view of a smart city of the future, robots, flying cars, space travel --ar 3:2 --motion high --video 1
By: Nicole Kobie
Rating: ⭐️
Nicole Kobie’s “The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here” presents a refreshingly balanced review of a number of quintessential “futuristic technologies” like flying cars and AGI, and updates us on why we’ve not yet fully cracked them, despite the progress we’ve made.
I’m always a little hesitant to read takes on technological progress. Like any good Rorschach test, they often reveal more about the writer’s state of mind than any objective reality. Usually these screeds fall into a few distinct categories. There’s the technopessimism, usually complaining that we’ve progressed too far (Wired’s review of the Friend device is a good example). Then there’s the e-acc technopropagandism that says’s we’ve not gone far enough. I’m pretty sympathetic to this view, but the vibe is always panglossian slop (like 40% of Garry Tan x posts). Another way to characterize this is Thiel’s definition of passive optimism - keep calm and carry on watching the future. Finally, you have the technoclassicism lamentations, with progress studies people and Thiel himself view progress as a thing we used to do and no longer can - as if [Pr]ogress were a periodic element we can no longer synthesize.
Kobie’s work successfully navigates away from all of these predispositions. Despite being a card carrying member of the Media™ (she works at Wired), she’s presented each technology as an individual chapter the way an alien might write a class report - equal parts background history, drama, and analysis. While she doesn’t present it as such, from my reading there seems to be a handful of reasons why every year we feel as far off from the future as before, and surprisingly I’m OK with all of them.
The “future” seems to suffer from an uncanny valley problem. The closer we get to it, the more noticeable the differences between reality and utopia. If we zoom out and showed both to someone from a few decades ago, they might be better suited to see the progress ahead of them.
I’m both surprised and unsurprised that the one organization that appeared most frequently throughout the book was Google. More so than any university or government lab, they’ve made the production of the future their business. I’m of two minds about whether this is good or bad. On the one hand, everyone admires their ability to constantly swing for the fences. There is probably no better argument for a benevolent monopoly than Google - where else can sneaker ads fuel AGI? On the other hand, I do wonder if a lot of that capital was misspent. I’m not a luddite, and I do want self driving cars and all the other cool stuff Google has made. But I’d love to see a study of the sheer magnitude of capital they’ve torched on these projects, with basically the majority of them shutting down or still being indeterminate in value (remember wifi balloons? or infinite lifespan?).