I was walking through the parking lot at work and a car moves silently past me, and I got the feeling that I am in the future with everyone walking around with computer screens in their hands and cars with mysterious propulsion.
I sometimes feel like I'm living in the world of the movie Brazil, a nightmare of bureaucracy and thuggish government with sprinklings of technological toys. Artisanal bread and a circus in our pockets.
<p><pre><code> "We eat in restaurants, buy branded toiletries, build
skyscrapers, create legislative institutions, travel in
flying machines, write poetry, and search for meaning in
relationships, temples, and scientific books. Humans have
discovered antibiotics, sent probes into space, decimated
rainforests, shared a billion views of clips of kitten
behaviour, and decoded their own genomes.
But there is one thing that humans have singularly failed
to do, and that is to properly understand their own behaviour. "
— Robert Aunger and Valerie Curtis:
Gaining Control: How human behavior evolved
The Thirties had seen the first generation of American
industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil
sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners; your basic
Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of
decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some
pencil sharpeners looked as though they'd been put
together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change
was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell,
you'd find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a
certain kind of sense, because the most successful
American designers had been recruited from the ranks of
Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a
series of elaborate props for playing at living in the
future.
- William Gibson</code></pre>
Yeah, here are some of my observations on it...<p>Artifical skylight:
<a href="http://twistedsifter.com/2015/02/scientists-develop-artificial-skylight-that-mimics-natural-light/" rel="nofollow">http://twistedsifter.com/2015/02/scientists-develop-artifici...</a><p>Self Driving Cars
<a href="http://www.extremetech.com/tag/self-driving-cars" rel="nofollow">http://www.extremetech.com/tag/self-driving-cars</a><p>Hololens
<a href="http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/21/7868251/microsoft-hololens-hologram-hands-on-experience" rel="nofollow">http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/21/7868251/microsoft-hololens...</a><p>Wikipedia/Google - look up just about anything within seconds<p>Siri/speech interface multi lingual live translation<p>Commercial space projects - Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, SpaceX<p>Self driving cars, Electric Cars, drones, etc... list is growing.
There are a few things that I thought we would (should) have in the mainstream based on science encyclopedias of long ago:<p>1. Spaceplane - this was a big thing a while back and is no longer talkeda bout. Military needs are what drove the technology for airliners, and there is no longer a need for aircraft crews. So they built missile-like X planes instead.<p>2. Ocean thermal energy conversion - Is a big tower that sits in the ocean and grabs energy from the differences in water temp. This was on the cover of one of those kid's future science books. It hasn't been built that I know of.<p>3. Robotic crop harvesting - I don't think these are here yet<p>4. Bipedal robots - I think we are almost there but again, there are more practical designs for military purposes.<p>5. Robotic surgery, tele-presence surgery - not sure if this is a thing yet.
A text I sent to a friend a few months ago:<p>"On shift on 5th and mission. A bus goes by with an ad: WHAT IF THE INTERNET WAS FOR YOU? Mobile phones everywhere. I read this on MY mobile phone: <a href="http://popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-why-urbit-matters/" rel="nofollow">http://popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-...</a> All this while working as a contractor electronic valet. Feels like a Stephenson novel."
You can't strike up a conversation in public any more. Everyone is too occupied with their electronics.<p>You don't get to talk to a human when you call a business - at least, not without great effort. You don't at the grocery store either - self checkout.<p>Daily life has dramatically de-humanized. Yeah, it feels like I live in the future, but I don't like this part of it.
Future was when I watched Steve Jobs flick his finger to scroll through contacts when he was introducing the first iphone. Prior to that I always felt scrolling through 200+ contacts on my sony ericsson phone was unnecessarily hard. It has been almost 8 years since and I can distinctly remember the awe on my face.<p>I am living in the future ever since.
Sometimes it feels like a dumbed down version of the future I expected as a child just a few decades ago, a lot of extremely cool technological improvements but the human race has not improved much.