Future Imperfekt

What happened to the Future?

As a lad in the 1960s, I read Arthur C. Clarke's Profiles of the Future  and was most impressed by the concluding chart that listed his predictions of technologies to come. Some were right on target (Lunar Landings, although he overshot slightly, predicting the 1970s), personal radio (i.e., cell phones, 1980s though not becoming truly widespread, virtually ubiquitous, until decades later), global library (e.g., the internet/wikipedia)..etc.

An interesting website reviewed the evolution of  Clarke's prognostications of the future over subsequent editions of the book, but I was always fascinated with the original edition, as a youth, in the dramatically evolving years, socially and technologically, of the 1960s and 1970s... intelligent animals, robots, planetary engineering...it reminded me of Donald Fagen's I.G.Y. which offered a vision of a cool, Kennedy-esque, future, leisure "and spandex jackets for everyone."

A recent article also took our dreams of the future to task, discussing why some issues, with so much seeming potential, never came ot fruition. Sadly, does it all come down to "The Market" ?  More here