Utopian Visions
We have only to look at the novels of Jules Verne (which portrayed helicopters, submarines, projectors, jukeboxes, and space ships at a time when such devices seemed absurd) to know that the most outlandish inventions of our imagination can become everyday realities. But the speed of modernization in the past century may have carried away even the hardheaded forecasters amongst us. Paul Milo’s “Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century” shows just how carried away that was.
According to Milo’s book, an average morning in our fantasy future might have looked a little like this: you’d begin your five-day weekend by awaking to a gloriously bright room, which would swivel for optimum sunlight. You’re Robot-Jeeves, bowing, would present you with your daily food pill while you called mom at her retirement time-share orbiting in space. (Much more spectacular than Florida. And minus the alligators.) You’d slip out into Manhattan, protected by a semisphere dome, to make your appointment for cyronic freezing, all the while chatting with your pooch, who had turned out to be full of rather crotchety opinions and tasteless jokes after interspecies communication was perfected.
This sounds pretty improbable, but then many of the prognostications that Milo lists feel merely astray rather than downright wrong. Perhaps we don’t get our newspapers by fax, but then many people have them delivered to a kindle or a iPhone, devices that would have seemed like magical tablets only a few generations ago. We don’t yet have subterranean cities deep underground or planted on the sea floor; but we certainly have subterranean parking garages, subways, and malls, all of which feel a little like an underworld prowling beneath the real one. As Milo himself implies in his afterword, it’s the profusion of failed ideas that eventually helps us refine the successful one.
