It's fairly commonplace to say that while the world of 1970 would be mindblowing to someone living in 1900, the same can't be said of today for someone living in 1950. Certainly there have been tremendous developments in medicine, computing, and so on, we don't have flying cars or jetpacks and nobody's living on the moon or eating their meals in pill form, as certain people predicted we would be. The shift is nothing like as spectacular as the earlier one, which saw us go from crude motor cars to putting men on the moon, the invention of pennicilin and the discovery of DNA, radio and television, and the nuclear bomb.

I've been getting the sense, though, over the last couple of years that within my lifetime, we will feel like we're living in the future. I've gushed on here before about the revolutionary potential of nanotechnology - not even so much the little robots everyone thinks of, but the myriad applications of nanofibres and the like. We've recently had news of the successful development of materials with a negative refractive index in the visible spectrum, only a couple of years after the concept was proved viable in the microwave spectrum. So within the decade we could have actual working invisibility cloaks. Now that's a futuristic technology if ever I saw one.
The internet is progressing and growing so rapidly that it's almost unrecognisable from the first time I used it in the mid 90s, and beyond the wealth of amazing entertainment it offers it's starting to facilitate meaningful social change around the world.
The human genome project, while still in its early stages, promises to open up whole new avenues of medical treatment and prevention, after quite a few decades of relative stagnation in pharmaceutical research.

So what do you think? Am I talking bollocks or is anyone else as excited by all this stuff as I am?

Every few weeks I will comment on something in everday life as being "It's the future", Brian Potter style.

There are video adverts in the underground.

I can pause live TV

Mobile phones!

It's true that back in the early 1980s we were all promised that we'd have jetpacks by the '21st-century', a phrase which itself was synonymous with the future and great technological advancement.

I want my money back.

I'm glad I don't have to wear Bacofoil trousers though.

I dunno, GY.

There are indeed lots of cool stuff being discovered at the moment. But how much of it will end up actually being commercially viable? Just because something can be done doesn't mean that the technology will necessarily then get used in any significant way. My favourite piece of technology in this regard is the "ultrafax", developed in 1948.

There is a line of literature on innovation theory which basically says the time from the development of a new technology to the time it actually starts to affect productivity, the economy and society in any significant way is between 50 and 70 years. Take the computer. Assume ENIAC as the starting point. It was 30 years before any significant commerical potential could be wrung out of it, 50 years before you saw much in the way of social change as a result, and - arguably - it still hasn't really shown up in the productivity features because we haven't figured out how to re-arrange the workplace properly (or, more likely, because computers are at least as efficient in encouraging people to faff around as to work....take otf, for instance).

So, let's assume that one of robotics and nanotechnology or genomics is the next "big" technology. I would argue we're probably still 20 or more likely 30 years away from any of these even remotely hitting a moment in its development as significant as the creation of the PC. And it will be another 20-30 years beyod that for us to figure out how to really use the technology in a beneficial manner. By which time, I fully expect to have kicked off.

I figure my kid might see some major changes in his life time, but I kind of doubt that I will.

The biggest changes a normal person from 1900 would have noticed by 1970 would undoubtedly have been the use of the motor car as the normal form of transport, television, labour saving electrical kitchen devices such as the washing machine and hoover, and young women walking around showing their ankles off and being quite unabashed about it too. Nuclear weapons and men on the moon are all very well, but I don't walk around all day thinking "wow, we've built the Hubble telescope".

I think from the world of the 1950s to today, the great leaps forward have undoubtedly been cheap air travel, home computing, and mobile telephony. Say what you like about the "visions" of Asimov and Clarke not coming true, with jet-packs and robots in the home, even they never, ever, envisaged computers you could carry in your pocket that would allow you access to a source of information as vast as the internet. Or the on-line porn.

"Nuclear weapons and men on the moon are all very well, but I don't walk around all day thinking "wow, we've built the Hubble telescope"."

I do. Although at the moment it's more "we've built Cassini".

Rogin, I absolutely take your point, and I agree that widespread commercial applications for nanotech are still a ways off. Certainly if I were older I wouldn't feel quite so excited. But I reckon I've got about 40 years left, if I'm lucky. Plenty of time for these things to come to market. It's also worth noting, I think, that in the 50s, nobody predicted that computers would get small enough to be a mass market product. Everyone thought they'd get bigger. So there wasn't the push from mass market producers until the microchip was invented. By contrast, there are loads of mass market applications being devised for nanotech. Now I happen to think that the inherent difficulties of manufacturing on that scale mean that it will take the longest to commercialise of all the things I mentioned, but the potential is enormous and once we fully move from basic research to technological implementation and improvement, I think there will be more money and effort behind it than there was for computing, which was really driven by universities and governments for a long time.

QUOTE:
I think from the world of the 1950s to today, the great leaps forward have undoubtedly been cheap air travel, home computing, and mobile telephony.

I'd add quite a lot to that list:

Supermarkets

Global brands (including, to bring it closer to home, the globalisation of sports brands)

The retreat from political empires and their replacement by economic ones

The ubiqity of television
The disappearance of many taboos such as deference to royalty, acceptable language in the media

While those are indeed profound changes, they're much more social in nature - more a question of living in another country than living in the future. It's the "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" angle that I'm thinking about.

I'd also like to add one more mindboggling 1900-1950 transition, which I don't think has a parallel in the more recent period - physics. In 1900, people thought (or at least had no good evidence to believe otherwise) that the atom was the smallest unit of matter. They (scientists, anyway) thought the universe was basically deterministic in a Newtonian manner. They thought that time was absolute. Light was a wave. By 1950, we have the splitting of the atom, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. That's a staggering change, completely overturning what we thought about the nature of the universe. We also had the formulation of the Big Bang theory, although it didn't receive observational support until the 60s.

Futuristic present or not, if civilization is still more or less intact by the end of this century it'll be a miracle.

I'd be amazed if people weren't saying that 100 years ago. Or 200. Or anytime, really. Humans always assume that the present is not as good as the past, and that the future will be worse. Yet that sentiment is very rarely true.

The future will look like now only different. And it won't take so long to get there.

I have trouble with the present, let alone the future. When I recently informed some friends that I'd never downloaded a song off the internet, they looked at me as though I was some missing link.

I like your description of an invisibility cloak being a futuristic development 'if ever I saw one'

I'm just about to start living in the future.

And again. Oh, and once more.

And now... (etc. ad infinitum)