[FORUM] What cultural trends do you think will shape the future?

[rfmcdpei]

A recent Jamais Cascio blog post, "The Future Isn't What It Used to Be", talks about the failures--the lack of vision, at least--of futurologists. Predictions are made and very often turn out to be false. Why? Basic assumptions are flawed.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the role technological change plays in futurism. The big picture visions

Comments

[dsgood]

Flying cars were supposed to completely replace ground cars after WW II ended.

We do now have videophones which people actually use -- but in 1967, they were supposed to completely replace voice-only phones by 2000.

[mmcirvin]

And they were imagined as working like the landline phones of that era, but with video.

However, I'd have to say (as I've said elsewhere) that old futurism about telecommunications was more on the mark than futurism about anything else. There were lots of stories in the Seventies about the universal wristwatch phones of the future, frequently making reference to Dick Tracy strips from much further back than that. They got the shape and location wrong, and they were often imagined as working by direct satellite links instead of cell towers, but functionally they pretty much came about as described by the end of the 1990s and then evolved further.

[mindstalk]

Stories going back to the 1930s or earlier, really
http://mindstalk.net/sfpred.html

[mmcirvin]

People often talk about the Star Trek communicator as if it were amazingly prescient, but I don't think it was that remarkable an example. For one thing, there were all these prior examples. For another, the Original Trek communicator, which crewmembers typically used just to communicate with the ship when they were away from it, wasn't really a wireless phone; it was a walkie-talkie, something that was already in widespread use at the time. Imagining that a Vietnam-era walkie-talkie could be miniaturized to a small flip handset was pretty modest futurism. (The ability to talk unassisted to a spaceship a very long way off is more remarkable, but today's cell phones don't do that either.)

(In the Seventies, there were functioning toy walkie-talkies styled like Star Trek communicators, though of course they were bulkier than the ones on TV.)

[mmcirvin]

Predictions of sociocultural change also have a strong tendency to be based on whatever the most recent big shocking headlines were; it's very hard to distinguish atypical events from the New Normal at close range. By the end of September 2001, most Americans assumed that from now on we'd be besieged with world-shaking hyperterrorist attacks on famous landmarks all the time.

[robertprior]

By the end of September 2001, most Americans assumed that from now on we'd be besieged with world-shaking hyperterrorist attacks on famous landmarks all the time.

Viewed from the outside, it seems like a lot of them still assume that.

[mmcirvin]

...Anyway, you wanted actual predictions of sociocultural trends for coming decades. Here are some shots in the dark

[mmcirvin]

Not seeing the second. Smaller electric cars beats complete reordering of the urban structure. Absent that, then, what's the logic?

[ext_550529]

Randy --- look at the guy's list of "unpredicted" developments. Every single one of them (save the last) was not only predicted by 1995; they were well under way! So tell me, why doesn't that completely blow away this fellow's credibility?

[ext_550529]

To be fair, the "collapse of the E.U.," but even there this guy is talking about the collapse of something --- EMU --- that didn't exist in 1990, but was expected, and was controversial precisely because many economists thought it to be a bad idea. I ask again, why is he credible?