My treasured copy of the humor classic Science Made Stupid, copyright 1985, contains a Wonderful Future Invention Checklist. Who in 1985 would have thought that just 25 years later, I could check off a third or so of the entries?
- Househould Robot. Does my Roomba count?
- Magnetic Train. Check.
- Flat-Screen TV. Check.
- Flat-Screen 3-D TV. Check.
- Two-Way Wrist Radio. We are so far past this.
- Two-Way Wrist TV. Ditto.
- Intelligent Computer. My computer’s a lot smarter than it looks, honest. It just acts dumb when it has to run Microsoft products.
- Instant Access to All Human Knowledge. Check!
- Human Clones. Getting there.
- First Woman President. Does Secretary of State count?
- First Black President. Check!!
- Universal Language. That would be English.
- X-Ray Specs. My infrared camera sees through clothes.
- World War III. By some accounts, we’re about 9 years into it.
- Access to Other Dimensions. Talk to the string theorists.
- Immortality. Check?
- Spelling Reform. OMG! I cn chk ths 1 off 2.
Some of the other entries, like “Home Holographs”, “Personal Rocket”, and “My Trip to Other Galaxy” might be a bit farther off. But things sure change in a hurry.
What else about your current life do you think would most surprise a time traveler from 25 years ago?
GPS. And the crazy amount of regulations. And the overall huge size of government. And the deep infiltration of environmentalism into schools, businesses, government, everything.
25 years ago I was 6. But from what I remember, I think a lot of people would be surprised at the advent of political correctness on the present scale. I don’t think all political correctness is a bad thing (Dr. Laura got her just desserts for dropping 11 n-bombs in a row). But I think time travelers of the past would be surprised at how strict it’s gotten.
My copy of “Science Made Stupid” is in boxes of my stuff at my Mom’s house. Best line:
“A more detailed explanation may be found on page 29. Then again, it may not.”
Really? Page 29? Uncanny.
Don’t forget the English Channel Tunnel. And my “intelligent” computer allied with microsoft products renders slightly slower than “Instant” access to all human knowledge, but from a 1985 perspective it would be pretty fantastic. I am a bit dubious about the immortality also.
Spelling reform, well text speak is older than we think:
He says he loves U 2 X S,
U R virtuous and Y’s,
In X L N C U X L
All others in his i’s.
– taken from this poem from 1867
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xd8BAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA29&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false
(By spooky coincidence, on page 29!)
Things the 1985 dweller would find amazing:
No USSR, and “friendly” terms with russia.
Nuclear fusion power still 20 years away.
GW Bush got to be president. (he gave up drinking in 1986).
The whole computer thing.
Almost no progress in space travel.
Nelson Mandela got to be president, and was great.
Social mores no longer permit such racist and bigoted speech and attitudes (the PC thing).
Things they may not be so surprised about:
Stock market has overheated and crashed 3 times. Some things never change.
Another surprise for the visitor from 1985 would be the “shrinking” of their music collection, from hundreds or thousands of CDs to one small player.
When my dad was a kid, he was expecting to have his very own Rosie the Robot by now. The Roomba is nice, but it certainly can’t match her charm and wit.
I think the quality of special FX in movies/TV/games/animation etc. Have you watched Jurassic park lately? Looks so hokie but at the time I thought “wow!”.
Not saying CGI is fantastical but when you compare it.
I remember when I first loaded up “Super Mario Bros” on the original NES and was blown away by the advance in graphics.
Looking back, the biggest changes to me over the last 25 years were cell phones, instant messaging, the internet, and email (existed in 1985, but not commonly used). I wonder if the average person in 1985 would recognize how transformative those technologies would be – especially IM and email. The reaction might be “so what?”
In 1985 I would have been blown away by mobile phones. What, you can have a tiny little box that allows you to speak with anyone, anywhere, anytime? Stuff of spies.
My earlier post seems to have vanished into the ether. Probably no great loss.
The fact that I can interact so freely with all of you fine folks during little bits of downtime throughout my day and pick up so much knowledge in the process.
Force Tube Avenue, I don’t know what you were doing in 1985, but personally that year my music collection consisted of LPs, cassettes, and a couple of 8-tracks. I’m not even sure I’d seen a CD at that point, and I definitely didn’t buy my first one until my first year of college, ’88/’89. And I don’t think I was particularly behind the curve there. I didn’t have the bulk of my collection on CD until the mid-90s.
Now consider: today I have 50 albums (about the full size of my collection then) on a device a bit bigger than a cassette tape which is also a mobile phone, camera, video camera, GPS, and conduit to the Internet. Not to mention the fact it is a general purpose computer at least 100x faster than any computer I’d ever used in 1985, and has about 1000x the storage of any computing device I’d ever seen advertised back then. I was an avid science fiction reader and technology fan, and if you’d told me that then I’d have said you were absolutely crazy.
(On the other hand, if you’d have told me we wouldn’t have AI yet, I’d have been stunned…)
Right now I’m in love with online shopping and package tracking — my box of gluten-free bread arrived in Lexington, KY, at 1:19 pm, en route to my friend’s house in California.
I think bittorrenting would be up there (remember when, if you missed watching a show on broadcast tv, you just *missed* it, and had to hope to catch a summer re-run?), as well as webcams (hello vid-phones!). Oh, or Kindles with wi-fi and a connection to Wikipedia, which, as Randall Munroe pointed out, is basically The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe without the inspirational message on the cover.
If they were a scientist, the mapping of the entire human genome, partially accomplished using the downtime of thousands of networked computers in people’s homes, would probably blow them away.
There’s a short story I read once that left a big impression on me (although apparently not big enough to remember the title or author ;-). It postulated a future where there had been a violent revolution to wrest control of information broadcasting from the hands of the few. Instead of all that trouble, we just invented YouTube.
In 1985 they were making the transition from the view that the future was going to be all about space, to the view that it’d be about computers combined with communications. Many time travelers from 1985 would still have the former view, and be surprised by the entire direction everything took. Others would be mostly unsurprised by a lot of it.
But we already knew GPS was coming :) (Well, I did – my Jewish Big Brother was working on it, it was in development throughout the 80s)
The best part of this is that it was all from consumerism. In fact I predict that, in the near future, there will be gay rights to mary. I wouldn’t be surprised if the advanced social media culture we have today will be a helping hand to bring it about.
Rowan: Sometime in the early 90s I remember thinking that pretty soon TV & radio schedules wouldn’t matter, because you’d just subscribe to the programs you wanted, which would become available for download when they were ready, and subscribers could get their copy whenever. All that we were waiting for was a faster Internet backbone. I might’ve thought this as early as 1990 (Brandeis got on the net in January 1990), but I don’t remember. Certainly while I was still an undergrad. What surprised me was how long it took for that model to finally become widespread – I really expected it to happen by the late 90s.
Cos: I think you might have been more prescient than your average time-traveller-from-25-years-ago. Then again, I don’t know what the selection criteria were for the time travel program. ;-)
My disapeared post included an example of a poem from 1867:
He says he loves U 2 X S,
U R virtuous and Y’s
In X L N C U X L
All others in his i’s.
so perhaps we can disregard spelling reform!
My posts seem to be failing to appear – has Steve somehow got a program that can recogise rubbbish?
Harold: for reasons I cannot fathom, a couple of your posts were misclassfied as spam. (My spamcatcher, Akismet, is remarkably accurate and almost never makes these mistakes, but this was one of those rare instances.)
I just went through the spam folder, checking for misclassified posts, and retrieved two of yours before I mistakenly hit the wrong button and deleted all the rest of the alleged spam. If anything more of yours is missing, that’s why, and I apologize.
Speaking of ’85, I’ve recently been watching the Back to the Future trilogy with my youngin, which, of course, was centered in ’85.
We’re 5 years from the future they visited in Back to the Future II and I am still holding out for one of those hover boards.
I second Sol’s amazement with the gadgets that allow us to carry our music collections in our pockets and listen to folks like Russ Roberts and Mike Munger talk to each other while I mow my lawn. Heck, much of this stuff has come a long way in the last 10 years, let alone 25.
I have some old rolls of film that I’m hoping will be worth some money some day.
Steve, I’m interested in Numann’s analysis concerning maximizing two or more variables at the same time – I was wondering if you could shed some light onto that subject.
Chicago Methods: I confess to not being sure what you’re referring to. If you can help with that, I’ll see what I can do.
Well Steve, I’ll be honest with you. I just got done reading “Tragidy of the Commons” and I’m a bit disturbed at the call for coercive action against population growth. It discussed Numann’s theoretical concept of not being able to maximize two or more variables at once. Is it just recognizing a minimax scenario or what are they really talking about?
Home Holograph:
http://www.reghardware.com/2010/08/17/fujifilm_finepix_real_3d_w3/
There have been film-based versions of this available since about 1985 or so.
You can also buy 3d televisions which do not require special glasses, though they are currently extremely expensive.
Chicago Methods: I think Garett Hardin claims in that essay that von Neumann says you cannot maximize two variables at once, although I don’t see why you couldn’t maximize two variables among many if you have an exchange ratio between the two variables. That is, if you know what one variable is worth in terms of the other.
On a lighter note, whenever I ask clients if they want to optimize for speed or cost they always answer, “Both.”
Chicago Methods (and Jeff Semel): Yes, Hardin does (rather hilariously, in my opinion) cite von Neumann and Morgenstern for the principle that you can’t, in general, hope to maximize two things at the same time, and goes on (even more hilariously) to say that the principle dates back “at least” to d’Alembert in the 18th century. But it is, I think, quite obvious to any five year old that you can’t, for example, spend your entire day indoors and simultaneously spend your entire day outdoors, which is all that Hardin is saying. But we’re quite off topic here, aren’t we?
Speaking of Back to the Future, I caught that clip of 2 yesterday with the hoverboards as well. I find it very funny how we think about the future- how certain things we seem sure will happen, like those flying cars, without even thinking about huge advances in other areas that change our way of life. If you look closely at the movie among all the flying cars and hoverboards you can see people waiting in line for a phone booth. How surprising would it be, coming from 1985 and expecting flying cars, to instead see cell phones and find out they were probably even more revolutionary!
“Instant Access to All Human Knowledge. Check!”
And for no additional cost, you get instant access to all human stupidity!
Cos: “But we already knew GPS was coming :) (Well, I did – my Jewish Big Brother was working on it”
“Jewish Big Brother”? You’ve probably managed to attract a fair amount of dubious traffic to this blog. :-)
It’s often difficult to explain to non-gamers the extent to which video games have advanced since 1985, but it has been exponential in terms of production values (e.g. graphics, sound, animation, voice acting), technology (optical sensors, autostereoscopy), content delivery (digital distribution), user interface (dual analog sticks, touchscreens, motion controls), player interaction (online matches, cooperative play), and immersion (persistent worlds), to name a few. Entire universes have been spawned from gods called programmers.
What’re the biggest disappointments?
I think it’s transportation.
In ’85 you could take a commercial supersonic flight, not now.
In ’85 I think it still seemed possible we would have been to Mars in the forseeable future.
Today, I can’t see it happening for at least 75 to 100 years.