1. confessions
  2. Friday Fun: Why Hollywood Always Gets the Future Wrong

Friday Fun: Why Hollywood Always Gets the Future Wrong

By jdupuis on March 19, 2010.

John Scalzi's latest AMC column Why Hollywood Always, Always Gets the Future Wrong is, as usual, very smart and right on target.

And pretty funny too.

Everybody gets the future wrong. It's not just Hollywood or science fiction writers. When it comes to the future, no one knows anything. At the close of the 19th century, British physicist Lord Kelvin declared heavier-than-air flight an impossibility (despite the existence of, you know, birds) and that radio was just a fad. In the '70s, the president of Digital Equipment Corp. voiced doubts that anyone would ever need a personal computer. In 1995, scientist Cliff Stoll wrote in his book Silicon Snake Oil that the Internet wouldn't really take off, in part because it could never replace newspapers or shopping malls.

Here's to getting the future wrong!

Tags
friday fun
My Job in 10 Years Book
futurism
humor
humour

More like this

The fifteen years that shook the world . . . and you were there
Fifteen years isn't a long time. Most of us can remember what we were doing 15 years ago. Often it's the same thing we are doing now, job-wise. Sure our kids were just kids, not adults. But 15 years isn't a historical epoch. At least not when you are living through it. But the fact is we have gone…
The Galileo Gambit: Just because your quackery is rejected by the establishment does not make you Galileo or Semmelweis
[Orac note: A combination of power outages, travel to Seattle, and trying to write something for my not-so-super-secret other blog conspired to leave me with nothing for this morning. So I thought I'd resurrect this old gem, which hasn't been reposted in at least four years. I actually did try to…
The Galileo Gambit
Over the last couple of weeks, I've been discussing How "They" See "Us," which is basically that "they" see "us" as pure evil. Well, maybe not always sheer evil, but certainly not good, and even more certainly as having ulterior motives, the most common of which is filthy pharma lucre. As a result…
The Galileo Gambit
While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have…

Huh? There are probably three things in your office that were depicted on Star Trek (in story lines that Roddenberry stole from short stories written in the 1940's and '50's). If anything, SF writers are too conservative in their predictions. Naturally they get some things wrong.

FTL is a literary device - we all know it. So is cloning, but there's work being done right now on printing body organs using your own stem cells. And as for flying cars, would you want the average driver to interact with traffic in three dimensions?