• Ech@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    They saw the invention of air travel and space travel within 70 years. As far as they were concerned, nothing was too extraordinary.

  • Vespair@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    Make no mistake, that is the future that we were entitled to, but which was stolen from us by capitalists and despots.

    The old sci-fi writers weren’t wrong in their aspirations for us, we were wrong for letting our futures be taken away from us.

    • abbotsbury@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      They thought automation would drastically reduce the amount of work someone needs to do to survive, instead of just increasing corporate profit and leading to layoffs.

      • Vespair@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        and it should have reduced the work as predicted

        The only reason we aren’t approaching Star Trek utopia is because of the unchecked greed fostered by our systems of capitalism.

        There is no reason that, in a world of finite necessary work, increased automation shouldn’t have freed us from the constraints of some of that work.

        The fact that it hasn’t isn’t indictment of automation, it’s indictment of unchecked capitalism.

        • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Star Trek’s utopia came after economic collapse and a third World War, in that order. So we actually seem to be on track so far.

          • Vespair@lemm.ee
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            9 months ago

            I mean, sure, valid, but I am specifically speaking of the end state and don’t personally believe that is the only pathway there, though I do fear much the same as many of us that it might be the most likely.

            • areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
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              9 months ago

              At this point war and revolution is probably the only way forward. How else do we get rid of things like capitalism and nationalism?

              • Vespair@lemm.ee
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                9 months ago

                Real talk, aside from walking into a voting booth every few years, what actual real world effort have you put into changing the world and system?

                Because I’m gonna be honest, I hear this defeatist sentiment a lot, and it’s almost always from people taking other’s word on the matter, not from the people who are out on the ground enacting real change every day.

                Change isn’t impossible, it’s just hard. You just have to ask yourself if you care enough to put in the effort or if you’re just waiting for revolution because it’s the easy answer.

                • areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
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                  9 months ago

                  I actually used to attend protests, meetings, try and convince people to join back when I was part of a marxist organization. From my perspective all the people on the ground wanted a revolution. I think if you actually looked you would find plenty of people like this. I left for several reasons, including not agreeing with the actions of Leninists in the past, but also because I couldn’t sustain the required time and energy to the cause.

                  What do you do to create change? What is your plan? I don’t have a plan anymore, perhaps because I don’t know enough. I am not sure it’s even possible.

                  I am not suggesting I have all of the anwsers. I actually think there is a good chance things won’t work out even after a revolution or civil war (see the soviet union for example). I don’t think it’s realistic to expect anything to change without one though. Almost all great leaps forward and changes in regime through history has been through violence and war. This didn’t always improve things either.

                  Revolution isn’t an easy answer at all. It seems impossible from my perspective no matter how much I try to tell people it might be necessary. Actually convincing people is extremely hard work and that’s just the start. There are plenty of cases where revolution didn’t work, and plenty of revolutionary ideologies to battle it out. None of this is simple and easy. It might be our only shot though, if we have a shot at all which I doubt very much. Honestly though I think if we do nothing things will collapse eventually anyway. The worst option is things become stagnant and stuck.

          • bluewing@lemm.ee
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            9 months ago

            I think if you peer behind the curtain of that utopia, I see the shadowy outline of an authoritarian government controlling it all. And Star Fleet is the iron fist in the velvet glove. The utopia seems to exist to simply keep the masses fat, happy, and controllable.

        • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          Yep. Kill your masters, or youre killing yourself (and also literally every other living thing becauae climate change)

          There is no third option. I mean, you could ask shitty Jeff to give it all up and srop, just fucking stop, and be an aging beach himbo and fuckerberg to just run a cringe mma gym and maybe contribute to an obscure Linux GUI a couple times a year. But they won’t. Don’t think they can.

    • Jimmyeatsausage@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I wish we were exploring space more!

      The monkey paw curls. We get entitled pricks, destroying labor protections to build so much wealth they’ve bought everything worth owning on the planet and still yearn for more.

      I wish we had robots to do our work!

      Another finger curls. Wealth inequality cripples the working class. Corporations consolidate to the point that everything is profit driven… locked behind paywalls or subscriptions. The only publicly available art and literature are made by robots.

      I wish we could all communicate with each other!

      The last finger curls, and paw crumbles to dust. Democracies around the world flounder as their populations are brainwashed by greedy CEOs in the news and media…taught to fear their neighbors and mistrust those politicians who haven’t been bought and paid for. Online, they’re bombarded by misinformation campaigns on every topic until they live in different realities. Diseases and pestilence once vanquished through science and cooperation return when science isn’t trusted and cooperation with your fellow citizens is viewed as betrayal to your tribe. The world now burns, and it, too, crumbles to dust.

      This timeline sucks, yo.

    • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Let’s look at which legislators have held progress back since we landed on the moon and it’s almost exclusively one party…

      • Vespair@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        Facts. “Both parties” might definitely suck, but the scale and scope to which that suck remains entirely non-comparable. The democrats are incompetent and ineffective, yes, but the republicans are openly and enormously diabolical and hostile.

      • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        No. One is worse. This does not absolve the other.

        Fight the worst bastards, but if you only fight them to the bosom of the less awful but still very awful bastards? Youre not winning. Youre not even surviving long.

      • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        Democrats would rather lose to Republicans than risk a third party gaining traction. Make no mistake, there’s a mustache-twirling villain capitalist party, and a “I swear I’m trying, please vote for me on this most important election evar” capitalist party.

        Our most recent chance at lasting real change was the rail strike. Before that it was Bernie Sanders. They’re doing it on purpose and playing leftists for fools.

        • Hoomod@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          This both sides are the same shit is so old now

          If you truly can’t tell the difference between them, I don’t know what will help you now.

          • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
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            9 months ago

            They’re different, but they’re good friends at the end of the day. One wants to kill me, the other doesn’t care and wants to make their friends happy. I die either way.

            They’re not the same, but they aren’t trying to be different.

            If the dems wanted to win, there would have been a primary, and anyone but biden on the ballot. They care more about perpetuating genocide and sucking billionaire dick than they do about stopping fascism at home, and they’re not willing to risk the former ending to do the latter.

  • quinkin@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    It is the distant future of the year 2024. Our intrepid hero uses her pocket computer to argue that the world is flat.

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I enjoyed how in Foundation novels they had mathematics that could predict the outcome of the future, had intergalactic travel, had personal shields, and a bunch of other fancy shit, but they were still using tapes to record information.

    For those of you born after, or near the turn of the century, you don’t understand how magical the year 2000 was. It was a completely different eon, and seemed so futuristic. Conan O’Brien had a whole gig about In the Year 2000. The term “2000” was used to indicate something was fancy, or ultimate, or high-tech. 2000 was the future, and therefore amazing. We did have a sense of optimism though, that is nowhere to be found nowadays.

  • Omega_Jimes@lemmy.ca
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    9 months ago

    I’m actually super mad at the stagnation in the way of life.

    The first manned flight was 1903, Apollo 11 was in 1969. I’m still going to work by chasing an exploding machine on four round dinosaurs, the same way someone in 1969 would. I still get hungry and homeless the same way someone in 1969 would. I have an 8 hour, five day work week just like someone in 1969 did.

    This is bullshit.

    • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      Almost like slave societies do not innovate, they just add slaves.

      If you want cool new gadgets; kill your masters.

        • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          On the other hand having a supercomputer in your pocket is a direct example of one way we’ve made huge leaps in technology since 1969, directly countering the original premise of stagnation.

    • problematicPanther@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      first successful manned powered flight was in 1903. People have been killing themselves by strapping into gliders for centuries. there was also that French guy who flew in a hot air balloon in the 1800s.

      Also, fuck the wright brothers.

        • problematicPanther@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          they were patent trolls, essentially. tried to patent the entire concept of an airplane, and tried to sue Curtiss over him creating a plane that actually didn’t use the technology they had patented.

          • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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            9 months ago

            Oh right, gotcha. I think I’ve read somewhere that they were pushed into suing by other outside influences, and that at least one of the brothers was opposed to suing at all, but that very well may have been from a whitewashed source. Either way, fuck patent trolls

          • ArcoIris@lemmy.zip
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            9 months ago

            Wait, really? I heard that what happened is they’d decided to be sneaky by patenting the control system for a heavier-than-air flying machine since they couldn’t patent the idea of the machine itself. Do you have sources I can research?

    • bluewing@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      Don’t you think that Commander Ryker had to get up and wade through all the paperwork, reports, and meetings every day for 8 hours, (plus mandatory OT), before he could get to screwing his way across that galaxy?

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Within your example, at least your four cylinders aren’t spewing lead and smog into your lungs and is massively more efficient. If someone runs a red in front of you, you are much more likely to survive. It can go much longer without any overhaul or tune up. You aren’t having to regularly manually adjust your valves. When you panic brake, you no longer have to pump your brakes. Your car is adjusting breaking to motivate roll over by vectoring brakes too. For other people, they have cars that can largely drive themselves, avoid combusting any gasoline at all, and are more likely to avoid some accidents altogether with automatic emergency braking.

      Going outside that, you have pervasive data connectivity, cheap high definition 100" screens, watches that would put the computers of 1969 to shame, a massively improved prognosis for many diseases notably including a whole bunch of cancers, brain implants that help Parkinson’s patients have better motor control. Air conditioning is much more likely to be available, affordable, and effective.

      Different areas have certain difficulty curves, basically moving a car is constrained by physics, the heavier than air flight and rocketry similarly have physics challenges that reared their heads quickly. Massive medical, computing, electronics, and connectivity have happened over the last 50 years, as well as a huge number of other advances I’m not thinking about. We have a number of issues that we haven’t fixed, or really can’t be fixed by tech.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Doesn’t everyone vape now?

        Cigarettes are as last century today as snuff boxes were to 1950’s authors.

        • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          It’s certainly far more popular among the youth than traditional smoking but there are plenty of cigarettes being sold still.

          • jaybone@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            I’m a dinosaur and I like my cigarettes. I’m waiting for them to get banned altogether and I’ll have to grow my own tobacco :(

            • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              Honestly it would be a fuck load better for your health to grow, hang dry, cut, and roll your own vs buying the literal poison from PhillipMorris. The tobacco itself isn’t good by any means but the real threat to your health is the additives not the plant

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                9 months ago

                I feel it’s the additives I would miss most. Not sure if or how I could recreate those.

    • LeadEyes@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      The uniform that both men and women wear in the movie are cut to show off the amazing fisique of the female lead but the cut is totally working on the male lead also.

  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    Idiocracy sadly was the only futuristic story to get it right. Wall-ee probably a pretty safe bet too. At this point, any “blue future” sci-fi writers still out there are disillusioned dreamers.

  • Underwaterbob@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    And then there’s Dune: it’s the year 40’000 (or something) and mankind is fighting a religious war in the desert over natural resources. Haha!

    • orrk@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      to be fair, even the Dune universe had the human golden age, before the whole AI wars happened

      • Underwaterbob@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        I’ve actively avoided reading the Brian Herbert stuff because I tried to read a Kevin J. Anderson book once and it nearly gave me an aneurysm.

        • TrueStoryBob@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          The Brian Herbert books aren’t bad, but don’t go into them thinking that the writing will be the same as his father. I’ve read a few of them through the anti AI Jihad timeline. They’re not terrible but they feel a little rushed compared to Frank’s writing… not “we need to get these out for the sake of the IP” like how Disney is just printing Marvel movies, but more like “meh, it could be better, but that’s as good as we’re gonna get it for now, just publish it.”

  • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    The Jetsons:

    George Jetson went to work everyday at Spacely Sprockets and pushed a button. A single button. That was his whole job. The whole businesses was automated to the point George did not have to do anything except sit and press the button.

    And he made enough money in that job to support a family of 4 in a nice house, as the sole bread winner.

    Imagine that: A future where the benefits of automation technology are not solely for the wealthy and business owners. Automation and AI making people’s jobs easier, instead of simply replacing them. Businesses that employ people to do jobs that could be automated, but don’t, because people need living wages regardless of how easy the work has become.

    • JimVanDeventer@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      There was a joke I remember in the episode they bought Rosie, their maid-bot: Jane said she was exhausted by all the cooking and cleaning while simply pressing two buttons that said “cooking” and “cleaning”.

      I also enjoy the conspiracy theory that Jetsons and Flintstones exist at the same time, but Jetsons are upper class and live in cities above the nuclear rubble, and mutant, talking, dinosaur adjacent monsters below.

      • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        The Jetsons meets the Flintstones proves that. I own dvd and remember it when I was kid. Apparently Leroy invited a time machine but he really didn’t its just telporter to surface.

      • TrueStoryBob@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Thinking about it now… Rosie the Robot was presented to the viewer as a being that was basically sentient and fully self aware. In fact, she could and did fall in love at one point. Like… the family owned her. She was a possession. Was that slavery? Is the future depicted in “The Jetsons” a slave based one?

      • Kedly@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        Tbh, it was appealing to me the first time I heard of it. Its the most seamless way to transition from modern work society to post work society. It still has the same culture and incentive structure of what worked for society before, but removes the NEED to work in order to simply live

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      9 months ago

      Who’s to say there wasn’t a working class supporting their comfortable lifestyle, living on the ground, beneath the cloud-covered hi-rises?

      • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        No. They don’t deserve it and I will die in filth and poverty before I let someone have something they don’t deserve!

        Except billionaires. They get everything and deserve less than nothing.

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      9 months ago

      The Jetsons lived in an apartment and George kept getting fired for stupid reasons. That very much resembles modern life where a lot of people can’t afford a house and have no job security.

  • Napain
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    9 months ago

    it’s 2030, the world is notching but hurricanes abd forest fires, also we got 1 guy on mars

    • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      we got one guy on mars

      And he’s not coming back. We abandoned the program. Last food delivery gets to him in three years; after that its nothing.

      Also, most people alive are survivors of sharknadoes, zombie fire, and desert oceans.