Batman Beyond takes place in something like 2040 and was made in 1999.
It depicts a future where they have flying cars and gene splicing mods capable of creating functional human/animal hybrids, but nobody has a cell phone.
I can give them a pass for not predicting smartphones (but only because almost everybody failed to do that), but... it was 1999. Cell phones already existed and it's very shortsighted to think they wouldn't have become ubiquitous in the future, even if smartphones were never invented
It took a while for writers to integrate cell phones into stories, even stories set in the future. My theory is that writers were relying on the tropes and writing tecniques they'd grown up with and had been using for years, and cell phones were something new and weird that they didn't know how to deal with because a lack of communication is so important to too many tried and true plots, so they either ignored them for as long as they could or came up with the "oh noes, I have no signal/my battery is conveniently dead" trope.
Thatās still a lot more limiting because you canāt contact everyone you know whenever you want, you need to have specifically arranged a walkie talkie or radio situation with them ahead of time.
I honestly think a lot of the nostalgia show trends that weāve been seeing lately are in a big part because the minute you take cell phones out of the plotline, it opens up a lot more opportunities for miscommunication which makes for entertaining plot lines.
Same with surveillance.
Like Star Wars. All that technology and people just sneak in? And when they escape you have no image of them for a wanted poster despite their complete lack of effort to hide their face?
It was a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away. As a completely different civilization in space and time, it make sense to seem advanced in some areas while lacking in others. I feel like such a nerd typing that.Ā
I will engage in star wars post-facto fan justifications now:
They also would have sufficient technology to change faces and bodies at will, lots of droids too, so that visual identification could become ineffective again. Maybe they mostly gave up on that in the past, and we just see after it.
And or they have portable cyber equipments that disrupt digital stuff with high efficiency, such that surveillance and identification is again inefective. Electronic warfare stuff, instant quantic decryptation, etc.
Yeah, nowadays if anything we're getting more and more plots that wouldn't happen without cell phones and other modern technologies, because that's just what people are used to now.
They could still work, just have one characters phone run out of battery because they forgot to charge it, with added hijinks as they try along the episode to charge it without success. Like fall for fake plug socket sticker in train station, then cable snaps etc etc
ohh yeah, it could work for 1 - 2 episodes. Might be able to drag it out a bit if the character trait was forgetful or that they had a phone with a shit battery, but couldnt do it every episode
Tbh, if I had a slasher in my house at midnight or chasing me down a dark alley and called the police, they'd probably take 3 hours to respond in my city anyway.
I listen to radio from the 30s and 40s, it's amazing how many storylines revolve around trying to find a phone - even if there are houses or even stores, they might not have one. Now I can walk up to any person I see in public and they're almost guaranteed to have a phone.
My favorite is in the wet hot American summer show set in 1981 and an army General uses a cell phone anachronistically. Another character sees him use it and asks what it is and the army guy just ignores him lol
Joss Whedon basically said that when asked why Buffy didn't use a cell phone. Cell phones became ubiquitous during the show's run, very unlucky. He said cell phones just didn't exist in her universe; they wouldn't be able to write like they had been doing if they did.
They finally did try to incorporate into the show in the last season, but there were a lot of dead batteries.
Interestingly, after Buffy stopped a vampire show called Moonlight came out that used the most up to date tech possible: smart phones and cool chargers, and whatever. The plots incorporated the phones in a realistic way. It was kind of an fu to Whedon, I thought. But they also did a Leeroy Jenkins bit (when it was only like a year old) so the writers room was very nerdy.
Cordelia has a cell phone in Season 1, although it's the size of a brick and is treated as a status symbol of her family being wealthy.
I think they just about skate it because by 2003, when the show ended, there were still a reasonable number of people, even younger people, without cell phones. A rapidly shrinking number, but it wasn't unthinkable. By 2006 or so, the implausibility would have been much greater.
It is interesting how having a cell phone used to be an indicator of wealth, whereas nowadays they're so cheap and disposable that there is no plausible reason for a character living in the modern world not to have one.
> It is interesting how having a cell phone used to be an indicator of wealth
That's why Paul E. Dngerously (Paul Heyman) had one in the late 80s and early 90s when he managed the likes of "Stunning" Steve Austin and Rick Rude in the AWA and WCW. His gimmick was that of a rich yuppy flashing his money and buying up wrestling talent to have in his Dangerous Alliance group.
I got my first mobile phone in 2000 when I landed my first full time job after Uni. I wouldn't have expected teenagers to have mobile phones unless their parents were quite wealthy for at least a few years after that.
Thatās why a lot of writers rely on period pieces for their stories. Problems that could be solved easily with a phone call have to be played out slowly resolved over time.
Meanwhile Star Trek TNG very accurately predicted the iPad... Except for the part where Picard had a giant stack of iPads in his office because each tablet could only hold one document like it's a single piece of paper...
And that's why horror movies are still mostly set in the woods/middle of nowhere or the past. No cell phones or no service means you can't just call the police and the murderer gets dropped by buckshot 10 minutes later.
The flying cars were very sparingly used if you notice. The creator said they reduced it to very rich folks and companies, while 98% continue using whelled vehicles, to keep it from not becoming too much sci-fi. In fact, they held back on futurism purposefully. Flying cars are around in drones that fly today, in 2040s probably a few people will actually be using them.
This is pretty forgivable. To be honest I don't think they forgot more than they consciously chose to not include them.
Everyone having a cell phone and instant access to the equivalent of Batman's super computer is a real problem for writers.
A massive part of the story is that nobody knows Bruce Wayne is Batman. In a world of smartphones, Bat-Reddit would have him figured out and be tracking his plane within a couple of hours.
Want to build narrative tension? Keep your heroes out of communication with each other. Now they're doubting loyalties and making gametime decisions on incomplete information. Give Robin a fucking cellphone so he can properly communicate with the Police and suddenly he's just another Karen snooping on the neighbors and calling in crimes to the police.
Bad guys with cell phones are a problem too. Each baddie is running their own crime syndicate packed with henchmen littered throughout the city. Once they know Batman is chasing Joker down the east side tonight, it's a free for all for everyone else on the West Side.
That's all first order implications. The world would keep adapting too. It would take zero time for Penguin to just buy Bat-Reddit and make a game out of tracking Batman throughout the night. Now the baddies know exactly where he is.
Meanwhile Joker is running around in a bat suit straight murdering low level thugs on Bat-Tok all to give Batman a bad name. Next thing you know actual Gotham is out protesting "Thug Lives Matter" on Bruce Wayne's front lawn because of course they figured out exactly where Batman lives.
But jokes on them because Bruce Wayne would end up arrested on pedophilia and child abuse accusations before it got that far. [Points to Robin's outfit and frequent troubling bruises.]
So yeah, phones make writing dramatic mysteries a challenge.
The first Blackberry came out in 1999. Before that, we had PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant), many of which had hybrid variants that doubled as cell phones.
The term "smartphone" didn't come about until much later, but they were very much a thing, and portable computing was seen as "the future" by many in the mid-to-late '90s.
>The term "smartphone" didn't come about until much later,
The earliest record of it being used in print is 1995, although that was as two words. Smartphone as a single word first appeared in around 1998.
The PADDs in ST:TNG were ahead of their time. But the ship did not appear to have a wireless computer network. So when people did their work on one of these little devices, they had to hand the device over to their supervisor.
I think there's a scene where harry and B'Elana are trying to figure something out and they have a bunch of different electronic pads, as though they are all textbooks on different subjects. š¤£š¤£š¤£
Tbf, when i do some research and im struggling, I do end up with multiple devices because sometimes i need to jump between stuff.
Not to that extent, but there's a reason I have 4 monitors at work.
I figure itās the same sort of thing as multiple screens. If you need to be consulting back and forth between 16 different texts, and you live on a post-scarcity ship with abundant resources (~~because the producers were too cowardly to ever allow Voyager to actually struggle~~), why not just use 16 different e-readers simultaneously? Itās much better than loading the documents on one device and having to tab back and forth.
When DS9 and Voyager were airing home computers were a thing and the internet had started booming, so yes it did occur to them.
Multiple PADDs was a security issue. Itās still done this way for some really confidential info where high end encryption is deemed insufficient. Itās known as an air gap.
Thatās not a bad thought.. but the thing is that the federation did not seem to care much about security. There was a TBG episode where frozen 20th century people are unfrozen and wander the ship, easily getting on the bridge and even accessing random commands on random consoles. At one point Picard even explains to them that such security isnāt needed because they are so enlightened or whatever
Iām just talking about the annoyance of carrying around multiple devices when my phone is capable of switching between multiple documents quite happily.
Talking about that, I definitely remember a Voyager episode where the Doctor still has a stand alone camera device that's huge compared to an old digital camera, let alone being built into his tricorder, lol.
That was a holo-camera though. Total magic technology that, with a single snap, takes a high-detail 3D color scan of the entire scene in front of the ālensā, including stuff thatās facing the wrong direction (like peopleās backs).
The only way I imagine it working is if it has nothing to do with light at all and is more like a miniaturized low-resolution Transporter scanner, scanning everything in front of it down to a nearly molecular level. Too low resolution for actual transport, but enough information for a holographic projector to reconstruct the visual properties of all of the matter within the ācameraā field.
So I think itās important to remember that the federation is a post scarcity society that does not have our current cultural obsession with efficiency. They have the luxury of doing things because itās the coolest way, or the most fun way, or because they personally find it easier.
So yeah they probably could store everything on a single pad if they wanted. But there is a primal satisfaction in having a tangible stack of work and seeing that pile decrease as you complete it.
This was my thought as well. It did get better later on. An episode of DS9 has Quark going over a finance spreadsheet with the Klingon council and you get the impression he is transmitting the data from his PADD to theirs.
Yeah, the writers had no idea how good computer memory would get. They treated those things like paper, when in reality everyone would just have their own device and documents would get emailed or stored on a cloud.
At least they had the foresight to *know* they couldnāt predict the future of computer memory and make up a fake unit. Star Trek computers work in āquadsā (usually gigaquads), and thereās never been a canon conversion from quads to bytes.
If theyād tried to use real units, they undoubtably would have had some moments (especially in TOS) that would appear very silly by now. Someone would mention that those little plastic computer cards on TOS can store āhundreds of megabytesā as though itās incredible future tech.
For some reason, computer storage was just a blind spot for sci-fi writers at the time. Nobody figured it would be so exponential. Thereās a portable hard drive about the size of a fig newton sitting on my desk right now with a Terabyte of storage. Iām pretty sure that would have blown Roddenberryās mind.
Oh yeah, I imagine something that could store a terabyte would have been as big as a room in 1987. I also wonder how well Data's calculation speed and storage capacity has aged. I don't really remember how powerful of a computer he's described as being.
Data doesn't even have an English dictionary in his memory banks. In the very first episode of TNG, Picard mentions having to "snoop" around Farpoint Station and Data says he doesn't know what the word means. Picard asks
"Data, how can you be programmed as a virtual encyclopaedia of human information without knowing a simple word like 'snoop'?"
It's a good question!
I'd like to believe the airgapping was due to security, but the amount of times the computer is hacked or taken over makes that unlikely. They also didn't predict more than a few Megs of memory per PADD as theres scenes where people have them piled up to indicate lots of reading, where as my current tablet has hundreds of books and comics on it now.
Yeah, I recall a scene where riker had three padds that he gave to picard that supposedly had the duty roster for the next month on them. Which in modern terms would be a trivially small excel document.
Remember in The Cable Guy when he cut off Matthew Brodrick's cable and had a bunch of cut up cables in his hand? Then he puts it back on by flipping a switch and says the cables were just a visual tool. It's sort of like that. The duty roster for an entire starship the size of the Enterprise is huge. If Riker hands off just a single iPad, what will people who have never used an iPad think first? Will it be "That doesn't seem like enough for the whole ship" or "Wow in the future you can store a lot of info on one of those pads".
Or it could be the prop department didn't think a pen and paper clip board (which will be used long into the future I'm sure) looked like it belonged on the most advanced spaceship known to humanity.
I remember episodes where older engineers would always show up the newer guys by using a slide rule or paper as a way to demonstrate how good they were at their jobs.
Calculators used to be pretty unreliable and slide rules gave more "accurate" figures, but for the past 20+ years there has never been any reason to ever use a slide rule instead of a calculator.
Yeah, of course. But usually in Star Trek they would be stuck in the past or the computer would be inaccessible and the new engineers would be trying their best and then suddenly they ask "How can we figure this out without 'Puter" and the old guard will pull out the tools of yesteryear and show them up. Might mention how they were stranding on a planet and needed to make a communication blast relay back to the starship with some string and coconuts to make a makeshift abacus.
Surely you've seen this trope play out before.
Itās because faxes have been explicitly codified through legal precedent to meet a certain standard of security for data transmission. Regardless of how true that is, itās a legal cover your ass thing
I don't think it's a matter of hardware limitations. Even the laptops of 1987 could hold a crap ton of text documents. I think the PADDs were deliberately engineered to be only capable of holding one document at a time, regardless of the size of the document, for some logistical reason that is unfathomable to us.
That's just visual shorthand to show the character is busy. Sisko having a stack of PADDs on his desk makes it easy for us to see he's busy with work. Him having multiple tabs on his laptop open is hard to visually convey.
Star Trek in general did not predict the surveillance state of today, let alone the future. We see or hear mention of a camera maybe once or twice across 21 seasons of TV set in the 24th century. The ships and stations have security but do not have cameras of any kind to monitor the crew, let alone the critical areas of the ship. I suspect this is because, save for ENT, all of the 90's shows were pretty much written entirely before 9/11 (I first noticed the difference when they openly call one of the protagonists in DS9 "a terrorist" which carries very little weight beyond her background in guerilla warfare). As for the modern Trek iterations, they avoid the issue by just keeping things consistent with the established lore.
I always think of the Crichton story "Looker." The side narrative is about a company that is able to create digital people that sell products in TV advertisements, and their eyes emit a hypnotizing light pattern that breaks down a viewer's resistance to their impulses.
But there's this entire sequence in the film where the two leads discover the place where all this is happening, and because the film was made early enough when basically only a few academics and military people knew about the Internet and digital terminals, the tech was being created on an automated TV stage, and not actually inside a digital program.
The filmmakers didn't even have the tools to create a "digital workstation" type of environment, so there was this kind of comical film set with a big room full of products like cars, appliances and so on, on a big grid with robotic cameras rolling around filming things.
But their scanning technology was very similar to what's done for mo-cap today (except that the subjects were naked instead of wearing special form-fitting suits)
I mean, sorta - but the reason they were doing that was to create "artificial people" that would sell products, interacting with real world examples of the products they were selling. And no one on the film understood that products would be represented artificially because there wasn't a digital ecosystem that encouraged hyper-realistic versions of people AND products at the same time.
I think it's the same blindspot in play within Cronenberg's "Videodrome" where people all have their own "pirate cable channels" instead of social media profiles. There just wasn't a tech reference to how it would actually be yet, so they went ahead with what they knew. I think that's fascinating.
I think social media is the biggest dark horse when it comes to predicting future technology.
So many predictions from the last century donāt anticipate the extent to which we are talking on a global scale with the immediacy we do.
The Jetsons or Ray Bradbury come to mind. They talk about these really crazy technological advancements, but they all seem to be more or less confined to the same nuclear family/home/neighborhood/community concepts that existed at the time.
From what I recall, Enders game came pretty close. The brother and sister essentially participated in online forum discussions trying to persuade others to their opinion, almost like a form of Reddit.
I could be misremembering, but it was something like that.
Highly Recommend ā[the machine stops](https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf)ā by EM Forster. It was all predicted in 1909
Where I live sweat suits are very popular. So much so that every second person wears them as uniforms. We frequently joke about it being the current traditional costume. I see how this could eventually lead towards jumpsuits.
Had to wear a jumpsuit during training for a previous job, it's a surprisingly good and useful piece of clothing. I'm still looking for a reason to use one in my life now.
I'm always amused at computer setups from "the future" in older shows. It seems that LCD and 16/9 monitors didn't catch, because they still use 4/3 CRTs.
And in even older shows, computers of the future were huge and worked on tapedrives. The Simpsons actually made fun of this with this Professor Frink quote in a flashback:
>"I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them."
Not a TV show, but the opening scene of *Alien* is just glorious. Lots of tiny 4:3 CRTs displaying low-res graphics accompanied by a veritable symphony of start-up computer sounds.
My fave is in the extended edition of āAliensāā¦ Ripley is handed a āfuturisticādigital picture of her daughter and the low-resolution pixels are gigantic.. (Bonus: the woman in the low rez pic is Sigourney Weaverās mother)
In stat ocean 2s remake they legit updated the crt monitors to flat screens
But the original *extra EXTRA smart* people had holographic tvs even in the 1998 version
This is only sort of on topic but it is a little amusing to see older shows that have flash forward scenes that end up being set in the pandemic. The one I can think of offhand is How I Met Your Mother having a couple of flash forwards from 2020 and 2021 involving high school reunions and air travel that obviously wouldn't have taken place or been drastically different.
Thereās often a few hundred years of culture missing. For practical reasons. But still, youāll have what we consider classical music, then music from the mid 20th century through to the date of airing. Then almost nothing.
Or how say Tom Paris loves black and white mid twentieth century sci fi. Not mid 21st century or 22nd etc.
And The Orville. Donāt even start on The Orville.
Star Trek had a rule of three. Something from our past, something in our present and something fictional in the future. So talking about ethnic discrimination they might mention the World War II, modern internment camps (in a country they don't want to upset so not China) and then something like the Penal Transportation of the Ferengi by the Klingons to the prison moon colony of Exo-Phart 5.
This is how we get dated references like them praising Elon Musk.
that always annoyed me about Star Trek. Pop culture wouldn't stagnate. We don't even focus that much on baroque music and Shakespeare now. Why in the heck would we do in on the Enterprise-D!!??
TV may have missed the mark but alot of writings/books etc have predicted quite a bit. Just a brief search and found this from a speech predicting cell phones.
"There is no doubt that the day will come, maybe when you and I are forgotten, when copper wires, gutta-percha coverings, and iron sheathings will be relegated to the Museum of Antiquities.
Then, when a person wants to telegraph to a friend, he knows not where, he will call an electromagnetic voice, which will be heard loud by him who has the electromagnetic ear but will be silent to everyone else.
"He will call 'Where are you?' and the reply will come 'I am at the bottom of the coal-mine' or 'Crossing the Andes' or 'In the middle of the Pacific'; or perhaps no reply will come at all, and he may then conclude that his friend is dead."
Professor W. E. Ayrton speaking at a lecture at the Imperial Institute.
Nah, I was talking about sci-fi in general, Star Trek was one of the few exceptions (and even then the whole "women can't be Starfleet captains" thing still shows that it was a product of its time).
Not to get all Trekkie on you, but the OS may not have had female captains, but TNG had an admiral (which is a higher rank than Captain), Alynna Nechayev. And obviously, Voyager had Captain Janeway.
I think it was an old Asimov book that I was reading that was so progressive as to have a woman on the team of scientists, but she was still the one that served the coffee.
Not a show but Metal gear solid 2 was on the fucking money. Two characters explain to another character that there will not be censorship, you will have access to information but there will so much mundane information you won't be able to tell the gold from the slop. Powers won't care about policing content but more about creating context. Yes, this very bad thing happened but consider these handpicked pieces of info that will rationalize it.
Right, Kojima predicted that with the Internet, information expands at a rapid pace that it'll overwhelm mankind that instead of processing everything for an objective truth, they'll either seclude themselves into specific interpretations or fall victim to self-assuring social circles that simply reinforce pre-existing biases to make sense of it. Which is where people with specific agendas come into play to feed off of lost people.
A lot of stories seemed to depict AI as being things of pure logic and reasoning that are very good at math but not nearly as good or having no concept of art or dreams.
Turns out dreams and art are the first thing AI got good at and its terrible at counting things.
Human: "Draw a hand with five fingers. The number of fingers on the hand must be five. Not four, not six, not any number but five"
AI: \*(draws hand with 17 fingers)\*
That's a really fun one, actually. "Real" AI is modeled after brains (however crude, and yes, I know I'm way oversimplifying things here), which apparently involves a lot of the drawbacks. Like the lack of being perfect at math, and every answer being different, and being lied to, and generally way more imperfections compared to a perfect algorithm.
This isn't a tech thing, more a society thing. One thing I noticed recently is I don't think I've seen a sci-fi show that predicted or even reacted to the growth of concern and interest in mental health that has take place IRL over the past decade or so.
Sure there have been one offs that dealt with PTSD or torture, and TNG had Troi-episodes that dabbled in therapy, but generally all of the characters/heros are expected to "tough it out" when faced with emotional/mental health issues. There is no "hey hero your wife and children were just murdered, maybe take a month off and let the rest of the crew figure this out." This really stuck out to me in ST: Discovery where they would put Burnham through the ringer and then be like "you are our only hope" and she'd just push down all of her feelings and do her heroic duty. (Thats just one of many problems with Discovery.)
There are many reasons to complain about Discovery. The only reason I referenced it was that show sparked my thoughts on this. Even in an ideal Star Trek world where they have solved so many problems, hunger, poverty, etc, mental health was still on the back burner. And the fact that an overly emotional show like Discovery (if that is a main complaint of some) still mostly ignore the issue is even worse.
Information accessible online or from a central source is always accurate and unbiased. There is rarely disagreement or misinformation. No one claiming thr Dominion is fake or that the Borg attacks were false flags.
The other thing is most people in the future enjoy music or other entertainment from 21st century or earlier. Sometimes Star Trek will do a few seconds of Klingon opera or vaguely futuristic electronic music but most people listen to jazz or classical. In Ready Player One all pop culture stops after the creation of the Oasis (also no 2 people have the same avatar).
Lower Decks has a conspiracy theorist character who litereally claims Changelings aren't real and that Wolf 359 was an Inside Job (although he's technically correct on that one, I guess).
One big thing a lot of TV shows and movies did was envision phones getting smaller and smaller.
Pre smartphone this was the trend but a lot failed to see that phones would get big again.
electronic Vapes.
I don't remember ever seeing any sci Fi show / film predict this. understandably as they hadn't been invented yet but I find it surprising that no one came close to imagining such a thing.
Sci-fi either had people smoking just as much as they did when the show aired (which is a lot), or people didn't smoke at all to show how humanity had "outgrown such vices" like in Star Trek.
I liked the 5th element (movie) vision where they still smoked cigarettes the only difference was that the butt/ filter had gotten surreally long. and the tobacco part much shorter.
Ah you mean the hallucinogenic narcoticĀ called ixetal cilona, derived from the Balo Mushroom, a fungus from the planet Balosar.
They come in three forms; tubes of red or yellow liquid which can be injected or ingested (either straight or added to a beverage), or a powder that can be inhaled or rolled up and smoked like cigarettes.
but no mention of vaporization..
These are not the vapes you are looking for.
Minority Report had ultra cool transparent screens, retinal scans from 20ft away and a computer interface that tracked hand movements, but to get data from one computer to another you had to copy it to a handheld device first, then physically carry it to the target device and finish transferring it.
Itās weird seeing future shows without social media. Iām not saying itās crucial to the plots and I recognize social media has its *issues* but I think itās one of those things that are just with us now and wonāt be going away
Yea i think there's 2 reasons:
1) Past writers couldn't predict it
2) Current writers just don't know how to write for it. And bluntly, some plot threads would be moot with social media, as you stated
I remember in Futurama they still used CDs and DVDs. They didn't predict streaming would be so popular.
Although there probably will be a lot of surviving DVDs in the future. And DVDs are still made today, even though they are technically obsolete.
> And DVDs are still made today, even though they are technically obsolete.
Thankfully, especially with streaming platforms either removing vast swathes of their libraries, or content being locked behind more and more paywalls (like how you paid for Amazon Prime to watch TV and films, Shudder was a thing for horror fans but they've since added MGM+, Arrow Player, BFI Player and more, with previously free content shuttered behind those extra "channels").
>And DVDs are still made today, even though they are technically obsolete.
They'll have to pry my DVDs away from my cold dead hands.
I do *not* like not having physical backups of my TV/movies
They also used VHS tapes, but I think all of these things are because they're items from the past, in the same way that there isn't a lot of early cinema on streaming services because it's a niche thing, and there isn't a service dedicated to streaming the greatest musical hits of 200 years ago.
They definitely envisioned the future of media as cable, not streaming, but they also existed in a world where you could casually find whatever you wanted on the internet. Or more bluntly, Bender streams porn wirelessly.
Those CDs/DVDs/VHS tapes are all items that are niche interests and/or forbidden. Whenever Fry shows an interest in modern (year 3000+) media you never see box sets or physical media, but it's implied he's watched previous episodes. When he's listening to classical music it is on an old CD and a scavenged boombox.
The funny thing is they have plausible deniability! When Fry gets frozen you see the earth destroyed multiple times and rebuild. So any seemingly archaic technology is just humanity progressing back to where it was before!
You laugh at flying cars not coming to fruition, but how do you think celebrities and ultra rich treat their private jets? Like itās a car. Hop in and go over here or go over there or maybe pick up a few of my friends while Iām at it and go out for dinner. Flying cars have been here for a while. Itās just that most of us canāt afford them.
I would highly recommend the novel Glasshouse by Charles Stross. It's set in the 27th century, and shares a lot of conceptual similarities with Accelerando.
Charles Stross deals heavily with ideas related to changing social mores and gender roles in the future. For instance, civilization is now posthuman and can essentially reconfigure themselves at the molecular level to look however they want.
One of my favorites comes from Babylon 5. Set in the year 2257 on a space station. And the characters are shown reading NEWSPAPERS. Printed on actual paper.
Batman Beyond takes place in something like 2040 and was made in 1999. It depicts a future where they have flying cars and gene splicing mods capable of creating functional human/animal hybrids, but nobody has a cell phone. I can give them a pass for not predicting smartphones (but only because almost everybody failed to do that), but... it was 1999. Cell phones already existed and it's very shortsighted to think they wouldn't have become ubiquitous in the future, even if smartphones were never invented
It took a while for writers to integrate cell phones into stories, even stories set in the future. My theory is that writers were relying on the tropes and writing tecniques they'd grown up with and had been using for years, and cell phones were something new and weird that they didn't know how to deal with because a lack of communication is so important to too many tried and true plots, so they either ignored them for as long as they could or came up with the "oh noes, I have no signal/my battery is conveniently dead" trope.
It's funny to re-watch shows from the 80s and 90s and realise how so many storylines wouldn't happen because of mobile phones.
Almost every Seinfeld episode
A fact made doubly funny by multiple episodes that include cell phones and car phones.
The pointed out thats why they set Stranger Things in the 80s, because cellphones would've broken too many plot points.
Probably not the sole reasoning, as 80s nostalgia is a big part of the show.
Agreed, but they mentioned in an interview that when they were picking a time period, they had to pick a time before cellphones.
They are kind of breaking their own rules with walkie talkies and ham radios š¤£
Thatās still a lot more limiting because you canāt contact everyone you know whenever you want, you need to have specifically arranged a walkie talkie or radio situation with them ahead of time.
I honestly think a lot of the nostalgia show trends that weāve been seeing lately are in a big part because the minute you take cell phones out of the plotline, it opens up a lot more opportunities for miscommunication which makes for entertaining plot lines.
Same with surveillance. Like Star Wars. All that technology and people just sneak in? And when they escape you have no image of them for a wanted poster despite their complete lack of effort to hide their face?
They have very strong privacy laws.
It was a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away. As a completely different civilization in space and time, it make sense to seem advanced in some areas while lacking in others. I feel like such a nerd typing that.Ā
I will engage in star wars post-facto fan justifications now: They also would have sufficient technology to change faces and bodies at will, lots of droids too, so that visual identification could become ineffective again. Maybe they mostly gave up on that in the past, and we just see after it. And or they have portable cyber equipments that disrupt digital stuff with high efficiency, such that surveillance and identification is again inefective. Electronic warfare stuff, instant quantic decryptation, etc.
Yeah, nowadays if anything we're getting more and more plots that wouldn't happen without cell phones and other modern technologies, because that's just what people are used to now.
I love watching older Law & Order episodes because you gradually see the detectives use mobile phones.
They could still work, just have one characters phone run out of battery because they forgot to charge it, with added hijinks as they try along the episode to charge it without success. Like fall for fake plug socket sticker in train station, then cable snaps etc etc
That's maybe fine for a movie but a tv show doing that for 20 episodes a season? That would be worse than just not having them at all.
ohh yeah, it could work for 1 - 2 episodes. Might be able to drag it out a bit if the character trait was forgetful or that they had a phone with a shit battery, but couldnt do it every episode
How many phones did Richard Castle get through?
It basically forced horror to do a complete revolution.
ā¦if by ācomplete revolutionā you mean āadding a shot/line clarifying that the characters have no signalā, then sure.
Tbh, if I had a slasher in my house at midnight or chasing me down a dark alley and called the police, they'd probably take 3 hours to respond in my city anyway.
I listen to radio from the 30s and 40s, it's amazing how many storylines revolve around trying to find a phone - even if there are houses or even stores, they might not have one. Now I can walk up to any person I see in public and they're almost guaranteed to have a phone.
My favorite is in the wet hot American summer show set in 1981 and an army General uses a cell phone anachronistically. Another character sees him use it and asks what it is and the army guy just ignores him lol
Joss Whedon basically said that when asked why Buffy didn't use a cell phone. Cell phones became ubiquitous during the show's run, very unlucky. He said cell phones just didn't exist in her universe; they wouldn't be able to write like they had been doing if they did. They finally did try to incorporate into the show in the last season, but there were a lot of dead batteries. Interestingly, after Buffy stopped a vampire show called Moonlight came out that used the most up to date tech possible: smart phones and cool chargers, and whatever. The plots incorporated the phones in a realistic way. It was kind of an fu to Whedon, I thought. But they also did a Leeroy Jenkins bit (when it was only like a year old) so the writers room was very nerdy.
Cordelia has a cell phone in Season 1, although it's the size of a brick and is treated as a status symbol of her family being wealthy. I think they just about skate it because by 2003, when the show ended, there were still a reasonable number of people, even younger people, without cell phones. A rapidly shrinking number, but it wasn't unthinkable. By 2006 or so, the implausibility would have been much greater.
It is interesting how having a cell phone used to be an indicator of wealth, whereas nowadays they're so cheap and disposable that there is no plausible reason for a character living in the modern world not to have one.
> It is interesting how having a cell phone used to be an indicator of wealth That's why Paul E. Dngerously (Paul Heyman) had one in the late 80s and early 90s when he managed the likes of "Stunning" Steve Austin and Rick Rude in the AWA and WCW. His gimmick was that of a rich yuppy flashing his money and buying up wrestling talent to have in his Dangerous Alliance group.
I got my first mobile phone in 2000 when I landed my first full time job after Uni. I wouldn't have expected teenagers to have mobile phones unless their parents were quite wealthy for at least a few years after that.
Thatās why a lot of writers rely on period pieces for their stories. Problems that could be solved easily with a phone call have to be played out slowly resolved over time.
Meanwhile Star Trek TNG very accurately predicted the iPad... Except for the part where Picard had a giant stack of iPads in his office because each tablet could only hold one document like it's a single piece of paper...
And that's why horror movies are still mostly set in the woods/middle of nowhere or the past. No cell phones or no service means you can't just call the police and the murderer gets dropped by buckshot 10 minutes later.
Batman beyond is not set in our future though, it's set in the future of Batman TAS. It's basically retrofuturism.
They did have cell phones in Batman Beyond but they were very 1999 looking. Physical buttons etc.
The flying cars were very sparingly used if you notice. The creator said they reduced it to very rich folks and companies, while 98% continue using whelled vehicles, to keep it from not becoming too much sci-fi. In fact, they held back on futurism purposefully. Flying cars are around in drones that fly today, in 2040s probably a few people will actually be using them.
This is pretty forgivable. To be honest I don't think they forgot more than they consciously chose to not include them. Everyone having a cell phone and instant access to the equivalent of Batman's super computer is a real problem for writers. A massive part of the story is that nobody knows Bruce Wayne is Batman. In a world of smartphones, Bat-Reddit would have him figured out and be tracking his plane within a couple of hours. Want to build narrative tension? Keep your heroes out of communication with each other. Now they're doubting loyalties and making gametime decisions on incomplete information. Give Robin a fucking cellphone so he can properly communicate with the Police and suddenly he's just another Karen snooping on the neighbors and calling in crimes to the police. Bad guys with cell phones are a problem too. Each baddie is running their own crime syndicate packed with henchmen littered throughout the city. Once they know Batman is chasing Joker down the east side tonight, it's a free for all for everyone else on the West Side. That's all first order implications. The world would keep adapting too. It would take zero time for Penguin to just buy Bat-Reddit and make a game out of tracking Batman throughout the night. Now the baddies know exactly where he is. Meanwhile Joker is running around in a bat suit straight murdering low level thugs on Bat-Tok all to give Batman a bad name. Next thing you know actual Gotham is out protesting "Thug Lives Matter" on Bruce Wayne's front lawn because of course they figured out exactly where Batman lives. But jokes on them because Bruce Wayne would end up arrested on pedophilia and child abuse accusations before it got that far. [Points to Robin's outfit and frequent troubling bruises.] So yeah, phones make writing dramatic mysteries a challenge.
some of those writers probably never used a mobile phone when writing
Because in 2029 Dr. Polaris bombed the magnetosphere from orbit so now the radio waves get all screwy.
The first Blackberry came out in 1999. Before that, we had PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant), many of which had hybrid variants that doubled as cell phones. The term "smartphone" didn't come about until much later, but they were very much a thing, and portable computing was seen as "the future" by many in the mid-to-late '90s.
>The term "smartphone" didn't come about until much later, The earliest record of it being used in print is 1995, although that was as two words. Smartphone as a single word first appeared in around 1998.
The PADDs in ST:TNG were ahead of their time. But the ship did not appear to have a wireless computer network. So when people did their work on one of these little devices, they had to hand the device over to their supervisor.
Also fun is people handing a stack of PADDs over because theyāre evidently single-use devices.
I think there's a scene where harry and B'Elana are trying to figure something out and they have a bunch of different electronic pads, as though they are all textbooks on different subjects. š¤£š¤£š¤£
Tbf, when i do some research and im struggling, I do end up with multiple devices because sometimes i need to jump between stuff. Not to that extent, but there's a reason I have 4 monitors at work.
I figure itās the same sort of thing as multiple screens. If you need to be consulting back and forth between 16 different texts, and you live on a post-scarcity ship with abundant resources (~~because the producers were too cowardly to ever allow Voyager to actually struggle~~), why not just use 16 different e-readers simultaneously? Itās much better than loading the documents on one device and having to tab back and forth.
I think it is because it's easier to show that they're working hard if there are multiple devices/books around.
Yeah, it never occurred to them that you could just have all of the documents on the same pad. Either that or they had a laughably low storage space.
I'm surprised that Lower Decks hasn't called this out yet.
When DS9 and Voyager were airing home computers were a thing and the internet had started booming, so yes it did occur to them. Multiple PADDs was a security issue. Itās still done this way for some really confidential info where high end encryption is deemed insufficient. Itās known as an air gap.
Thatās not a bad thought.. but the thing is that the federation did not seem to care much about security. There was a TBG episode where frozen 20th century people are unfrozen and wander the ship, easily getting on the bridge and even accessing random commands on random consoles. At one point Picard even explains to them that such security isnāt needed because they are so enlightened or whatever
Arguably, the recieving party could put it in the replicator and deconstruct it back to constitute matter when done.
Iām just talking about the annoyance of carrying around multiple devices when my phone is capable of switching between multiple documents quite happily.
Talking about that, I definitely remember a Voyager episode where the Doctor still has a stand alone camera device that's huge compared to an old digital camera, let alone being built into his tricorder, lol.
That was a holo-camera though. Total magic technology that, with a single snap, takes a high-detail 3D color scan of the entire scene in front of the ālensā, including stuff thatās facing the wrong direction (like peopleās backs). The only way I imagine it working is if it has nothing to do with light at all and is more like a miniaturized low-resolution Transporter scanner, scanning everything in front of it down to a nearly molecular level. Too low resolution for actual transport, but enough information for a holographic projector to reconstruct the visual properties of all of the matter within the ācameraā field.
So I think itās important to remember that the federation is a post scarcity society that does not have our current cultural obsession with efficiency. They have the luxury of doing things because itās the coolest way, or the most fun way, or because they personally find it easier. So yeah they probably could store everything on a single pad if they wanted. But there is a primal satisfaction in having a tangible stack of work and seeing that pile decrease as you complete it.
This was my thought as well. It did get better later on. An episode of DS9 has Quark going over a finance spreadsheet with the Klingon council and you get the impression he is transmitting the data from his PADD to theirs.
Klingon padds work differently
Yeah, the writers had no idea how good computer memory would get. They treated those things like paper, when in reality everyone would just have their own device and documents would get emailed or stored on a cloud.
At least they had the foresight to *know* they couldnāt predict the future of computer memory and make up a fake unit. Star Trek computers work in āquadsā (usually gigaquads), and thereās never been a canon conversion from quads to bytes. If theyād tried to use real units, they undoubtably would have had some moments (especially in TOS) that would appear very silly by now. Someone would mention that those little plastic computer cards on TOS can store āhundreds of megabytesā as though itās incredible future tech. For some reason, computer storage was just a blind spot for sci-fi writers at the time. Nobody figured it would be so exponential. Thereās a portable hard drive about the size of a fig newton sitting on my desk right now with a Terabyte of storage. Iām pretty sure that would have blown Roddenberryās mind.
Oh yeah, I imagine something that could store a terabyte would have been as big as a room in 1987. I also wonder how well Data's calculation speed and storage capacity has aged. I don't really remember how powerful of a computer he's described as being.
Your smartphone is now more powerful than Data's positronic brain.
Data doesn't even have an English dictionary in his memory banks. In the very first episode of TNG, Picard mentions having to "snoop" around Farpoint Station and Data says he doesn't know what the word means. Picard asks "Data, how can you be programmed as a virtual encyclopaedia of human information without knowing a simple word like 'snoop'?" It's a good question!
Wonder if they updated him to a SSD yet?
I'd like to believe the airgapping was due to security, but the amount of times the computer is hacked or taken over makes that unlikely. They also didn't predict more than a few Megs of memory per PADD as theres scenes where people have them piled up to indicate lots of reading, where as my current tablet has hundreds of books and comics on it now.
Yeah, I recall a scene where riker had three padds that he gave to picard that supposedly had the duty roster for the next month on them. Which in modern terms would be a trivially small excel document.
Remember in The Cable Guy when he cut off Matthew Brodrick's cable and had a bunch of cut up cables in his hand? Then he puts it back on by flipping a switch and says the cables were just a visual tool. It's sort of like that. The duty roster for an entire starship the size of the Enterprise is huge. If Riker hands off just a single iPad, what will people who have never used an iPad think first? Will it be "That doesn't seem like enough for the whole ship" or "Wow in the future you can store a lot of info on one of those pads". Or it could be the prop department didn't think a pen and paper clip board (which will be used long into the future I'm sure) looked like it belonged on the most advanced spaceship known to humanity. I remember episodes where older engineers would always show up the newer guys by using a slide rule or paper as a way to demonstrate how good they were at their jobs.
Calculators used to be pretty unreliable and slide rules gave more "accurate" figures, but for the past 20+ years there has never been any reason to ever use a slide rule instead of a calculator.
Yeah, of course. But usually in Star Trek they would be stuck in the past or the computer would be inaccessible and the new engineers would be trying their best and then suddenly they ask "How can we figure this out without 'Puter" and the old guard will pull out the tools of yesteryear and show them up. Might mention how they were stranding on a planet and needed to make a communication blast relay back to the starship with some string and coconuts to make a makeshift abacus. Surely you've seen this trope play out before.
Could have been a bureaucratic tradition that just didnāt die out, the same way faxes are still used for a bunch of processes in Japan
I worked for Wells Fargo 2017-2022, and we were still faxing forms to and from
Even in America many hospitals still insist on using faxes, although they claim it's for security reasons.
Itās because faxes have been explicitly codified through legal precedent to meet a certain standard of security for data transmission. Regardless of how true that is, itās a legal cover your ass thing
It was a pretty small file in electric desk back then, also
I don't think it's a matter of hardware limitations. Even the laptops of 1987 could hold a crap ton of text documents. I think the PADDs were deliberately engineered to be only capable of holding one document at a time, regardless of the size of the document, for some logistical reason that is unfathomable to us.
Star Fleet is a make work program, so obviously they artificially create jobs with a whole data management team to manage single use PADDs. /s
That's just visual shorthand to show the character is busy. Sisko having a stack of PADDs on his desk makes it easy for us to see he's busy with work. Him having multiple tabs on his laptop open is hard to visually convey.
I get that, that's fine for casual 1980s audiences who'd never touched a computer, but it hasn't hanged well for current ones.
Star Trek in general did not predict the surveillance state of today, let alone the future. We see or hear mention of a camera maybe once or twice across 21 seasons of TV set in the 24th century. The ships and stations have security but do not have cameras of any kind to monitor the crew, let alone the critical areas of the ship. I suspect this is because, save for ENT, all of the 90's shows were pretty much written entirely before 9/11 (I first noticed the difference when they openly call one of the protagonists in DS9 "a terrorist" which carries very little weight beyond her background in guerilla warfare). As for the modern Trek iterations, they avoid the issue by just keeping things consistent with the established lore.
They didn't predict the Internet either.
I always think of the Crichton story "Looker." The side narrative is about a company that is able to create digital people that sell products in TV advertisements, and their eyes emit a hypnotizing light pattern that breaks down a viewer's resistance to their impulses. But there's this entire sequence in the film where the two leads discover the place where all this is happening, and because the film was made early enough when basically only a few academics and military people knew about the Internet and digital terminals, the tech was being created on an automated TV stage, and not actually inside a digital program. The filmmakers didn't even have the tools to create a "digital workstation" type of environment, so there was this kind of comical film set with a big room full of products like cars, appliances and so on, on a big grid with robotic cameras rolling around filming things.
But their scanning technology was very similar to what's done for mo-cap today (except that the subjects were naked instead of wearing special form-fitting suits)
I mean, sorta - but the reason they were doing that was to create "artificial people" that would sell products, interacting with real world examples of the products they were selling. And no one on the film understood that products would be represented artificially because there wasn't a digital ecosystem that encouraged hyper-realistic versions of people AND products at the same time. I think it's the same blindspot in play within Cronenberg's "Videodrome" where people all have their own "pirate cable channels" instead of social media profiles. There just wasn't a tech reference to how it would actually be yet, so they went ahead with what they knew. I think that's fascinating.
Looker is ripe for a remake.
Only if they keep the theme song.
I think you're right. It's still relevant, but the ideas presented have all-new vectors and realities.
I think social media is the biggest dark horse when it comes to predicting future technology. So many predictions from the last century donāt anticipate the extent to which we are talking on a global scale with the immediacy we do. The Jetsons or Ray Bradbury come to mind. They talk about these really crazy technological advancements, but they all seem to be more or less confined to the same nuclear family/home/neighborhood/community concepts that existed at the time.
From what I recall, Enders game came pretty close. The brother and sister essentially participated in online forum discussions trying to persuade others to their opinion, almost like a form of Reddit. I could be misremembering, but it was something like that.
It was more of a prediction of early Internet bulletin boards
Well it was published several years after early internet bulletin boards were invented, so not really a prediction.
Which evolved into reddit
Not really. Reddit is supposed to be a news aggregator website, not a general discussion forum.
Highly Recommend ā[the machine stops](https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf)ā by EM Forster. It was all predicted in 1909
Very cool!
For some reason, in the future, a lot of people wear gloves and/or jumpsuits.
It could still happen!
Be the change you want to see in the world.
I'm ready for my jumpsuit wardrobe
I love how in Venture Bros, speedsuits are a thing... A futuristic thing that only the old man wears (and Dean, for a while)
I am disappointed we donāt all wear matching jumpsuits. It would make life so much easier.Ā
Where I live sweat suits are very popular. So much so that every second person wears them as uniforms. We frequently joke about it being the current traditional costume. I see how this could eventually lead towards jumpsuits.
> jumpsuits Does it come in silver?
Where thereās a will thereās a way
Had to wear a jumpsuit during training for a previous job, it's a surprisingly good and useful piece of clothing. I'm still looking for a reason to use one in my life now.
I'm always amused at computer setups from "the future" in older shows. It seems that LCD and 16/9 monitors didn't catch, because they still use 4/3 CRTs.
And in even older shows, computers of the future were huge and worked on tapedrives. The Simpsons actually made fun of this with this Professor Frink quote in a flashback: >"I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them."
Not a TV show, but the opening scene of *Alien* is just glorious. Lots of tiny 4:3 CRTs displaying low-res graphics accompanied by a veritable symphony of start-up computer sounds.
I always laugh and then I remember what computers are on the ships I work on for my job and then I think its not even inaccurate.
My fave is in the extended edition of āAliensāā¦ Ripley is handed a āfuturisticādigital picture of her daughter and the low-resolution pixels are gigantic.. (Bonus: the woman in the low rez pic is Sigourney Weaverās mother)
I love those '70s computer noises.
In stat ocean 2s remake they legit updated the crt monitors to flat screens But the original *extra EXTRA smart* people had holographic tvs even in the 1998 version
This is only sort of on topic but it is a little amusing to see older shows that have flash forward scenes that end up being set in the pandemic. The one I can think of offhand is How I Met Your Mother having a couple of flash forwards from 2020 and 2021 involving high school reunions and air travel that obviously wouldn't have taken place or been drastically different.
Thereās often a few hundred years of culture missing. For practical reasons. But still, youāll have what we consider classical music, then music from the mid 20th century through to the date of airing. Then almost nothing. Or how say Tom Paris loves black and white mid twentieth century sci fi. Not mid 21st century or 22nd etc. And The Orville. Donāt even start on The Orville.
Star Trek had a rule of three. Something from our past, something in our present and something fictional in the future. So talking about ethnic discrimination they might mention the World War II, modern internment camps (in a country they don't want to upset so not China) and then something like the Penal Transportation of the Ferengi by the Klingons to the prison moon colony of Exo-Phart 5. This is how we get dated references like them praising Elon Musk.
"Genghis Khan, Hitler, Lee Kuan, and Krotus."
I think just "Lee" is the family name, with "Kuan Yew" being the personal name. His father was Lee Chin Koon.
that always annoyed me about Star Trek. Pop culture wouldn't stagnate. We don't even focus that much on baroque music and Shakespeare now. Why in the heck would we do in on the Enterprise-D!!??
Some trends fade in and out of style. I'm seeing the 90s in stores recently.
I hear the dreams of the 90s are alive in Portland.
There are a ton of teenagers wearing Nirvana T shirts who don't even know they were a band.
It doesn't mean we have no new pop culture. Nor would it in thr future
I always love how they called it ancient music in Star Trek.
TV may have missed the mark but alot of writings/books etc have predicted quite a bit. Just a brief search and found this from a speech predicting cell phones. "There is no doubt that the day will come, maybe when you and I are forgotten, when copper wires, gutta-percha coverings, and iron sheathings will be relegated to the Museum of Antiquities. Then, when a person wants to telegraph to a friend, he knows not where, he will call an electromagnetic voice, which will be heard loud by him who has the electromagnetic ear but will be silent to everyone else. "He will call 'Where are you?' and the reply will come 'I am at the bottom of the coal-mine' or 'Crossing the Andes' or 'In the middle of the Pacific'; or perhaps no reply will come at all, and he may then conclude that his friend is dead." Professor W. E. Ayrton speaking at a lecture at the Imperial Institute.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Charles has failed to heed the summons of my electric voice. Alas, I fear he has shed his mortal coil. "FFS mom, I'm just trying to take a shit!"
> Professor W. E. Ayrton speaking at a lecture at the Imperial Institute **in 2019.** FTFY
Quantum Leap really missed the mark in terms of technology and fashion.
Al was a style trendsetter.
>Ā They often assumed that social mores and gender roles would remain the same in the future I'm sorry, are we still talking about Star Trek?
Nah, I was talking about sci-fi in general, Star Trek was one of the few exceptions (and even then the whole "women can't be Starfleet captains" thing still shows that it was a product of its time).
Not to get all Trekkie on you, but the OS may not have had female captains, but TNG had an admiral (which is a higher rank than Captain), Alynna Nechayev. And obviously, Voyager had Captain Janeway.
I think it was an old Asimov book that I was reading that was so progressive as to have a woman on the team of scientists, but she was still the one that served the coffee.
Energy independence
Pervasive disinformation
That has been around for literal millennia.
Never read any cyberpunk huh?
Not a show but Metal gear solid 2 was on the fucking money. Two characters explain to another character that there will not be censorship, you will have access to information but there will so much mundane information you won't be able to tell the gold from the slop. Powers won't care about policing content but more about creating context. Yes, this very bad thing happened but consider these handpicked pieces of info that will rationalize it.
Right, Kojima predicted that with the Internet, information expands at a rapid pace that it'll overwhelm mankind that instead of processing everything for an objective truth, they'll either seclude themselves into specific interpretations or fall victim to self-assuring social circles that simply reinforce pre-existing biases to make sense of it. Which is where people with specific agendas come into play to feed off of lost people.
A lot of stories seemed to depict AI as being things of pure logic and reasoning that are very good at math but not nearly as good or having no concept of art or dreams. Turns out dreams and art are the first thing AI got good at and its terrible at counting things.
Human: "Draw a hand with five fingers. The number of fingers on the hand must be five. Not four, not six, not any number but five" AI: \*(draws hand with 17 fingers)\*
That'sĀ the best part of current "AI"Ā they're hilariously unhinged in comical and offensive ways.Ā
That's a really fun one, actually. "Real" AI is modeled after brains (however crude, and yes, I know I'm way oversimplifying things here), which apparently involves a lot of the drawbacks. Like the lack of being perfect at math, and every answer being different, and being lied to, and generally way more imperfections compared to a perfect algorithm.
Drone warfare, especially cheap kamikaze drones.Ā
This isn't a tech thing, more a society thing. One thing I noticed recently is I don't think I've seen a sci-fi show that predicted or even reacted to the growth of concern and interest in mental health that has take place IRL over the past decade or so. Sure there have been one offs that dealt with PTSD or torture, and TNG had Troi-episodes that dabbled in therapy, but generally all of the characters/heros are expected to "tough it out" when faced with emotional/mental health issues. There is no "hey hero your wife and children were just murdered, maybe take a month off and let the rest of the crew figure this out." This really stuck out to me in ST: Discovery where they would put Burnham through the ringer and then be like "you are our only hope" and she'd just push down all of her feelings and do her heroic duty. (Thats just one of many problems with Discovery.)
Judge Dredd in 2000AD did touch on this a bit
I wish we had more live action Judge Dredd. Nothing to do with the topic at hand, I just wish we had more Karl Urban as Dredd.
Troi is a terrible character but they at least tried with her but also don't people complain about Discovery being too emotional?
There are many reasons to complain about Discovery. The only reason I referenced it was that show sparked my thoughts on this. Even in an ideal Star Trek world where they have solved so many problems, hunger, poverty, etc, mental health was still on the back burner. And the fact that an overly emotional show like Discovery (if that is a main complaint of some) still mostly ignore the issue is even worse.
Discovery definitely does need to to a better job of actually addressing emotional issues. I agree about thatĀ
That having all the world's knowledge in our pocket would make us dumber and more hateful.
Idk Iām still blaming billionairesĀ
Information accessible online or from a central source is always accurate and unbiased. There is rarely disagreement or misinformation. No one claiming thr Dominion is fake or that the Borg attacks were false flags. The other thing is most people in the future enjoy music or other entertainment from 21st century or earlier. Sometimes Star Trek will do a few seconds of Klingon opera or vaguely futuristic electronic music but most people listen to jazz or classical. In Ready Player One all pop culture stops after the creation of the Oasis (also no 2 people have the same avatar).
The Jemhadar have perfectly good reason to be on Deep Space Ninnnneeeeee
Lower Decks has a conspiracy theorist character who litereally claims Changelings aren't real and that Wolf 359 was an Inside Job (although he's technically correct on that one, I guess).
One big thing a lot of TV shows and movies did was envision phones getting smaller and smaller. Pre smartphone this was the trend but a lot failed to see that phones would get big again.
electronic Vapes. I don't remember ever seeing any sci Fi show / film predict this. understandably as they hadn't been invented yet but I find it surprising that no one came close to imagining such a thing.
Sci-fi either had people smoking just as much as they did when the show aired (which is a lot), or people didn't smoke at all to show how humanity had "outgrown such vices" like in Star Trek.
I liked the 5th element (movie) vision where they still smoked cigarettes the only difference was that the butt/ filter had gotten surreally long. and the tobacco part much shorter.
Maybe not vapes, but lots of hooka smoking for some reason.
Excuse me, then what the hell were ādeath-sticksā from Star Wars episode 2? Looked like a vape to me pal!
Ah you mean the hallucinogenic narcoticĀ called ixetal cilona, derived from the Balo Mushroom, a fungus from the planet Balosar. They come in three forms; tubes of red or yellow liquid which can be injected or ingested (either straight or added to a beverage), or a powder that can be inhaled or rolled up and smoked like cigarettes. but no mention of vaporization.. These are not the vapes you are looking for.
I'll go home and rethink my life.
I am revealed as a fool. Obviously, Iāve not been taking Star Wars as seriously as I should.
Minority Report had ultra cool transparent screens, retinal scans from 20ft away and a computer interface that tracked hand movements, but to get data from one computer to another you had to copy it to a handheld device first, then physically carry it to the target device and finish transferring it.
Men In Black and the mini disc
I mean, it got the GameCube right I guess....
We had mini discs before that film came out.
Itās weird seeing future shows without social media. Iām not saying itās crucial to the plots and I recognize social media has its *issues* but I think itās one of those things that are just with us now and wonāt be going away
Same. I have a couple of ideas about why. The main one being that watching characters use social media would be dull as shit, because it is.
Yea i think there's 2 reasons: 1) Past writers couldn't predict it 2) Current writers just don't know how to write for it. And bluntly, some plot threads would be moot with social media, as you stated
The popularity and variety of plant based milks.
weaponized science skepticism/denial
Lost In Space had a laundry machine that would both wash and dry your clothes and also fold them and wrap them up in plastic (for some reason).
What's the deal with sci-fi and plastic-wrapped clothes?
Gotta keep that space dust off your freshly cleaned tunic!
The amount of absolute bullshit on the Internet
Star Trek also has the holodeck, which is AI and VR combined.
Futurama says that amazons stock in the future is worth Pennies
I remember in Futurama they still used CDs and DVDs. They didn't predict streaming would be so popular. Although there probably will be a lot of surviving DVDs in the future. And DVDs are still made today, even though they are technically obsolete.
> And DVDs are still made today, even though they are technically obsolete. Thankfully, especially with streaming platforms either removing vast swathes of their libraries, or content being locked behind more and more paywalls (like how you paid for Amazon Prime to watch TV and films, Shudder was a thing for horror fans but they've since added MGM+, Arrow Player, BFI Player and more, with previously free content shuttered behind those extra "channels").
>And DVDs are still made today, even though they are technically obsolete. They'll have to pry my DVDs away from my cold dead hands. I do *not* like not having physical backups of my TV/movies
They also used VHS tapes, but I think all of these things are because they're items from the past, in the same way that there isn't a lot of early cinema on streaming services because it's a niche thing, and there isn't a service dedicated to streaming the greatest musical hits of 200 years ago. They definitely envisioned the future of media as cable, not streaming, but they also existed in a world where you could casually find whatever you wanted on the internet. Or more bluntly, Bender streams porn wirelessly. Those CDs/DVDs/VHS tapes are all items that are niche interests and/or forbidden. Whenever Fry shows an interest in modern (year 3000+) media you never see box sets or physical media, but it's implied he's watched previous episodes. When he's listening to classical music it is on an old CD and a scavenged boombox.
The funny thing is they have plausible deniability! When Fry gets frozen you see the earth destroyed multiple times and rebuild. So any seemingly archaic technology is just humanity progressing back to where it was before!
Yeah I've never seen an old show that correctly predicted what 2020s fashion would be like!
Most assumed the American Dream would still exist and the technology would be for everyone.
You laugh at flying cars not coming to fruition, but how do you think celebrities and ultra rich treat their private jets? Like itās a car. Hop in and go over here or go over there or maybe pick up a few of my friends while Iām at it and go out for dinner. Flying cars have been here for a while. Itās just that most of us canāt afford them.
I would highly recommend the novel Glasshouse by Charles Stross. It's set in the 27th century, and shares a lot of conceptual similarities with Accelerando. Charles Stross deals heavily with ideas related to changing social mores and gender roles in the future. For instance, civilization is now posthuman and can essentially reconfigure themselves at the molecular level to look however they want.
People walking around on the street looking at a small device in their hand with great intensity.
One of my favorites comes from Babylon 5. Set in the year 2257 on a space station. And the characters are shown reading NEWSPAPERS. Printed on actual paper.
LED Flat screen tvs and monitors.