The future's not what it used to be

It's not the technological wonderland described in numerous 1940's SF short stories or 1950's TV shows and movies, but it's still pretty cool:

If this is the future, someone forgot to stock it properly. Where are the personal service robots, the moon vacations, the self-contained cities rising out of the smog? What happened to all those sci-fi prophecies? In Where's My Jetpack? (Bloomsbury), Popular Mechanics columnist Daniel Wilson moans that "it's the twenty-first century, and things are a little disappointing." Wilson, the author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising, begs "all the scientists, inventors, and tinkerers out there" to "please hurry up" (emphasis in original).

Wilson shouldn't be so moony. Fanciful futurist visions can obscure all the neat stuff we’ve accumulated, once-wild innovations that are far cooler and more functional than jetpacks. (Microwave ovens, anyone?) They also make it easy to forget that the ultimate responsibility for choosing which technologies fill our lives lies with us, the ordinary consumers, more than any rocket scientists. Take the titular jetpack. It exists — but no one really wants it. It's a 125-pound monster with a flight time of 30 seconds, powered by expensive fuel. The dream of individual human flight was realized in 1961, and we haven't been able to find any use for it outside of Bond movies, the first Super Bowl halftime show, and Ovaltine commercials.

[. . .]

In another recent book, The Shock of the Old (Oxford University Press), the British historian David Edgerton posits that technological innovations don't matter as much as we think they do. We tend to consider scientific and engineering breakthroughs themselves as the important thing, he says, when what really matters is how we fit them into our lives. Edgerton disparages our high hopes for each new innovation as "futurism," a disease that led us to believe in a new world birthed by engineers, where electricity would be "too cheap to meter," Segways would be ubiquitous, and voice recognition software would replace keyboards. Moving sidewalks exist, after all. Even now they creep through many of our airports. Heinlein's future isn’t upon us for the same reason we don't all have jetpacks: We haven't wanted to make the technology our own.

If Wilson is disappointed with the future, it's because he approaches it the wrong way. He — and we — shouldn't read science fiction to get a sneak peak at as-yet-unseen innovative technologies. Rather than as a blueprint for what should happen, we should read it to imagine the ways humanity will figure out how to use whatever shows up, or to tweak the impressive tech that's already lying around.

All quite true, and yet, not enough to displace those memories of being a 10-year-old SF reader and expecting to have my winter vacations on the moon or on Mars by now. Damn it, I do feel ripped off on that score!