Ever feel like you're living in the Future?

[Astro Pen]

When I was a kid Winston Churchill was PM. A little later Sputnik bleeped around the world. I read shelves full of Asimov et al.
But they were not the future that arrived. Orwell, it seems, was closer to the mark, with a touch of Huxley.
Mass human space travel, lets be honest, is never coming. Only machines are robust enough to conquer the universe. We are hopelessly fragile off our planet.
Of course with the AI thing we are getting the first glimpse of the singularity. I think it is both unstoppable and probably a perfectly natural evolutionary progression to a post biological world. There are already markers along that road and they are extrapolable. Letting machines make our decisions is the current folly, algorithms, profiling and such. Machine consciousness is the critical junction, you can just see it in the long headlights now but it will happen so fast, so very fast, when it does. And it won't be asking permission.

For now, though, the bit of the 'future' that I enjoy most are the telescopes, Hubble and Webb. They show me the delightful complexity of the universe I live in. It is quasi religious being able to see it all, this is my birth place, in the middle of all this splendour, Energy made material.

It is designed, it has to be. No dice could roll enough sixes to match the perfectly balanced interacting physics of the universe.

 

[paranoid marvin]

When I was a kid Winston Churchill was PM. A little later Sputnik bleeped around the world. I read shelves full of Asimov et al.
But they were not the future that arrived. Orwell, it seems, was closer to the mark, with a touch of Huxley.
Mass human space travel, lets be honest, is never coming. Only machines are robust enough to conquer the universe. We are hopelessly fragile off our planet.
Of course with the AI thing we are getting the first glimpse of the singularity. I think it is both unstoppable and probably a perfectly natural evolutionary progression to a post biological world. There are already markers along that road and they are extrapolable. Letting machines make our decisions is the current folly, algorithms, profiling and such. Machine consciousness is the critical junction, you can just see it in the long headlights now but it will happen so fast, so very fast, when it does. And it won't be asking permission.

For now, though, the bit of the 'future' that I enjoy most are the telescopes, Hubble and Webb. They show me the delightful complexity of the universe I live in. It is quasi religious being able to see it all, this is my birth place, in the middle of all this splendour, Energy made material.

It is designed, it has to be. No dice could roll enough sixes to match the perfectly balanced interacting physics of the universe.

And the beauty. Nothing could be that wonderful, that awe-inspiring, that beautiful, entirely at random. It's hardly a scientific observation, but doesn't make it any less true.

 

[BAYLOR]

Back to the Future II gets funnier and funner with each passing year .

 

[paranoid marvin]

Back to the Future II gets funnier and funner with each passing year .

I also thought it was clever how they interpreted a cafe from the 80s. My favourite movie out of the trilogy is II. It's the darkest, but it makes the funny bits that much funnier. And the star of the show is always Biff. The movies wouldn't have been half as good as they were without Thomas F. Wilson.

 

[BAYLOR]

I also thought it was clever how they interpreted a cafe from the 80s. My favourite movie out of the trilogy is II. It's the darkest, but it makes the funny bits that much funnier. And the star of the show is always Biff. The movies wouldn't have been half as good as they were without Thomas F. Wilson.

Ive always liked Thomas F. Wilson. He a terrific actor .

We don't have millions of people driving flying Cars and no Mr Fusion . They did manage to get some projection of the year of 2015 sort of correct . And they were almost right about the Cubs winning the World Series except the it happened 2016 and against Cleveland, though thye did forecast Florida Baseball because at the time this fit was made there were no MLB teams in Florida .

 

[Astro Pen]

I just came across this re Back to the Future. A DeLorean copyright case.

Back to the Future’s time machine DeLorean at centre of trademark dispute

With its gullwing doors and nuclear reactor stashed in the boot, the DeLorean sports car may well be the world’s best known time machine.

uk.yahoo.com

Quite honestly this is so ridiculus it reads like a parody.

Quote: "Legal papers submitted to a California federal court claimed “there have been numerous instances of actual consumer confusion”. The company said it had even had “customers approaching the DeLorean Motor Company to purchase DeLorean automobiles in the style of the Time Machine Car”.

the judges response is equally funny:

"District Judge David Carter, who gave permission for a trial, wrote in his preliminary judgment that the Time Machine Car was “heavily modified”.
He explained it had “two external thrusters at the rear of the car, a complex arrangement of external wiring and tubes, exterior lighting, and a personalised number plate reading “OUTATIME”, as well as interior modifications that included a fictional “flux capacitor” powered by an onboard, plutonium-fuelled nuclear reactor”.

 

[bretbernhoft]

Absolutely, the earliest bits of it. But we live in the future now.

 

[THX1138]

I think that the one of the main warnings in Nineteen Eighty Four was that it could happen without anyone realising that it actually already had. Not 'if' or 'when', but 'how long ago'.

And how! From all side and fronts, and how.
Many of us have parents/family that went through one or both sides of WW2 and/or the Cold War in all kinds of ways. Known and unknown.
History will repeat itself until its lesson is learned. And rewriting it or ignoring it won't help because it will blind side you without warning.

 

[Karapace]

many things make me think of being in the future but just lately it is cars. I remember watching UFO in the late sixties and thinking that their cars were so futuristic, now those "future" cars look old fashioned.
Also phones. Star Trek (original series) went from futuristic communicators to the joke in "Voyage home" where everyone one had one in "past" earth to "Looks a bit like an old Nokia and is just a communicator, boring."

 

[Elckerlyc]

I remember old TV programs like Horizon and Tomorrow's World and how fascinated I was by the possible technological developments they showed. Much of that have since been surpassed. Computers have made things possible that we couldn't imagine decades ago, multiple ways of communications that certainly would have looked like pure SF in the 1970. How beautiful the future would be!
But our everyday's world isn't the clean future we imagined. It isn't made or defined by technology, but how people apply those tools. We didn't imagine or predicted the downsides of all that technology and consuming, absorbing ways of communicating the world over. We didn't foresaw how it can be misused, ill-used or abused. Or the warnings weren't taken seriously or simply ignored. 1984? That can't happen really, we're all safe here in our democracy.
The more I saw the downside and risks of social media etc, the more I distanced myself from it. I can not help but distrust all that technology, even my own PC (Goodbye Microsoft, hello Linux.)
So yes, we live in the future, technology-wise. Otherwise it is the same old sick world.

 

[Parson]

I remember old TV programs like Horizon and Tomorrow's World and how fascinated I was by the possible technological developments they showed. Much of that have since been surpassed. Computers have made things possible that we couldn't imagine decades ago, multiple ways of communications that certainly would have looked like pure SF in the 1970. How beautiful the future would be!
But our everyday's world isn't the clean future we imagined. It isn't made or defined by technology, but how people apply those tools. We didn't imagine or predicted the downsides of all that technology and consuming, absorbing ways of communicating the world over. We didn't foresaw how it can be misused, ill-used or abused. Or the warnings weren't taken seriously or simply ignored. 1984? That can't happen really, we're all safe here in our democracy.
The more I saw the downside and risks of social media etc, the more I distanced myself from it. I can not help but distrust all that technology, even my own PC (Goodbye Microsoft, hello Linux.)
So yes, we live in the future, technology-wise. Otherwise it is the same old sick world.

I agree. But that's not surprising because:

(1) People are people, so there will always be those who try to twist technology to their own good while ignoring the good of others.
(2) There is no consensus about the principal that we should treat everyone as having basic human rights. (This I put as the failure of Christianity and other religions to convince the masses that we should "do unto others as you would have them do unto you.")
(3) Any advancement with a great possibility for good has a great possibility for evil as well.
(4) Mass media is really poor with nuance. It almost always shows technology as very largely evil or very largely good. So shows like Star Trek almost always showed the affluent parts of the Federation and not the poorer parts.
(5) I also suspect that part of our disappointment is that when we are younger we tend to see things with little regard for their larger ramifications. I remember thinking about how great that the Freeways in the US often blotted out poor housing and so everybody had better places to live. Since I didn't know anyone whose home was affected by the freeway I had what I now see as not a very enlightened view of what was actually going on.

 

[Karapace]

I agree. But that's not surprising because:

(1) People are people, so there will always be those who try to twist technology to their own good while ignoring the good of others.
(2) There is no consensus about the principal that we should treat everyone as having basic human rights. (This I put as the failure of Christianity and other religions to convince the masses that we should "do unto others as you would have them do unto you.")
etc...

Pretty much my view. People are people good, bad and inbetween. The religion thing is interesting as I see beliefs as quite a complex mix of ideas. On the one hand they promote individual and group well-being and group cohesion beyond that of nation states, but on the other they can be co-opted to "other" those not part of the group and produce a blind adherance to an ideal. As I see it we are very advanced in technology and science and even social cohesion (cities etc.) but in other ways we are still Homo heidelbergensis looking for the next mastodon to kill

 

[JunkMonkey]

I don't feel like I'm living in the future. I feel like I'm living in a remake of the late 1930s with added special effects.
And, not wanting to drag this thread into forbidden territory but as Parson bought the subject up. The failure to convince people to treat each other as they would like to be treated themselves is not just a failure of religion. Lots of other non religious and anti-religious people have dropped the ball on that one too. The concept of universal fairness and empathy for others has nothing to do with whatever gods, demons, or alien space brothers you do or don't believe in.

 

[Christine Wheelwright]

I don't feel like I'm living in the future. I feel like I'm living in a remake of the late 1930s with added special effects.
And, not wanting to drag this thread into forbidden territory but as Parson bought the subject up. The failure to convince people to treat each other as they would like to be treated themselves is not just a failure of religion. Lots of other non religious and anti-religious people have dropped the ball on that one too. The concept of universal fairness and empathy for others has nothing to do with whatever gods, demons, or alien space brothers you do or don't believe in.

I was thinking early 1930s.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Speaking of going backwards, weather reports that told you what was actually going to happen have disappeared, to be replaced by waiting to see what's still standing after the storm goes through.

 

[RDArmstrong]

Somewhat. The recent video capabilities of AI have surprised me in a way where I can't understand how it's possible. Even after researching it a bit, I'm still confused how it can generate such believable scenes that fool the human eye. I didn't expect it this early.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

AI looking smart could be happening because you don't see all the flops it turns out. Monkeys at the keyboard. How many flops are there for each perfect one that comes out. A friend of mine had CoPilot write up an advertisement for his books. Looked very professional, wording was good, but it was ripped from what was already there. I tried it, got books from another author listed as mine. It was the same name but the books never appear on the same author page but they do appear together in web search results. The descriptions of my books started out good but rapidly became nonsense. That's because I don't write mainstream ideas which I believe confuses AI because it has fewer sources to go to get examples of writing it can copy to make up a description. I throw words together in unusual combinations which still make sense, just unlikely to be seen elsewhere. It put together words that didn't make any sense for book descriptions. I tried it two different days, the first time it listed half a dozen books, that's when it created odd descriptions. The next day it would only list 2 books, one was mine, the other was the other author. It listed one author page, even though there are two author pages. Why it picked mine, the right one, seems by chance as it had a book from each author page.

 

[Venusian Broon]

Absolutely feel like I'm living in a future. Might not be one I could have predicted, but I still have memories of late 1970's Scotland and those memories feel like history now, same as crinkly old black and white films of the 1930s!

Possibly every generation since the 1850s has felt that they have been experiencing fast technological 'progress' but I think my experience of the exponential growth in the use of computing since 1980 in all areas of life has been just plain mindboggling.

 

[BAYLOR]

I just came across this re Back to the Future. A DeLorean copyright case.

Back to the Future’s time machine DeLorean at centre of trademark dispute

With its gullwing doors and nuclear reactor stashed in the boot, the DeLorean sports car may well be the world’s best known time machine.

uk.yahoo.com

Quite honestly this is so ridiculus it reads like a parody.

Quote: "Legal papers submitted to a California federal court claimed “there have been numerous instances of actual consumer confusion”. The company said it had even had “customers approaching the DeLorean Motor Company to purchase DeLorean automobiles in the style of the Time Machine Car”.

the judges response is equally funny:

"District Judge David Carter, who gave permission for a trial, wrote in his preliminary judgment that the Time Machine Car was “heavily modified”.
He explained it had “two external thrusters at the rear of the car, a complex arrangement of external wiring and tubes, exterior lighting, and a personalised number plate reading “OUTATIME”, as well as interior modifications that included a fictional “flux capacitor” powered by an onboard, plutonium-fuelled nuclear reactor”.

This overlooks the fact that every law of Physics says that a DeLorean , even one so modified cannot time Travel. And besides, doing such modifications would void the vehicles warranty.

 

[paranoid marvin]

"Those who cammot remember the past are doomed to repeat it."

I think that statement is relevant at least twice a Century.