But a flip phone of just a few years before would have been obvious. Yes, push buttons aren't rotary dials, but that would be no biggie. Push buttons for letters and numbers go back to the 1800s. And the idea of portable phones can be found in pop culture going WAY back.
It's that touchscreen which semi-randomly responds to your gestures that would confuse. I still get confused and will use a desktop computer over a "smart" phone at all opportunities.
Robots and self-driving cars were expected well before 2025. Space travel is WAY behind the expected curve. And clothes are only now starting to look futuristic. Alas the purple haired women in tights are not nearly as comely as those on the moonbase in "UFO" -- which was supposed to take place in 1980.
Most of these "fails" aren't caused by lack of tech, but lack of solutions to other cultural problems. Flying cars have been in existence for many decades. But they still haven't found a way to make them compatible with air traffic regs.
Musk's Teslas are already better drivers than humans, (by which I mean if the only cars on the road were Teslas, accident rates would be far lower than with human drivers). However, customer reluctance and semi-Luddite hysteria, not to mention ideological warfare around EVs, have limited their acceptance.
Factory robots have been a huge factor for decades. They just don't look like the cool cyborgs of movie fame, but they are robots nonetheless. And those cyborgs will be traipsing about in factories quite soon.
Space flight is another case of missed opportunity not due to lack of tech, but lack of intention and willpower, and a massive, organized campaign against space flight organized by the "we need to spend more money on the welfare state instead" crowd, mainly those who benefited in one way or another from the welfare state itself, along with the effective government monopoly on the actual means of getting into space.
Fab, I go way back. I'll be 79 next month. I've been a voracious consumer of science fiction and to a lesser extent, hard science (mostly as an autodidact) since my days as a five year old reading Tom Swift novels, and I've written and published dozens of SF novels, short stories, and even some screenplays. In other words, I pay attention to the cultural tech temperatures. My first experience with phones at a very young age involved that old Model 102 that sat in its place of honor on my grandmother's dining room sideboard, like a little tech idol. I vividly remember eavesdropping on our own four-family party line.
The first time I can remember the notion of a "portable telephone" getting any traction in popular culture was the Dick Tracy wrist phone. I used to desperately want one of those, and tried to imagine how cool things would be if they actually existed.
The big difference between you and I on these matters, I suspect, is that I *know* I've been living through the takeoff of the Tech Singularity, and I'm not sure that you do.
S curves happen. Pop culture in the 60s and 70s did an exponential projection of transportation and got burned bigly. In Star Trek the Enterprise encounters the SS Botany Bay whose passengers are in suspended animation. The Botany Bay left the Solar System in the 1990s. Plenty of other examples.
For androids and self driving cars things are getting real, but we are well behind the timeline of Astro Boy.
And usable computing power does not scale as Moore's Law. The speed of an individual core maxed out quite some time ago. And even those speeds were a bit of a cheat. Pipelines got deeper. For computations where step n requires the results of step n-1 you have to wait for that deep pipeline to fully flush at each loop iteration.
Where work can be done in parallel, computing power continues to grow at an astounding rate. But keeping all the multiprocessors on a GPU busy is no easy task. Branches and memory accesses put them in idle mode. (I was an early adopter GPUs for doing computations. I cut my teeth on version 1 of the CUDA toolkit.)
And finally, I would note that a top of the line WIndows 10 machine is sluggish compared to a Sun Sparcstation 1 from the late 1980s.
While I don't necessarily disagree with your overall point, I think a couple intermediate data points need mentioning. About four years after your 13th birthday Bell introduced touch tone dialing which gradually replaced the old rotary style dialers with the same key pads the original cell phones used. And my circa 2022 cell phone still uses a symbol that looks an awful lot like a princess phone handset (and a lot like the 1920s handset) to invoke the phone app, and a user interface a lot like a touch tone dial pad.
Lastly, my late father, born in 1922, was capable of navigating an early 2000s cell phone, having experienced all of the changes from 2 and 3 digit phone numbers and party lines up through the touch tone phone era.
Yes, but that was because he lived across the span of the changes. In this case, the kids had never experienced *at all* the things they were being asked questions about. Why? Because the rate of change had speeded up to a much faster pace than it was when I was 13. Further, the rate of change at that time was incredibly faster than it had been a hundred years ago.
The nature of exponential increase is that it starts low and slow before eventually entering its hockey stick phase. We are now well embarked upon that pattern, having left behind the low and slow increases. From here on out, it's going to look like a rocket heading straight up.
But a flip phone of just a few years before would have been obvious. Yes, push buttons aren't rotary dials, but that would be no biggie. Push buttons for letters and numbers go back to the 1800s. And the idea of portable phones can be found in pop culture going WAY back.
It's that touchscreen which semi-randomly responds to your gestures that would confuse. I still get confused and will use a desktop computer over a "smart" phone at all opportunities.
Robots and self-driving cars were expected well before 2025. Space travel is WAY behind the expected curve. And clothes are only now starting to look futuristic. Alas the purple haired women in tights are not nearly as comely as those on the moonbase in "UFO" -- which was supposed to take place in 1980.
Most of these "fails" aren't caused by lack of tech, but lack of solutions to other cultural problems. Flying cars have been in existence for many decades. But they still haven't found a way to make them compatible with air traffic regs.
Musk's Teslas are already better drivers than humans, (by which I mean if the only cars on the road were Teslas, accident rates would be far lower than with human drivers). However, customer reluctance and semi-Luddite hysteria, not to mention ideological warfare around EVs, have limited their acceptance.
Factory robots have been a huge factor for decades. They just don't look like the cool cyborgs of movie fame, but they are robots nonetheless. And those cyborgs will be traipsing about in factories quite soon.
Space flight is another case of missed opportunity not due to lack of tech, but lack of intention and willpower, and a massive, organized campaign against space flight organized by the "we need to spend more money on the welfare state instead" crowd, mainly those who benefited in one way or another from the welfare state itself, along with the effective government monopoly on the actual means of getting into space.
Fab, I go way back. I'll be 79 next month. I've been a voracious consumer of science fiction and to a lesser extent, hard science (mostly as an autodidact) since my days as a five year old reading Tom Swift novels, and I've written and published dozens of SF novels, short stories, and even some screenplays. In other words, I pay attention to the cultural tech temperatures. My first experience with phones at a very young age involved that old Model 102 that sat in its place of honor on my grandmother's dining room sideboard, like a little tech idol. I vividly remember eavesdropping on our own four-family party line.
The first time I can remember the notion of a "portable telephone" getting any traction in popular culture was the Dick Tracy wrist phone. I used to desperately want one of those, and tried to imagine how cool things would be if they actually existed.
The big difference between you and I on these matters, I suspect, is that I *know* I've been living through the takeoff of the Tech Singularity, and I'm not sure that you do.
S curves happen. Pop culture in the 60s and 70s did an exponential projection of transportation and got burned bigly. In Star Trek the Enterprise encounters the SS Botany Bay whose passengers are in suspended animation. The Botany Bay left the Solar System in the 1990s. Plenty of other examples.
For androids and self driving cars things are getting real, but we are well behind the timeline of Astro Boy.
And usable computing power does not scale as Moore's Law. The speed of an individual core maxed out quite some time ago. And even those speeds were a bit of a cheat. Pipelines got deeper. For computations where step n requires the results of step n-1 you have to wait for that deep pipeline to fully flush at each loop iteration.
Where work can be done in parallel, computing power continues to grow at an astounding rate. But keeping all the multiprocessors on a GPU busy is no easy task. Branches and memory accesses put them in idle mode. (I was an early adopter GPUs for doing computations. I cut my teeth on version 1 of the CUDA toolkit.)
And finally, I would note that a top of the line WIndows 10 machine is sluggish compared to a Sun Sparcstation 1 from the late 1980s.
While I don't necessarily disagree with your overall point, I think a couple intermediate data points need mentioning. About four years after your 13th birthday Bell introduced touch tone dialing which gradually replaced the old rotary style dialers with the same key pads the original cell phones used. And my circa 2022 cell phone still uses a symbol that looks an awful lot like a princess phone handset (and a lot like the 1920s handset) to invoke the phone app, and a user interface a lot like a touch tone dial pad.
Lastly, my late father, born in 1922, was capable of navigating an early 2000s cell phone, having experienced all of the changes from 2 and 3 digit phone numbers and party lines up through the touch tone phone era.
Yes, but that was because he lived across the span of the changes. In this case, the kids had never experienced *at all* the things they were being asked questions about. Why? Because the rate of change had speeded up to a much faster pace than it was when I was 13. Further, the rate of change at that time was incredibly faster than it had been a hundred years ago.
The nature of exponential increase is that it starts low and slow before eventually entering its hockey stick phase. We are now well embarked upon that pattern, having left behind the low and slow increases. From here on out, it's going to look like a rocket heading straight up.