lazer-guided commentaries

Retrofuturism

This (courtesy of IP) is revisited 50s gee-whiz techno-utopian optimism. In the future, we’ll all be driving nuclear-powered cars! Holiday trips to the moon will be commonplace by 1973!

The problem is not so much with the predictions — although most will certainly appear laughable in hindsight — but with the irrelevance of the prediction game itself. "Tomorrow's robokitchen": who cares? This myopic obsession with artifacts ignores any wider context: the kinds of technological baubles discussed in the piece really have no bearing on what it is to be alive. An improvement in toasters does not translate into a change in human nature.

[Update:] Just found this slashdot comment which puts a different spin on essentially the same ideas. Another thought: the original article is so bad that it makes me wonder if it might be satirical in some way, rather than straight. I remain unimpressed.