Predicting the future is a difficult profession, although the fundamental technical issues allowing this sort of travel are now well in hand. Predicting how folks would be spending their time is much more challenging. Dominoes? Paper airplanes?
How We Were Supposed To Be Riding Across The Country With Our Kids
– Posted on December 7, 2011
People who try to predict the future always get things spectacularly wrong. Predictions for the future of telephones were for video phones – crystal-ball gazers didn’t see the mobile/cellphone coming. At college I was told that a problem in future would be how to spend our leisure time, as automation would mean everyone having to work only 3 or 4 days per week (for the same money). It didn’t occur to the lecturer that automation might mean some folk working a full week and others being redundant.
All very true. The art of predicting the future is keeping the second law of thermodynamics in mind while doing so.
The future will be just like the past, only the stuff will be shinier, and the rich will be richer. As for the rest of us, it’s the same game as always, just with fancy new titles/reasons.
“The future will be just like the past, only the stuff will be shinier, and the rich will be richer.”
At the risk of delving into politics….I cannot let this stand. The rich get richer…and the poor get richer, too. Just not as fast.
When I was a kid, one car per family was what the middle class had. Air conditioning and color television were luxuries gaudy enough to merit embarrassment.
Today, MOST people below the poverty line have one or more cars; three-quarters have air conditioning (and keep in mind, it’s not even needed everywhere) and color televisions are universal. So are cellular phones and meals out – another rare treat for us 1960s middle-classers.
Today the standard of living is dropping – fast. I could fill a couple of threads with why; if you’d like, I can steer you to a few political discussion sites were we could hash it out.
But I do think that a world where kids have their own cars, is a richer society than one where high-school kids had to work to buy their own….BICYCLES. My world in the past.
I disagree. The fact that “the poor” own more stuff does not make the poor of today richer than the poor of yesteryear. The reason those at or below the poverty line have more stuff than their fore bearers is because the stuff they have is cheaper and more plentiful. Along time ago, people were paid very little and stuff (electronics, cars, A/C etc.) were very expensive. Now, these items are ubiquitous and in most cases cheap. Also, people don’t make more money then they used too. They may get more in regards to their paycheck, but due to inflation and prices of everything across the board it equals out. Look at it another way: If in the ’30’s you were to rent a house, you may pay $65 per month. We may say today that amount is cheap, but it is only cheap to us. To the person renting that house back then, they might only make a $15 dollars a week. Now, a person may bring home anywhere from 1200 to 3500 a month. Factor in rent/mortgage car payment(s) utilities and everything else, and you might see where I’m going with this. 🙂
i would gladly trade two cars, tv and air conditioning for a defined benefit retirement plan and healthcare that doesn’t eat up over 10% of my pay.
Yes!
It’s all a shell game. Give them shiny stuff, it will keep them quite. The income gap between the rich and poor is huge, only 10% of the world has the shiny stuff and a very much smaller percent can actually afford it.
Please………please……….don’t go politics here. Curbside Classics is the place I go to forget all that garbage for a while. I love the fact that the comments here are about cars by people who know about cars and I don’t have to wade through political commentary to read about something I love. It’s your site Paul and you can do what you want here, I’m just asking you consider a reader’s request.
We don’t go off on political tangents here very often and the comments seem to be filled with much less (usually none) vitriol then those you will find on TTAC and I hope it stays that way. I don’t think Paul has set down a comment policy/rules or deleted any comments so far because there hasn’t been a need to do so. Finally, the best thing to do if you don’t care for a comment(s) is to simply skip over them unless you find them offensive in some manner, which I’m sure Paul would not stand for. 🙂
Nitsedy; It was a very brief (and polite and respectful) detour, and it seems to be over now. Sometimes its hard to totally avoid.
I noticed that too, the cellphone was mostly completely missed by futurists, they imagined video pay phones, like in 2001:A Space Odyssey
“2001: A Space Odyssey”, made in 1965-67, is a perfect example. They mocked up a pocket calculator and didn’t use it – not believable for the year 2001. But a computer (the size of a room) that was intelligent enough to have a psychotic breakdown was believable then.
Anything digital has gotten literally 100,000,000 times cheaper and/or more powerful since 1970. Nobody could have predicted that, it’s the greatest and longest scale-up in history. On the other hand making a computer as smart as a human turned out to be about that much harder than they thought. This weirdly funny video shows how far that’s gotten. Not exactly Hal just yet.
Driving a car poorly obviously takes very little intelligence. The hand-eye skills needed are far harder to compute than anyone thought back then too, but like Paul said, they are coming into practical reality. Google’s cars have logged 200K safe miles out on the roads already.
We’ll be sharing the road with self-driving cars eventually. I’m looking forward to it. The trouble with traffic is many people aren’t very good at driving, don’t pay attention and would just as soon be playing dominoes. I’ll be grateful when their cars drive themselves.
What I don’t expect to see is a highway that empty.
PS: Speaking of drafting, they’re all planning for self-driving cars going long distances to bunch up together like a train, “platooning”. Saves lots of fuel and space on the road.
I agree, I can’t wait. People are sucky drivers, trust me, it’s what I do.
Star Trek had handheld communicators — just like cell phones.
Interesting that the illustration portrays a car intelligent enough to drive itself (still very embryonic) but gives the passengers a physical game board instead of the iPad the kids would now be using to play a game in the car (with other players nowhere near the car, no less!).
The one I always loved was the openness of the limited access Interstate highway. No traffic jams. No bottlenecks.
And especially . . . . . . . those locals who only need to go ten miles will stick to the local streets. Nobody would ever think of bottling up the expressway to just go a short distance.
Sigh… I’m likely one of the few human beings on the planet that enjoys long distance driving as long as it’s in the right car.
Your not alone there Dan
Neither one of you is alone in that. Playing a board game at 70mph? I’d rather be the one actually driving the vehicle, not a computer.
I too love long distance driving, in the right car of course, a car that makes you feel comfortable, at ease, and one with the car. Especially at night, I would get into some kind of trance, like a good meditation. Time seem to not exist. Don’t know about if my reaction time is affected when I enter such a state, but never got any accident doing that yet. Most of my accident is during in-city driving somehow.
Imagine a life with so few cars on the 405 in Los Angeles also…..
I do also.
Can you imagine how miserably hot, humid, and uncomfortable it would be inside that plexiglas bubble?!
Tomorrow morning I need to drive from Savannah, GA to Atlanta. The first 165 miles of that trip are made on I-16. It’s kinda like the road in that first picture except flatter, straighter and more boring. In other words, one of the more sleep inducing drives around. I keep suggesting that it would be the perfect experimental road for long distance self driving, so I could read a book or post to Curbside Classic while going to Atlanta. I wish someone would listen to me and get on this project.
Nevada passed a law this year that their DMV is to work out the rules and regs for self-driving cars. Google’s supporting similar efforts in other states.
Amen. I make that trip all the time. (My son matriculates in Statesboro). One lonely road.
Go Eagles! Which direction are you coming to “The Boro” from? SAV or ATL?
Atl (Grrrrr!) (Go Eagles!)
The real science fiction in that picture is that the kids are not fighting with each other. We were thrilled by the first three row minivan, because we could put one kid in the front right, one in the middle left, and one in the rear right. A parent could sit in the middle right and clobber any one who got out of line.
The real pity is that we were too soon for DVD based entertainment systems.
Amen, brother. Three kids in the back of an Olds 98 was a disaster for any drive longer than 6 blocks. The Ford Club Wagon with second row captains chairs was a fabulous vehicle for Mom, Dad and 3 kids. We were too soon for video, but the Game Boy Color made for a lot of peaceful travel.
If the highway was I-5 going to Vegas, the game’s likely gonna be poker…
So cars of the future will all have bubble-tops, fins and apparently not need seatbelts.
The lack of seatbelts is probably because no futurist of 50 years ago would have considered our society becoming something so scared as to be completely obsessed with safety and not taking risks (personal, financial, etc.). After all, if you’re a futurist, the concept of a ‘brave new world’ is completely inconceivable without the word ‘brave’ in it.
If you think about it, no drawings of the future had kids riding bicycles with helmets, roller skating with knee and elbow pads, children armored into car seats, and views of balconies and walkovers usually had very minimal safety rails designed for being attractive rather than holding back a bus. Risk and (minor) injury was considered a normal part of life 50 years ago. You got banged up, you got up and continued on.
Today we’re too scared of our shadows to even play without pounds of protective armor.
I agree, mandated safety is overdone in our modern, civilized society. That and the fear of lawsuits.
I was mostly getting a chuckle out of how they predicted that future cars would look like concept show cars of the 50s. The future always looked cool on the cover of Popular Mechanics.
In their vision of all cars under computer control, they could drive the collision rate down so low there’s no need more need to wear seat belts in a car than in a house.