In the future, everybody will be wrong for 15 minutes

October 24, 2007 8:14 AM

What happened to the future?Forbes has a terrific special feature on the future that offers a smörgåsbord of cool things. In addition to the usual predictions and "whither the videophone" discussions, there are also interviews with futurists such as David Brin, Robert Sawyer, Stuart Brand, and Nicholas Negroponte about their mistakes and surprises (as well as an article on the value of futurists and one on why you don't want to make futurists angry). On the fiction side, it features short stories by Cory Doctorow, Max Barry, and Warren Ellis, all dealing with the American workplace in 2027 during a financial crisis, as well as a discussion of nine great books about the future. It ends with a quiz about your ability to predict what will happen next year - Forbes will send you your score in January 2009.
posted by blahblahblah (50 comments total)

I was very excited about registering my predictions, but I have no idea what most of these things even are. Federal fund rate? Euro exchange? Superbowl? Lame.
posted by DU at 8:25 AM on October 24, 2007

Weird to read about futurism on a website (Forbes.com) that looks like it hasn't been updated since 1999.
posted by saladin at 8:26 AM on October 24, 2007 [1 favorite]

In the future, everybody will be dead.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:32 AM on October 24, 2007

What? No! But that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life!
posted by Simon! at 8:42 AM on October 24, 2007

On the quiz, one of the questions is the exchange rate between the dollar and the euro at the end of 2008. The choices are:

Less than 4.00
Between 4.00 and 4.49
Between 4.50 and 4.99
Between 5.00 and 5.49
Between 5.50 and 5.99
Between 6.00 and 6.49
Between 6.50 and 6.99
Between 7.00 and 7.49
Between 7.50 and 7.99
Between 8.00 and 9.49 [Huh? what's with the sudden 1.50 range? after all the 0.50-range options?]
Between 9.50 and 1.00 [sic]
Above 10.00

The current rate is 1Euro = 1.42131USD, or 1USD=0.70358Euro. So how is any choice other than "Less than 4.00" even remotely possible here, barring a massive economic collapse?
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 8:43 AM on October 24, 2007

That's when I gave up, Devil's. I figured there must be some unit that Forbes was using that was so completely beyond my horizon that I wasn't even really being invited to play.
posted by DU at 8:44 AM on October 24, 2007

At least they list 'Infinite Jest' in their books selection (which, by the way, has a chapter on the failure of videophony that kicks Steinberg's ass).
posted by troybob at 8:50 AM on October 24, 2007

Drug fuelled zero-g sex is the only future I'm interested in. Precisely the conditions in which videophones do not thrive. Or jet packs with hot exhausts.
posted by vbfg at 8:54 AM on October 24, 2007

There are three different stories about the American workplace in 2027? How can that be? I thought the Mayan Calendar runs out in 2012!
posted by strangeguitars at 9:02 AM on October 24, 2007 [1 favorite]

Fun post blahblahblah.

In 1969 when my friends and I sat stoned in the cinema watching 2001, A Space Odyssey, the entire audience let out a spontaneous collective oooh of admiration, when the picture phone came on the screen. But today's camera, internet connected cell phones and the awesome internet itself are so way beyond that primitive vision, it still blows my mind.

What impresses me more than techno visions are the social ones, like those depicted in Robert Sheckley's sci fi. He wrote one mini story with people wearing clothes with all the labels on the outside and it amuses me no end in a dark sort of way, to see his advertisers paradise came to pass.

Some of the things that have dazzled me since I was born in 1953 have been all the music since The Beatles, women's lib so I could travel the world by myself from 1970 on, do all kinds of fun things and get all kinds of jobs not available to women before that, jets, discotheques, the Walkman, down jackets and sportswear, the new fitness shoes, permission to be as I am, rather than having to conform as one used to do really rigidly back then, hang gliding, base jumping, flying suits, inline skates, chromolux lightbulbs, protein shakes, lycra, home printers and, of course, personal computers.

Paleo Future's delightful, and often spot on, 1910 visions of what the year 2000 would look like.

Razor-thin TV screen you can wear as a T-shirt.
posted by nickyskye at 9:04 AM on October 24, 2007 [6 favorites]

Pat Cadigan is one of the few women renown in science fiction writing and I have read (and taught) Pat her award-winning but artistically compromised novel Synners. I will add others of her books to my list after reading this:

What I never foresaw in my wildest dreams was that people would die not because there was no treatment for them--but because they couldn't pay for it.

I suppose no one saw this coming, no one except Marx, that is.
posted by mistersquid at 9:08 AM on October 24, 2007

Next year? Next year the Republicans will lose the presidency, and our troops still won't come home.
posted by caddis at 9:09 AM on October 24, 2007

The current rate is 1Euro = 1.42131USD, or 1USD=0.70358Euro. So how is any choice other than "Less than 4.00" even remotely possible here, barring a massive economic collapse?

I assumed 1USD=0.70358Euro was read as 7.03, that was the only way the chart made sense. But I'm not a forex trader so that was just a guess.
posted by afu at 9:12 AM on October 24, 2007

I'm not taking the prediction quiz because I predict that Forbes won't be around in January 2009 to email me my quiz results.
posted by saladin at 9:15 AM on October 24, 2007

cool, nickyskye! I like the one where the airplane pilot stops mid-air for a glass of wine! It's funny how many of them look forward to using contraptions to do fine-motor tasks, like the bath, tailoring, and haircutting (yikes!).
posted by troybob at 9:19 AM on October 24, 2007

It has to be done. I'm sorry.

Metafilter: Drug fuelled zero-g sex
posted by sparkletone at 9:43 AM on October 24, 2007

That Nassim Nicholas Taleb piece is really bad. I liked his books, but I hadn't realized he's drank so much of the free market kool aid.

"By exporting jobs, the U.S. has outsourced the less scalable and more linear components of production, assigning them to the citizens of more mathematical and culturally rigid states, who are happy to be paid by the hour to work on other people's ideas."

Yeah, people in China and Indonesia make all our crap for us because they are mathematically and culturally rigid not because their citizens are dirt poor and will work for less than a tenth of what a U.S. worker will. It all makes sense now!
posted by afu at 9:50 AM on October 24, 2007 [1 favorite]

Also, the "What Happened To The Future" thing appears to be one of, if not the, main theme of Ellis' new comic Doktor Sleepless.

Still. Seeing Ellis in Forbes is a pretty big WTF.
posted by sparkletone at 9:56 AM on October 24, 2007

Aren't those fun troybob? It's charming how the future is envisioned in the language of the present. So having a glass of wine, perhaps a little glass of sherry or maybe port, en route are charmingly quaint. An 1882 vision of Going to the Opera in the year 2000.

Maybe it was hard for them to imagine that fine motor tasks might be advanced by helpful tools, mass produced clothes in various sizes, electric clippers or those flowbee vacuuming hair cutters?

Excellent and pretty amazingly accurate predictions from The Ladies Home Journal, 1900. (I love the "peas as big as beets".)
posted by nickyskye at 10:01 AM on October 24, 2007 [1 favorite]

It has to be done. I'm sorry.

Metafilter: Drug fuelled zero-g sex

If I, when I'm 130 years old and looking back on life, can say that the $5 I spent on Metafilter eventually got me to have drug fuelled zero-g sex, well, I can safely predict that these $5 will be the best spent $5 of my life...
posted by DreamerFi at 10:04 AM on October 24, 2007

Metafilter: Drug fuelled zero-g sex

or just total nausea and a vague feeling you're overcomplicating things
posted by patricio at 10:04 AM on October 24, 2007 [2 favorites]

I wasn't interested in Doktor Sleepless before Sparkletone's post (love Ellis in general, though)-- but now I am going to read it.
posted by everichon at 10:27 AM on October 24, 2007

nickyskye: "Rats and mice will have been exterminated"...and "There will be no C, X, or Q" ("...a language of condensed words explaining condensed ideas...") looks forward to email and text messaging!

I think part of it is in using the language of the present to describe the future, but also it gives some cool insight into what kinds of things were the primary annoyances or desires of the time. Everybody wants to fly, so that finds it way in, of course. But it's funny how stuff having to do with personal care (bathing, barbering, etc) seems to have been a burden people wanted to imagine lifted in the future.

"Etiquette and housekeeping will be important studies in the public schools." Ah, the dreams of Ladies' Home Journal!
posted by troybob at 10:41 AM on October 24, 2007

(and I'm totally going to name my next pet 'Elfreth')
posted by troybob at 10:42 AM on October 24, 2007 [1 favorite]

Ah, an article about all the wonderful things we'll have if they decide we should be allowed to have them.
posted by JHarris at 11:10 AM on October 24, 2007

That was weird. The future still seems to be 1997. Eh. Could be worse. Could be 2003.

What's the deal with Doctorow. Everybody gushes over the guy.

I tried to like Cory Doctorow. I wanted to like him. I really did. His essays are interesting. And he seems like smart and genuine type guy.

But his books are dull unimaginative crap. Just terrible.
posted by tkchrist at 12:29 PM on October 24, 2007 [2 favorites]

What I never foresaw in my wildest dreams was that people would die not because there was no treatment for them--but because they couldn't pay for it.

This is a really dumb thing to say. Starvation (including kwashiorkor, scurvy, etc) is a curable disease...
posted by nasreddin at 12:45 PM on October 24, 2007

Could be 2003.

While it was something he talked about before Pattern Recognition, it was around the time that that book came out that... Well.

William Gibson got asked a lot why PR was set in the near future (something like 6 months are the day it was published). His response, and this is something he still says when asked today, is that we already live in a science fictional future.

Things are already weird and science fiction-y. On top of that, things are changing so quickly that prognostication becomes so difficult that it's, he says, a pointless exercise.

... Thought I'd just toss that out there.
posted by sparkletone at 12:46 PM on October 24, 2007

In 1969 when my friends and I sat stoned in the cinema watching 2001, A Space Odyssey,

It's sad, really, that in 1969 2001 was science fiction but believable science fiction. Regular space travel was just one of those things that we all assumed was inevitable. Moonbases? But of course.

What we ended up with would have been unbelievable in 1969. A creaky shuttle that forces its crew to spend much of their time making sure enough tiles stay on so they won't burn up on re-entry? Unthinkable. No mission to the Moon in 30 years? Preposterous. But yet, here we are.
posted by tommasz at 12:51 PM on October 24, 2007

cool insight into what kinds of things were the primary annoyances or desires of the time

troybob, so nicely noted. Somehow Etiquette and housekeeping will be important studies in the public schools now seem like they actually might be "important studies", for males and females. It was good, I think to get rid of ye olde etiquette, because it was more then about trying to ape the rich folks and put on airs. But authentic etiquette, human consideration for others and thoughtful expression of that, would be a nice ingredient in visions of the future.
posted by nickyskye at 12:59 PM on October 24, 2007

Yep. And dig up the July 1976 National Geographic at the library and read about the nifty orbital colony we were supposed to be able to go visit.
posted by pax digita at 1:01 PM on October 24, 2007

Is the Ladies' home journal piece from nickyskye's post real? Seems way too creepily accurate :-)
posted by Anything at 1:01 PM on October 24, 2007

Oh. And I just remembered this blog post by Metafilter's own cstross. Very appropriate for this thread.

It deals with trying to explain our deeply weird future to someone ... not from the future.
posted by sparkletone at 1:09 PM on October 24, 2007

I think a problem with a lot of the futuristic stuff is the assumption that our intelligence, desires, and basic human nature will change along with the technology (as Brin holds out hope for, for instance). To take a simple example, the guy in the Ladies' Home Journal thing doesn't say how we might progress to having 'peas as big as beets' from the perspective of why/if anyone would want a pea as big as a beet (a single serving would basically be a pile of pea mush). I think that's why I appreciated the DFW videophony thing, because it 'grows' the technology from the users' perspective.

If futurists indeed do this to some reasonable level, it would be nice to see them include that analysis as part of their predictions. But overall they don't seem to factor in our lag in adjusting to technology and our reactions to it.
posted by troybob at 1:11 PM on October 24, 2007 [2 favorites]

Yup, Anything, seems likely it is. Antifuse did the research. "And, not that this is any definitive source or anything, but this page lists an article by that author with that title in the Dec 1900 issue, and PBSKids.org also spruced up the list some and also attributes the same article."
posted by nickyskye at 1:11 PM on October 24, 2007

I wish I had the time to go through that LHJ article sentence-by-sentence and check off each one as correct, incorrect, or as yet undetermined!
posted by troybob at 1:15 PM on October 24, 2007

(um...which the antifuse thread does to some extent...and which nickyskye perhaps predicted I would wonder...)
posted by troybob at 1:16 PM on October 24, 2007

And I just remembered this blog post by Metafilter's own cstross. Very appropriate for this thread.

The better thing from Charlie is, IMHO, a discussion between either Wells or Verne and a time-traveler who can only give factual, simple answers. I think it's in _Toast_.

Anyway, Verne/Wells asks all the wrong questions because he's trapped by his own assumptions -- how many battleships did Britain produce? How many coal mines opened?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:22 PM on October 24, 2007

Only thing I want from the future are those food pills we were promised. Although I’d prefer something like a food cube. Or perhaps a rectangle. Just some completely nutritious food object (not mealy) that is all you have to eat for a meal so you don’t have to worry about balancing your meals every day.
(fruit/vege smoothies come close).
posted by Smedleyman at 1:35 PM on October 24, 2007 [1 favorite]

perhaps predicted I would

funny.

a single serving would basically be a pile of pea mush

Why pea mush? One could have a delicious, crisp pea and eat it like an apple or sliced and sauteed.

Fruits and vegetables are so much larger now in the usa than before. When I returned from India in late 1985, after 15 years away from America and walked through a NYC supermarket, I cried it was so overwhelming and luxurious a selection. Rural life in India is much closer to life 100 years ago, or older. Indian eggs are a third the size, so are their limes, plums, tomatoes.

Peaches now are as big as softballs (and about as flavorful). But as I kid I never could have dreamed of eating fresh strawberries out of season, Asian apples or fresh lichees all summer long in NYC. Mesclun salad greens never existed when I was a kid, they're awesome and so far superior to that iceburg crap.

And another thing about amazing innovations that exist now but didn't then, are all the extraordinary extreme sports these days, the snowboarding, super-flexible gymnastics and mind bending Le Parkour.
posted by nickyskye at 1:49 PM on October 24, 2007

What I never foresaw in my wildest dreams was that people would die not because there was no treatment for them--but because they couldn't pay for it.

Aside from the starvation comment above (which, I think, might be off the mark because I think the implication is if you had the money, you could live FOREVER), it's worth noting that Kim Stanley Robinson also made this idea one of the major issues in his Mars trilogy. Actually, I have to think Forbes left the Mars trilogy off the list because a) they're Forbes, and so not really interested in exploring the fiction side of things, and b) because the Mars aspect superficially outweighs the social/cultural futurism of the series.
posted by chrominance at 3:02 PM on October 24, 2007

Ugh. Doktor sleepless. What a sad mess of a comic that is. It's hard to believe that this is the same guy who write Trandmetropolitan and the early Planetary (back when it was good and, you know, actually came out).

Fame and fawning internet sycophants have clearly been hard on him.
posted by Artw at 3:41 PM on October 24, 2007

Pat Cadigan is one of the few women renown in science fiction writing

Are you serious? First of all, as much as I have enjoyed some of Cadigan's work, she isn't even in the top tier of female SF writers in terms of name recognition. Tea From an Empty Cup was from 1998 and Synners is from like 20 freaking years ago.

Here are a few of the female SF writers who are better known and/or more award-winning, usually both: Lois Bujold, Megan Lindholm (Robin Hobb), Anne McCaffrey, Connie Willis, Ursula Le Guin, Andre Norton, Octavia Butler, Patricia McKillip, C.J. Cherryh, Nalo Hopkinson, Tiptree and Wilhelm, etc etc.

The whole SF as boy-zone meme is soooo 1955.
posted by Justinian at 5:26 PM on October 24, 2007

IIRC she's doing Horror Movie franchise novels for Black Flame (Warhammers non-games publishing arm) these days. Which is probably not an indication of great renown.
posted by Artw at 5:34 PM on October 24, 2007

Nah, remember Updike's tie-ins for Settlers of Catan?
posted by Justinian at 7:27 PM on October 24, 2007

and "whither the videophone" discussions

After about 8 years of determined ludditery when it came to mobile phones, I finally knuckled under and got one a couple of weeks ago. It was free with a $20 a month subscription, is 3G+ and has the HSDPA and the PDQ and the WTFBBQ and all the other approved acronyms and swiss-army-knife features I'm still discovering, and it can make video calls with one of its two built-in cameras. Works a treat. As far as the videophone goes, the future is already here, in Korea at least.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:20 AM on October 25, 2007

What, no Long Boom?
posted by lodurr at 7:38 AM on October 25, 2007

Simon!: What? No! But that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life!

Relax. Where you are, you'll be alive.

Well, right up until you're not.
posted by lodurr at 7:39 AM on October 25, 2007

Ugh. Doktor sleepless. What a sad mess of a comic that is. It's hard to believe that this is the same guy who write Trandmetropolitan and the early Planetary (back when it was good and, you know, actually came out).

Derail but:

Shrug. I read the first two issues 'cause a friend had them. I'm one of those people that only reads comics in trade paperbacks because they're better, dammit. So Doktor Sleepless is not of much interest to me quite yet. Judging it a sad mess before there's even enough of it released to put together a single trade seems... Premature?

I thought the two issues were fine as the start of something. It's got a ways to go, and not every classic is classic right out of the gate (I'd have to go back and look at, say, the first two issues of Transmet to see how they compare).

I think my favorite thing about Ellis is simply that he's worked in a ton of genres and formats that there seems to be kind of... segments of people who like his work grouped by what works of his they value the most. You'd pick Transmet and Planetary.

I'd go with Fell and Nextwave*.

Regardless of what the quality of the comic ends up being, I figure it's a good example of people asking the sort of questions that the thread is about wrt The Future.

* - True fact: People who don't like Nextwave aren't people, they're vaguely-sentient brocolli.
posted by sparkletone at 10:10 AM on October 25, 2007

Nextwave sucks, and you have no right to question my sentience. What do we want? Cruciferae Rights! When do we want them? Now!
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:42 PM on October 25, 2007