Where's The Jet-Pack I Was Promised As A Kid?
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As a kid growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I would avidly watch sci-fi movies as well as future-casting science and technology TV shows. I also read a lot of sci-fi novels, and would often imagine what the world of my adulthood would be like. Filled with high-tech gadgets, that would make life easier for us. Touch-screen TVs, sophisticated communications devices, video phones, artificially intelligent robot servants, driverless cars, or even better, flying cars, jet-packs, a moon base, interstellar travel, the list is endless. Now it wasn't that I expected all of these things, I was pretty savvy as a kid, and knew what was feasible and what would remain science fiction for a long time to come. But mid-way through the second decade of the 21st century, there are certain things I am sorely disappointed we don't have available to us yet.
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It's 2015, the year that famously Back To The Future II (1989) is partly set. So it feels about time to take stock on the promises of the past. In the movie Marty Jr. is seen wearing something very like Google Glasses, he talks to the TV and pulls up window-in-window channels on his large flat-screen TV. Marty takes a video-call on the TV, and is fired by fax machine. So far so good. Apart from the pretty much obsolete fax machine. Who uses them anymore? Anyone? Anyone?
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Self-tying shoes? Apparently so, as Nike have produced them especially for the anniversary of the movie. Self-drying clothes? Not even sure I'd want a built-in hand-dryer in my T-shirt. We don't have holographic cinemas, showing Jaws 19, thankfully! No flying cars, and no hover boards! The hover board is the one thing from the movie that everyone seems to mention. Along the lines of, "It's 2015, where's my fucking hover board they promised me?"
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Well apparently the hover board isn't too far away. As a company called Hendo are working with the king of skate-boarding Tony Hawk to develop a hover board using "Magnetic Field Architecture™". Check out YouTube videos of Hawk testing out the board, it does look pretty sweet for a prototype. So even though Mattel aren't manufacturing pink hover boards for little girls yet, we are getting there.
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While we're on the positives, let's talk phones. No one at the time could have imagined that the Star Trek communicator of the original series would become a defunct piece of technology by the turn of the century. I mean, really, who has a flip-phone these days? Surely anybody who's anybody got themselves a smartphone years ago. A computer in your hand, more powerful than Hal 9000 (okay maybe not), that is permanently connected to the Weird Wide Web 24/7. Smartphones and the ubiquitous nature of the Internet is something few could have predicted. I wish I had, I'd be a billionaire by now, and not sat knocking out articles for this website for no money whatsoever.
Multi-screen, multi-device, with complete Wi-Fi connectivity, being used by toddlers to watch YouTube videos of people making stuff out of Play Doh and open a 101 Kinder Eggs. It's amazing stuff. People living huge chucks of their life online, in games and purposely blocky 8-bit style virtual worlds. Millions of videos of cats, and for better or worse, the whole social media revolution. Not even the most insane futurist could have made that stuff up, without being locked-up in an institution for their own good. |
By 2015 a number of movies predicted we'd be living under some Big Brother like totalitarian system. Memory Run (1996) and V For Vendetta (2005), directly pin-point 2015. But as we all know, long ago someone in government either read the novel or saw the movie of 1984, and thought it was a great idea. Our world may not be as dystopian on the surface as movies predicted, but we are all aware of the potential amount of surveillance we are under. And as 19th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham who devised the concept of the panopticon knew, the idea that we are being watched, is enough to keep us in line and in fear.
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The one thing that never materialised was the prediction that we'd all have much more leisure time. That technology would make our lives easier, freeing us up to pursue higher ideals and a more cultured life, filled with contemplating philosophy, writing poetry, communing with nature, and all that malarkey. Not sat in the office until late into the evening finishing sending all the emails you'd forgot to do, because you spent all day on facebook commenting on photos of your friends cat/kid/food or whatever. Technology hasn't freed us, we've become its willing slave.
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Talking of slaves, where's my robot? In 4 years time it will 2019, the year that Blade Runner (1982) is set. "More Human Than Human", is the motto of the Tyrell Corporation, who manufacture the Nexus 6 replicants. We're only 2 years off from Cherry 2000's (1987), sexy fembot. This year seems to be the year of the sci-fi AI robot, with Ex Machina and Chappie both covering the themes of sentient robots. I'm not expecting full humanoid AI robots to be walking the streets of my home town, I'd settle for Baymax from Big Hero 6 (2014). But nothing?! The nearest we have is those crappy robot vacuum cleaners that bump around your living room, and get stuck on the little raised threshold between the living room and the kitchen. Not exactly Roy Batty are they?
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Okay, so we live in a quasi-dystopian supposedly over-crowded world, where we're unable to feed the clawing masses. So forget the robots for now. Let's have the assisted suicide clinics of Soylent Green (1973), and recycle the dead to feed the living. That prediction is only 7 years off, and will kill two birds with one stone. Now, lets get some decent entertainment sorted too. I don't mind which, but any of the following will do. We've got 2 years until we should be having Running Man (1987) on our screens. 3 years before I want to be able to go and see my favourite Rollerball team kill the opposition. And a massive 5 years before I want to see huge fighting robots beating the shit out of each other in a boxing ring, like in my lad's favourite movie Real Steel (2011).
Though I might just settle for the 24/7 Mars One TV Channel in 2024. |
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