 60s and 70s you would have been looking at almost a century of dramatic improvements in travel including steam trains, submarines, cars, prop planes, jets, and then rockets to the moon. With space shuttles and similar on the drawing board. People just assumed this would continue.
What very few SF writers understood was that all of these exploited chemical energy which is very limited in terms of how much can be lifted out of the Earth's gravity well and how fast you can go once you are up there. Many SF authors arm-waved atomics or nuclear propulsion but these, in the real world, never took off, as it were. Not in any mass transit to the stars sense, at least.
Edit: In reality space travel hit a hard brick wall due to the laws of physics. Most other forms of travel have experienced massive incremental improvements in reliability, efficiency, affordability, etc, but very few cars and and planes and ships actually now go much faster than they did 50 years ago.
Writers in the 60s and 70s were also promoting a space utopia because the space race was a critical Cold War military goal.
We needed scientists to build equipment to spy on the Russians harder than they were spying on us. That meant, among other things, winning the hearts and minds of the kinds of people who would grow up to be scientists.
People in the 1950 has just gone through around a bit more of century of industrial revolution. Things were moving fast, everywhere..
Infrastructure like roads were massively built or improved during this timeframe.
Nowadays things are moving fast in technology and some other sector but it's far from being the case for instance with car. They are basically the same 4 wheel petrol engine that we had 80 years ago.
I think its normal back then to guess that everything was going to keep evolving just as fast as it did. They had no way to know that the industrial revolution was ending.
Sure? Just maintaining them close to their original quality seems to be a challenge at times. Bridges that are close to coming down are another related issue.
People are joking about how this is trains or busses, but I think you hit on something fundamental:
- engine tech is now such that we no longer need one huge engine and lots of passenger to get good efficiency: many small engines works just as well.
- removing the need for everyone to stop where any one person needs to go ("bus stop") improves the experience drastically.
- the one remaining problem is density: cars would have to shrink a lot before they can reach the density of busses or trains.
So perhaps: a single-lane highway only accessible to self-driving vehicles driving in formation and where the vehicles must be below some specified size.
This gives us great last-mile experience, high throughput, and good safety.
Yeah, but then imagine if we took all these separate vehicles and stuck them together to increase efficiency. And now we could regularly send such vehicle groups, making travel predictable for everyone.
Everything else aside, I’m impressed his grandfather was born in 1896. My most recent ancestor whose grandparent was born before 1900 was my grandmother, and she died 25 years ago. Some families have much longer generations than mine. I already knew we aren’t a hearty stock, but this difference seems ridiculous.
My grandmother was born in 1901 and passed away in 1995. It was an amazing span of years to be alive, in terms of progress.
She saw computers go from room-size to PCs. She saw the birth of aviation and people walk on the moon. She saw electrification and indoor plumbing. She saw cars go from rare toys for the super rich to commonplace.
Not to mention old enough to witness two world wars and the Cold War. I wonder what could we have learned from her about how human nature flows from one conflict to another…
My parents were born in 1931 and 1932 and are both still alive and well. One of their four parents was born in 1899. All of their eight grandparents were born in the 19th century.
I’m 47. My dad’s mom, who I knew well, was born in 1910. Her father was born in 1857, before the Civil War. I always thought the span on that side was fascinating.
The predictions we have left are from industry expert or pretty successful people. Fundamentally they fit well in their current world and aren't envisioning social or technical shifts that will completely change the world as they know it.
This is most apparent in the telephone and international fax part, where they see the future of networking through telephone, and not some other technology making it obsolete. We'd have had a different prediction asking AM amateurs how they see the world of telephone communication in 50~100 years (might not have been correct either, but would have been different)
"plenty of people have pointed out that vintage scifi is full of rocketships but all the pilots are men. 1950s scifi shows 1950s society, but with robots. Meanwhile, the interstellar liners have paper tickets, that you queue up to buy. With fundamental technology change, we don't so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things. (And, of course, we now have neither trolleys nor personal gliders.) "
Yes, Asimov's Foundation has people smoking, reading physical newspapers and using physical money, lining up for customs when arriving to Trantor. No women until later on in the series (in his defense, he may have not talked to many women at the age he wrote the first novels).
There was movable sidewalks and other transportation devices though.
Yes, Asimov's Foundation has people smoking, reading physical newspapers and using physical money, lining up for customs when arriving to Trantor. No women until later on in the series (in his defense, he may have not talked to many women at the age he wrote the first novels).
The stories also have to be marketable to contemporary audiences. There may have been brilliant sci-fi at the time about strong, health-minded female protagonists, but I doubt it would have risen to popularity in 1950s society, and thus would have been forgotten.
You can see the effects today with some of the backlash against certain Disney IP.
I don't think sci-fi is a good predictor because of both the author's bias and society's (i.e. the The Market's) bias against topics that upset it.
A similar point can be made for the physical newspaper aspect; not every author is trying to impart accelerando-esque future shock on their readers. And presumably there isn't infinite market demand for that either. All different aspects of selection bias.
Just yesterday I had a "what's coming" discussion with a couple older (non technical) folk. They thought flying cars and fusion power were coming soon.
I contrasted saying that the energy equation for flying cars doesn't work, not to mention the penalty for mechanical failure. (I mentioned helicopters, they mentioned autonomous drones.)
Fusion power is famously "10 years away" but I maintain its simply too capital intensive. If I have 10 billion to invest do I want to make a stunningly complicated fusion power plant, (which will produce power 10 years after the project starts) or do I just buy a bunch of desert, a mountain of solar panels and enough wire to connect it to the grid? Staffed by some cleaners and electricians. Where the worst that can happen is it goes offline. With no moving parts, no sun-like pressures or temperatures.
And yet back in the 50s "free" energy and flying cars were "imminent".
We had fusion power 35 years ago[1], but "The Science"(TM) says it can't possibly work, so it doesn't. Instead we're forced to receive fusion energy via sunny days and big photovoltaic panels.
I've recently come to believe this stuff (cheap energy) was figured out in the 1950s, but they quickly realized that it would enable anyone to make a "gadget" that would make the "super" look like a firecracker, and put a very, very strong lid on the whole thing.
With the increasing adoption of AI into people's workflows I think this is something that's really important to be thinking about. AI is a paradigm shifting technology whether you like it or not.
Or is "AI" just a kind of a fax machine (from the post) which Big Tech is trying to morph into something profitable (e.g. loading it up with ads/commercial responses "optimised" just for you)
Readit News
Very few saw a world dominated by giant advertising firms. Or computing becoming a branch of advertising. Even in science fiction. There was Fowler Schocken Associates, in The Space Merchants (1952). The company behind the simulated world in Simulacron-3 (1964) builds it so they can do market testing and opinion polls. As late as "AI" (2001), the tie between search and ads hadn't appeared. In "AI", the "Dr. Know" search service is an expensive pay service.
Because cyberpunk basically got everything right. Unfortunately.
I'll play the contrarian here regarding the article: it's likely that many people did actually predict the future, but they lacked the platform to broadcast their message.
Cyberpunk didn't really get consolidated as a genre until the 1980s although dystopias had been written about before then. It was in the 80s that the core cyberpunk themes of computer hackers and evil corporations really came together in their current dystopian form.
Off-topic I know, but 100% this. Modern hang-gliders are amazing: easy to learn, unbelievable glide performance and handling, cheap to buy and learn. The 'whoosh' of energy retention as you pull in and push out has to be felt to be believed.
The same goes for paragliders: their speed and glide makes a mockery of my intuition as a ex-physicist and they fit in a rucksack. I'm a rubbish pilot and I've still managed to fly over a hundred kilometres on a paraglider.
https://youtu.be/OpemglwS8XA?feature=shared
Which are a step up from even the most sophisticated "hang glider", assuming that hang glider refers to the kite type thing that you hang underneath and steer with body weight shifting.
I'm pretty sure even the best paragliders aren't anywhere near 40:1 L/D ratios.
I'm struggling to come up with an older example of prominent ads in sci fi, but I'm drawing a blank.
https://archive.org/details/come-buttercup-come-daisy
It's episode 12 in the zip file. A lot of the stories for the series came from well known science fiction writers of the time. All four years of the series are on the Internet Archive. The Midas Plague is a comedy, some of the other episodes are truly frightening.
'Prescient', perhaps?
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wow. such a succinct way of putting it. ugly too. and probably at least mostly truthful.
They just don’t get noticed by the general public or mass culture, this is practically a tautology.
Dead Comment
On a related note, I think one reason that SF was so uniformly positive about space flight was that if you were writing in the 60s and 70s you would have been looking at almost a century of dramatic improvements in travel including steam trains, submarines, cars, prop planes, jets, and then rockets to the moon. With space shuttles and similar on the drawing board. People just assumed this would continue.
What very few SF writers understood was that all of these exploited chemical energy which is very limited in terms of how much can be lifted out of the Earth's gravity well and how fast you can go once you are up there. Many SF authors arm-waved atomics or nuclear propulsion but these, in the real world, never took off, as it were. Not in any mass transit to the stars sense, at least.
Edit: In reality space travel hit a hard brick wall due to the laws of physics. Most other forms of travel have experienced massive incremental improvements in reliability, efficiency, affordability, etc, but very few cars and and planes and ships actually now go much faster than they did 50 years ago.
We needed scientists to build equipment to spy on the Russians harder than they were spying on us. That meant, among other things, winning the hearts and minds of the kinds of people who would grow up to be scientists.
"Understood?" They were writing fiction, not instruction manuals.
Infrastructure like roads were massively built or improved during this timeframe.
Nowadays things are moving fast in technology and some other sector but it's far from being the case for instance with car. They are basically the same 4 wheel petrol engine that we had 80 years ago.
I think its normal back then to guess that everything was going to keep evolving just as fast as it did. They had no way to know that the industrial revolution was ending.
Deleted Comment
Sure? Just maintaining them close to their original quality seems to be a challenge at times. Bridges that are close to coming down are another related issue.
- engine tech is now such that we no longer need one huge engine and lots of passenger to get good efficiency: many small engines works just as well.
- removing the need for everyone to stop where any one person needs to go ("bus stop") improves the experience drastically.
- the one remaining problem is density: cars would have to shrink a lot before they can reach the density of busses or trains.
So perhaps: a single-lane highway only accessible to self-driving vehicles driving in formation and where the vehicles must be below some specified size.
This gives us great last-mile experience, high throughput, and good safety.
Wait...
She saw computers go from room-size to PCs. She saw the birth of aviation and people walk on the moon. She saw electrification and indoor plumbing. She saw cars go from rare toys for the super rich to commonplace.
"A Logic Named Joe" is a fascinating story, which has also been discussed on HN occasionally.
The predictions we have left are from industry expert or pretty successful people. Fundamentally they fit well in their current world and aren't envisioning social or technical shifts that will completely change the world as they know it.
This is most apparent in the telephone and international fax part, where they see the future of networking through telephone, and not some other technology making it obsolete. We'd have had a different prediction asking AM amateurs how they see the world of telephone communication in 50~100 years (might not have been correct either, but would have been different)
Yes, Asimov's Foundation has people smoking, reading physical newspapers and using physical money, lining up for customs when arriving to Trantor. No women until later on in the series (in his defense, he may have not talked to many women at the age he wrote the first novels).
There was movable sidewalks and other transportation devices though.
The stories also have to be marketable to contemporary audiences. There may have been brilliant sci-fi at the time about strong, health-minded female protagonists, but I doubt it would have risen to popularity in 1950s society, and thus would have been forgotten.
You can see the effects today with some of the backlash against certain Disney IP.
I don't think sci-fi is a good predictor because of both the author's bias and society's (i.e. the The Market's) bias against topics that upset it.
I contrasted saying that the energy equation for flying cars doesn't work, not to mention the penalty for mechanical failure. (I mentioned helicopters, they mentioned autonomous drones.)
Fusion power is famously "10 years away" but I maintain its simply too capital intensive. If I have 10 billion to invest do I want to make a stunningly complicated fusion power plant, (which will produce power 10 years after the project starts) or do I just buy a bunch of desert, a mountain of solar panels and enough wire to connect it to the grid? Staffed by some cleaners and electricians. Where the worst that can happen is it goes offline. With no moving parts, no sun-like pressures or temperatures.
And yet back in the 50s "free" energy and flying cars were "imminent".
I've recently come to believe this stuff (cheap energy) was figured out in the 1950s, but they quickly realized that it would enable anyone to make a "gadget" that would make the "super" look like a firecracker, and put a very, very strong lid on the whole thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion