Remember the “Paperless Office”? In the miraculous, undefined ‘future’ we weren’t going to need paper anymore because we’d all communicate electronically. Somehow it just never materialized. In fact, things are going in the opposite direction. According to Stats Can, per capita paper consumption increased by 93.6% between 1983 and 2003.
What’s your pick for “miracle innovation that never arrived”? The robot maid? Personal hovercrafts? Let us know.
The leisure crisis. Remember how, a few decades ago, we were being warned that we would soon all be bored stiff because we wouldn’t have enough work to keep us busy. I’m still waiting ….
Ha! I had forgotten about that. You know, so many of the people I know would gladly give up part of their income in exchange for more leisure time, but in spite of the promises, there still seems to be a lot of resistance to things like job sharing and flex-time.
I also grew up being told about shortened work weeks. Instead we have a few high-tech and telecommunications company executives (Richest man in the world still remaining Bill Gates, and still promotes his ideology of knowledge as a artificially scarce product) that have amassed huge amounts of money, while the rest of us haven’t really benefit from the efficiencies in our economies.
I don’t think the futurists that were making these predictions were recognizing that our advances in our understanding of natural sciences (physics, biology, etc) would massively outstrip our advances in social sciences (politics, law, economics, etc). We have technology to solve world hunger, and yet political problems have ensured that a massive percentage of the worlds population are still starving while there is an obesity problem in western/northern countries.
Whatever happened to the VR revolution? Apart from brief stints as the tech media darling and a plot device in some bad sci-fi movies, virtual reality went to bed way with some tantalizing, unfulfilled promises (tele-presence, immersive learning environments, intuitive interfaces, potential new art medium…) I know its still around in restricted forms and specialized applications, but nothing close to the predictions bandied about.