How Soon Is Now?

I notice that a lot of people are focused on what kind of future we live in, and how far along we are in getting there. For instance, I’ve confronted the why-don’t-we-have-flying-cars question. And it seems as though more people are looking in amazement/frustration at how our world has changed from the world we were born into.

I'm wondering why we care so much about that. I mean, I don't remember in, say, the 80’s, people talking about whether or not they were living in the future imagined by people in the 30’s. I suppose that could be because, for people in the twentieth century, the future officially started in the year 2000.

Of course, that brings up the question of whether people in the nineteenth century looked to 1900 as "the future" and if so, how long after the turn of the century did people still think they were living in the future. They had certainly stopped by the time I was born.

It could be that 2000 was special because it was a turn of the millennium rather than just a century, but I suspect it has more to do with people's attitudes. If you remember the story of the patent officer who thought everything has already been invented, it seems people didn't really think they were living in an age of technological progress.

I just looked for a link to the story of the patent officer, and discovered that - surprise, surprise - it's a myth. Further, it turns out that the man in question was actually very optimistic about the many innovations coming in the future.  So that totally undermines my assumption.

Though I don't know if his certainty about the future of invention was shared by everyone at the time. Certainly, by my time in the late twentieth century were keenly aware of the movement of technology. In fact, we took it for granted, and were disappointed when it didn't love up to our expectations, or simply didn't go in the direction we expected. And that's exactly what happened: people of a certain age were promised flying cars, and instead got iPhones. Even someone like myself, who grew up after the period of greatest optimism about the future, still had his expectations coloured by those optimistic assumptions about the future.

Yearly reminder: unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.

— Kyle Marquis (@Moochava) July 10, 2013

I realize this is pretty far down the techno-cultural rabbit hole, even for me. But thinking about ourselves as living in “the future” is probably going to have a big effect on how we look at things. You’d think that would be good; if we think of our world as something we’ve made, perhaps we’ll take a more active and thoughtful role in crafting it well.