A set of postcards was printed around the turn of the twentieth century, depicting life as it was to be at the turn of the twenty-first. As happens with so many looks forward, some few predictions came true, many fell comically flat, and a huge number stopped far short of what the future would hold, even just a few years down the road. Famous futurist Isaac Asimov came across these cards, miraculously preserved, around 1985. He comments on fifty cards from that set, admiring whatever was accurate, gently noting where imagination came up short of reality, and respectfully noting how chancy the prediction business can be. One point pervading the set was that, however much the technology might advance in a hundred years, the artist felt that clothing styles had reached perfection in 1900, and that no change of materials or cultural norms would ever disentrench women's long skirts, elborate bodices, and complex hair styles - not even in underwater sports!
Rather than comment on the artworks, I'd like to comment on Asimov's commentary, which suffered the advance of technology at least as much as Jean-Marc Côté's predictions did. For example, he predicted that 2000-era warfare would involve high-altitude bombers and nuclear weapons. Rather than blasts of ever greater power, however, bombs have evolved toward ever-greater precision. A smaller blast within inches of dead center and penetrated to precise depth can be even more effective, and can pinpoint an underground bunker in a population center with no effect on civilians a block away. And, although altitude has its place, stealth aircraft hugging the landscape can be even harder to detect and to counter.
Asimov's foresight fell short in other areas, too. The robot stenographer of another scene captures the essence if not appearance of text-to-speech products like Dragon. Likewise,
Roomba floor cleaners lie within easy reach of many houshold budgets. Electronic music, although not robotically played on acoustic instruments, pervades popular cultures. (In a second reversal,
Animusic) computer animations electronically recreate the music-making robots depicted here.) And the chemist-chefs distilling meals-in-a-pill presaged today's
molecular gastronomy. It seems odd that, a hundred years ago, descriptions of today's life might be more accurate sometimes than descriptions of a quarter that age.
Still, the future isn't what it once was and probably never will be. That's no reason to stop dreaming. Sooner or later, some of those dreams might come true.
-- wiredweird
