Re: Back To The Future Discussion Topic
@Americandad, methinks your keyboard needs to go not back to the future, but back to the vender sinse it seems wronger than a wrong thing which is wrong. Perhaps you could correct the above post sinse I'm afraid I have no idea what you were trying to say there.
@Joseph, I know what you mean about old sf having a weerd mixture of technologies. I always engage snigger mode when I watch the original 1963 Daleks, and despite a race of mutant aliens who have manufacturered their own robot travel machines running on static electricity, have automatic doors, laser defense systems and neutron bombs capable of wiping out all life on the planet, despite all this they are still! using a back lit slide projector. Hearing a Dalek say "next slide!" is really amusing, and lead one of my friends and I into some amusing dalek parodies:
"The! tape! Is! Tangled! dis! en! tangle! Dis En Tangle! Dis! En! tanble!" .
The problem however in any prediction, is having lived through some technological changes, especially the rise of the microchip and cyber age, I've personally lost faith in the old sf standbye idea that technological progress is identical with social progress, an idea which goes right back to H G Wells and Jules Vern.
Neither however do I necessarily think technological progress is automatically leading to ruin or apathy. What I see more is technological development increasingly subordinate only to propping up a status quo and the ability of those in power to maintain that power, eg, if a development such as a self driving car or online sharing of information against copywrite threatens some coorporations bank balance it gets suppressed, while if a development like facebook allows greater increases in control and money for those in charge it passes.
That's why I see the next major cha nge as a social, rather than technological one, though whether it will be a counter cultural movement similar to the 1960's, a liberation from the increasing levels of social conformity, or an increase in paranoyer and control which will eventually lead us to Huxley's brave new world I don't know.
I also think some degree of crash is entirely probable on an economic level. And all of this will of course affect how technology develops, after all there are many things which we currently have! the technology to do from cloning to farming the ocean floor, to colonizing the moon or flying to mars, but which just aren't happening due to our lovely tendency to look at only what bennifits a particular minority group or interest (usually these days a corporate one).
This is where I see Back to the Future's prediction really failing, sinse the world back to the future imagined was an expantion of the freer spirit of the nineties, with it's hov er boards and outlandish fashions and preservations of the past (remember the Hill Valley clock tower in glass).
One very scary prediction in fact was from the writer of Robocop. When he was asked to return and write the remake, he said that in 1985 when he penned the original film, the idea of a corporation attempting to discredit a police force so that they could have their own franchised lore enforcement service and literally own a city was a very outlandish and science fiction one, however now, 15 years before the film was set it seems worryingly probable.
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