Signs we're living in the future

[Shut Up Legs]

So if we're living in the future, does that mean we get to go time-hopping all over the place, and attract groupies (err... sorry, I meant "companions").

Seriously, though, as a long-time Science Fiction fan (I have a very large SF book collection at home), I've been spending the last several decades watching numerous SF concepts become reality. Some of these authors were way ahead of their time.

 

[anothersam]

No regrets buying the 'smart' phone (in tongs because my wife hates that ubiquitous description, not a slur on its IQ). Have downloaded a film from iPlayer to watch on the train into London later today. Hopefully it will have fewer lychees than my last download.

Was in the supermarket yesterday uncertain whether to buy organic half skim milk or nonorganic full skim and used the smartyphone to find out. Accidentally turned the camera on and nearly sent her a picture of my foot, which would have only muddied the waters. Not that I'd want to go back to the days when such a quandary wasn't worth finding a public phone and I bought neither, putting her next cup of tea at risk of being drinkable only by tipping the dregs of the last of the old container into it. (Don't drink tea myself. Triggers too many memories of lost empire.)

Some of these authors were way ahead of their time.

Robert Heinlein, for example, who in Have Spacesuit–Will Travel predicted that a plucky young dreamer would win a mothballed space suit in a jingle writing contest, buff it up real nice, get picked up in a passing flying saucer and be taken to places where it comes in handy, like the cold cold moon, then go on to save us all:

In humanity's defense, Kip makes a stirring speech. The Mother Thing and a representative of another race argue that the short-lived species are essentially children who should be granted more time to learn and grow. It is decided to re-evaluate humanity after "a dozen half-deaths of radium."*

He is awarded a full scholarship to MIT, so it was win-win. Alas the film treatment is in development hell.

* 19,200 years. I looked it up. This was published in 1958, so we're still good for a while.

 

[buggi]

I went in Pizza Hut the other day and they have a touch screen drinks machine. I actually got a bit scared LOL what happened to the ones where you push the lever with the glass??

 

[anothersam]

what happened to the ones where you push the lever

A generation being raised on touch screens failed to recognise that levers, formerly adequate to move the world, are fast becoming objects of curiosity rather than utility.

Continuing the smartyphone fun:

Pulled it out on this morning's ride to record large lumbering obstacles. Though I have several cameras, most offering much better picture quality, none meet the important criteria of being in my saddlebag when I need them. If I had wanted, I could've then uploaded the photo to local traffic update compilers to spread the word, tech to the rescue again.

 

[Smokin Joe]

A generation being raised on touch screens failed to recognise that levers, formerly adequate to move the world, are fast becoming objects of curiosty rather than utility.

Continuing the smartyphone fun:

View attachment 93662

Pulled it out on this morning's ride to record large lumbering obstacles. Though I have several cameras, most offering much better picture quality, none meet the important criteria of being in my saddlebag when I need them. If I had wanted, I could've then uploaded the photo to local traffic update compilers to spread the word, tech to the rescue again.

That mean looking bugger giving you the eye would have worried me.

 

[anothersam]

I stayed very still. They must sense not all of us are vegetarians.

 

[anothersam]

Calls to 0800 numbers are now free on my smartyphone. Not so much evidence of living in the future as about time.

Also breaking news, from the same site:

 

[mybike]

Further in the Idiocracy vein, my wife, who works in IT, is living through this now. Having recently been kicked upstairs/sideways (opinions vary) and had her role supplanted by a cheaper, far inferior version of herself, she now gets to watch as he and his team destroy the code she has nurtured and been the guardian of for a decade. They don't even appear to be able to write code: they're cut and paste artists, to put it kindly. There is a very large disaster in the making (lives won't be lost, just money), but she is powerless to stop it, as the powers that be are all living in one hellish strand of the future, where knowledge isn't prized, it's inconvenient.

Sounds like she's better off than my son in law who was shown the door when the project finished & maintenance handed to some less skilled & cheaper. I do not wish them well.

 

[mybike]

Also breaking news, from the same site:

View attachment 94599

£00 type, pre-STD party line. That takes me back!

 

[Rezillo]

Colour photos in newspapers, although newspapers themselves may go the way of the phonebox.

Talking of newspapers, one of my favourite Viz letters:

Dear Viz,

I wish the singer/songwriters of the seventies would get their facts right. In his sentimental ballad 'Streets of London', Ralph McTell sings "In his eyes you see no pride, hand held loosely by his side, yesterday's paper, telling yesterday's news".
Surely if they were yesterday's papers, they would be telling news from the day before yesterday.

Andrew Coughlin, Balham

 

[shouldbeinbed]

pornography at the click of a button rather than a rummage in a lay-by or quiet road hedgerow.

more seriously tho: Phone cameras or you take your memory card out of your digital camera and plug it into your home computer or Kiosk in a supermarket and have only the good ones of your holiday snaps saved (& printed occasionally) in a matter of minutes. rather than the trip to Boots or getting the Kodasnaps envelope to put the film canisters into post off and wait a week before all of the prints came back and you realised 90% of them were duff and not worth the cost of processing and printing.
I miss those days of cameras being a special item to have and the thrill of printing your own stuff or your photography coming back being something of an occasion rather than a 'yeah whatever I saw it on Facebook' blipvert.

 

[Deleted member 1258]

I was thinking about this at morning break this morning, I looked round and almost everybody was using a smart phone, it wasn't that long ago that most people would have had their heads buried in a newspaper.

 

[anothersam]

Sounds like she's better off than my son in law who was shown the door when the project finished & maintenance handed to some less skilled & cheaper. I do not wish them well.

Her worklife is more relaxed now, if exquisitely boring attending endless nonsense meetings planning things that will never get done by people who can't do them anyway.

 

[Smokin Joe]

pornography at the click of a button rather than a rummage in a lay-by or quiet road hedgerow.

more seriously tho: Phone cameras or you take your memory card out of your digital camera and plug it into your home computer or Kiosk in a supermarket and have only the good ones of your holiday snaps saved (& printed occasionally) in a matter of minutes. rather than the trip to Boots or getting the Kodasnaps envelope to put the film canisters into post off and wait a week before all of the prints came back and you realised 90% of them were duff and not worth the cost of processing and printing.
I miss those days of cameras being a special item to have and the thrill of printing your own stuff or your photography coming back being something of an occasion rather than a 'yeah whatever I saw it on Facebook' blipvert.

Taking thousands of photos instead of the tens you used to because it costs nothing and two years later having none left to look at because your PC/Smartphone/memory card or whatever you stored them on packed up and you'd never got round to printing any.

 

[classic33]

Calls to 0800 numbers are now free on my smartyphone. Not so much evidence of living in the future as about time.

Also breaking news, from the same site:

View attachment 94599

Your a day late with that. It started yesterday!