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- Jul 13, 2015
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There are people who make a living out of predicting trends in technology and possible (they might say likely or highly probable) changes in society and culture that will be the result of new technologies when they are introduced. Some get called "futurologists". I've heard some of them as they make their predictions (prognostications) and the ones I've heard have not sounded very convincing.
And when I watch old science fiction movies that gave dates for Moon bases, visiting Mars, space ships, faster than light travel (which I suspect is purely a plot device because the times taken in real light speed limited travel would break most sci fi plots into sagas of century long and longer durations), and time travel they all seem to have been seriously inaccurate. The Jetsons cartoon predicted we'd all have flying cars by now but obviously we're nowhere near such things yet.
So maybe the near future - say the next 100 years - is not going to be as amazingly different from now as some have predicted. One hundred years ago many, even most, of the substantial things that people had are still with us now. In 1919 people had phones, cars, trains, wide spread commercial aeroplanes were not yet around but came soon, they had electricity, and if you look at house designs from that period and even appliances they had many perhaps most of what we have now. Ours are improved in some ways and also less durable in other ways.
Maybe in 2119 people will still be doing most of the things we do in 2019 and in fundamentally similar ways with essentially the same equipment. Maybe the great robot industrial revolution that is predicted is not about to replace human labour and bring about almost universal unemployment, voluntarism, and a star trek like egalitarian atheist paradise of almost violence free and completely poverty free planetary civilisation - with the only violence being between humans and mean Klingons or Romulans!
And when I watch old science fiction movies that gave dates for Moon bases, visiting Mars, space ships, faster than light travel (which I suspect is purely a plot device because the times taken in real light speed limited travel would break most sci fi plots into sagas of century long and longer durations), and time travel they all seem to have been seriously inaccurate. The Jetsons cartoon predicted we'd all have flying cars by now but obviously we're nowhere near such things yet.
So maybe the near future - say the next 100 years - is not going to be as amazingly different from now as some have predicted. One hundred years ago many, even most, of the substantial things that people had are still with us now. In 1919 people had phones, cars, trains, wide spread commercial aeroplanes were not yet around but came soon, they had electricity, and if you look at house designs from that period and even appliances they had many perhaps most of what we have now. Ours are improved in some ways and also less durable in other ways.
Maybe in 2119 people will still be doing most of the things we do in 2019 and in fundamentally similar ways with essentially the same equipment. Maybe the great robot industrial revolution that is predicted is not about to replace human labour and bring about almost universal unemployment, voluntarism, and a star trek like egalitarian atheist paradise of almost violence free and completely poverty free planetary civilisation - with the only violence being between humans and mean Klingons or Romulans!
