Communications futurism

[mmcirvin]

The relative accuracy on display in this 1967 futurist film (which apparently convinced some people that it was fake), and some musing about Profiles of the Future on the occasion of Arthur C. Clarke's 90th birthday, lead me to propose the following general rule:

20th century futurism concerning communication devices is almost always much more accurate than any other type of 20th century futurism.

Reading the Paleo-Future blog for a while makes this fairly clear. We honestly do seem to have ended up with a world in which a lot of science-fictional communication devices became real, with some superficial changes. Commonplace videophones were one of the canonical failed predictions for a long time, but they're slowly emerging, albeit in a somewhat different form. People kept thinking up something like e-commerce in various guises. These "ristos" aren't on our wrists because that's kind of a bad place to put them, but, otherwise, if anything they're a highly conservative description of modern mobile phones (also, check out this 1910 article). And television was probably the real major 20th-century invention that had the most advance publicity, decades before it actually emerged—to the extent that it made some modern blog commenters think this 1900 Ladies Home Journal article was fake. Big flat-screen wall displays appeared all over the place, of course, from "The Machine Stops" to Fahrenheit 451. The details aren't quite right but it's a far cry from Moon cities and meals-in-a-pill; predictions are as likely to be too conservative as too wild.

I suppose the big exception—the flying car or ray pistol of the genre—is the proliferation of holographic video displays in futurism and science fiction from the 1970s and 1980s. Simple holograms rapidly became cheap and cheesy consumer items, and there are various ways to hack a (usually headache-inducing) stereoscopic display with some depth to it, but I don't think you're going to get a holographic TV any time soon. Oh, yeah, and automated language translation is a lot lamer in reality than in the predictions, though it doesn't keep people from using it anyway.

Comments

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Though PK Dick of all people got the automatic language translation right.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Now that I think of it, it's a little odd that he has an intelligent humanoid robot show up later in the same book (if I recall correctly). But, then, internally consistent worldbuilding is not a good thing to expect from PKD.

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Machine translators seems to me to deserve the kind of out that FTL drives get: they're needed to get the plot moving, so the writer doesn't look too hard at the assumptions there.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

That half of what they do is wrong, often laughably so?

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Specifically, writing in 1969, he posited that one of the uses of the voice-translation system would be for people to read in the title of a book into an English-to-Japanese translator, record the translation, then play the translation back into a Japanese-to-English translator, with hilarious effect. Eg "The Great Gatsby" comes out "The Latticework Gun Stinging Insect" et cetera.

(This was all a minor throwaway mainly intended to illustrate the pointlessness of the protagonist's life before he gets sucked into the main plot.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Dick was probably inspired by popular anecdotes of the time (most of them probably embellished or entirely made up) about early efforts at machine translation, in which somebody forward-and-back-translates a common idiom and gets something ridiculous out. "Out of sight, out of mind" becomes "invisible idiot"; "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" becomes "the wine is excellent but the meat is rancid", etc.

His clever correct guess, in my opinion, wasn't so much the part about machine translation as the speculation about what bored office workers in an age of networked computers would do with their time.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Quoting myself with an example that buttresses your point, written in May 2001:

I recently attended a talk in Chicago by Frederick I. Ordway III, technical advisor on 2001: A Space Odyssey. [...] Ordway showed a fascinating short film made to show theatre owners several months before the release, with the message "Here's this big space epic we're making, with lots of accurate science in it." Not a glimpse of apes nor psychedelia appears, but we see a lot about props and sets from the middle part of 2001. I liked the dollhouse-size centrifuge model they built to plan the big Vickers centrifuge set. One item that never made it into the final cut, a briefcase computer with integrated phone, video, and printer, got a laugh from the audience-- probably because it looked so 1983-retro.



In other words, this device was quite futuristic for 1968, but by 2001 we had overshot the future it was made for...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Ordway's remarks are interesting—I was never quite sure what sort of engines the Discovery was supposed to have, except that they were obviously nuclear. Gaseous-core fission rockets, eh?

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

For a while they were planning on nuclear pulse, _a la_ _Orion_. You can still see some of that in the wide "plate" around the exhaust nozzles.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

HAL's visual displays make me giggle, as do the computer readouts in all of the pre-TNG Star Trek movies. (Watch Spock playing chess with the computer in The Voyage Home.) Graphical user interfaces definitely overshot everything that anyone predicted. Or maybe it's just because filmmakers couldn't resist using modern computer games as models for their futuristic computers.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

I think it has more to do with expectations. There are still occasional sci-fi films or even contemporary thrillers that have those slightly-slow letter-by-letter visual displays. It's probably most comical when there's also a lot of CGI in the film.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Most of the mocked-up displays in "2001" strike me as not that bad in design, though they're spare and wireframey and are often clearly being displayed with film projection. The lights projected on Dave's face from the display console of his space pod make no sense, but I chalk that up to poetic license.

In some ways, the 1980s tech used in "2010" seems more primitive (there's a scene in which Roy Scheider lounges on the beach and uses what is clearly an Apple IIc with the never-shipped LCD attachment--though no power cord is in sight).

Hey, I remember that film!

[notr.livejournal.com]

I must have seen it a couple years later on TV or at a fair or something. I never knew it starred the lady who stole Spock's brain!

I am legend?

[timchuma.livejournal.com]

There are now three versions of this film starring Vincent Price, Charlton Heston and Will Smith respectively. I don't know if I will see the new version.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Don't. They gave it a happy ending that makes no sense.

Re: I am legend?

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

You forgot Night of the Living Dead.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

Another observation: the place where science fiction and futurism fails the biggest is social prediction. I'm having a tough time thinking of any old SF that got something right about the social side of the future.

OK, maybe Heinlein's prediction of sex cults... but that's only because people started basing religions on Stranger in a Strange Land.

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

There are bits and pieces... "The Machine Stops" did a good job of predicting how modern communications technologies would cut into face-to-face interactions, for instance. (See also Dick predicting that translation software would be used for stupid word games, or Heinlein having a teenage character deliberately "forget" his cell phone so his mom can't call him).

But it's hard to separate out individual social predictions in the way that you can separate out individual technological predictions.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The best thing about the PKD episode (from "Galactic Pot-Healer") is that they're clearly goofing off on the Internet, or something much like it.

Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" from 1946, which I keep mentioning, is not only the king hell champion of SFnal prescience with its networked home computers described as nearly physically identical to modern ones, but also manages to nail about a dozen actual uses and social phenomena revolving around them, including a character who basically Googles her old boyfriend and cyberstalks him. But gender relations in the story are very much mid-C20.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

John Brunner has some wonderful social predictions in the background. Were you thinking of earlier SF?

[smashingstars.livejournal.com]

I'm one of the people who thought the 1900 Ladies Home Journal article was fake... I'm still not convinced. It's probably been proven to be real, right? I just recall a fake 1950s home ec thing floating around that was an exaggerated re-wording of an original, and the LHJ article struck me the same way.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I pretty much trust the Paleo-Future guy; much of what he posts, I've seen from independent sources, and I think in this case he actually scanned the article in from a library microfilm, something he does a lot. (That was, I think, after the original controversy over the article, if I recall correctly.)

Fake stuff that reads sort of like this does go around a lot as pass-it-around email legends (I recall a supposed early-20th-century list of rules for factory employees that Snopes debunked).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I want to know what that one commenter says is non-period typography in the piece.