I feel cheated.

While Nathaniel is working on the new servers, I felt I would try to post something entertaining, which nevertheless wasn’t a crisis if it got lost. A re-blog was the obvious choice. So herewith, a little something I wrote a couple of weeks ago.

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“Apollo 11 was ten years ahead of schedule – that means as an author, I have to adjust all my timelines, we’re on the moon and it’s 1969 – that means that what I predicted for 2001 is now suddenly more likely to exist in 1981” – Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 – A space oddesey, October 3rd 1969.

I feel cheated.

It’s now 2006. Not only are we not anywhere near the tech that we Clarke anticipated for 1981, we didn’t even get there in 2001. Where’s my jetcar ? I want my lasergun damnit ! Oh and those x-ray glasses… mmm…
But I digress. What went wrong ? A hundred and fifty years ago the first scifi author (unless you count Dante) Jules Verne wrote a manuscript called “Paris 1939”. He predicts a city where people drive cars (this appears to be the first usage of the phrase ‘horseless carriage’) and filled with electric lights everywhere – including streetlamps. Since the lightbulb wasn’t even invented yet. His publisher refused to print the book calling it “just too farfetched”. His daughter inherrited the manuscript who passed it on to her daughter, who published it to “rectify the acuracy of grand-dads storytelling vission”
Former South African Minister of the external, Pik Botha was a writer before entering politics. In 1951 he writes a story called (translation): The value of a heart. In this story, he has Joseph Stalin undergo a heart transplant. Once more the story remained unpublished for being “too unlikely”. So Mr. Botha left scifi and spent the rest of his short writing career doing romances and (rather silly) detective stories.
Less than 10 years later, the first heart transplant happened right here in South Africa.

So SCIFI authors have predicted some things remarkably well. Yet amazingly, the best of the best just doesn’t seem to match. Most profound innovation of the end of the twentieth century – the personal computer. Nobody, not one saw that one coming. They all worried about the giant computers in the corps getting too powerfull – nobody saw the ones in our homes.
Once they were there, the next great predictions were wearable computing (watches that think), and voice recognition. So far those two have materialized, but been rather a let-down (though wearable computing is growing).
So the greatest inventions, they didn’t even expect (somehow none of the scifi writers, renegades that they are, and inspiration to renegades – ever really believed in the renegades who read them, for it was those renegades (particularly Steve Wozniak) who brought us the one thing no company on earth would have thought could be sold), and we got none of their greatest promisses.

There is no reliable cryogenics system for multicelled creatures. There is no cure for cancer yet. The flying car is still just something you see in movies. Personal space travel is just a dream, and even the X-prize won’t change that very soon. The world where space ships are as simple a piece of ownership as a car today is still as far away as ever.

What’s worse, we are still stuck on some things which scientists and scifi authors called “outdated” fourty years ago. Most notably the internal combustion engin – and fossil fuels. Things which we already have better alternatives for. The cheapest being methane conversion for any car. Methane is free – governments are only too greatfull to get rid of what to them is just a waste product, you can today, for a small outlay convert any car to run on a free fuel that causes absolutely no polution. Yet there are less than 100 of them in the world.
The reason is simple: politics. Political pressure by large oil companies (and countries) keep us dead set on a course of self-destruction when we have multiple ways out – the methane conversion is just the most easilly and immediately viable.
Of course they tell you there are safety issues – as if those didn’t exist in gasoline cars earlier – fix them ! It’s easier than an electric car that still needs to have a polluting power plant somewhere.

I feel cheated. What the hell happened to the world ? The IT industry has been through dosens, that’s dosens of major revolutions in the past fourty years. Vaccuum tubes became transistors became microchips became microcomputers became home computers. Punch card binary became assembler became top down programming became modular programming became object orientation.
And even now we are on the verge of the next major breakthrough – practical nanotech, and quite likely not too long after that, quantum computing.
So why the hell are cars still essentially the same as they were in 1893 ? Why on earth are powerplants still basically what they were in 1925 ?
Innovation has not stopped, if anything the pace has picked up – but where we needed it most, it hasn’t happened. I don’t buy it. Something else is stopping the innovations from realizing into products. Something with power and money and a vested interest in the status quo – which leaves not too many usual suspects !!
I feel cheated.
The world has been cheated.
We’ve been cheated out of our very future.
Any chance you think that we can still wake up in time to take it back ?