I Miss the Future

I Miss the Future

When I was a young kid, growing up in the 70s, the future I was promised was mechanized, not digitized. Automated, not bluetooth. Machines were supposed to advance to the point that they would take care of my every need, perform all the menial tasks around the house, and get me places faster and more efficiently. Instead, I live in a future basically no one thought of back then, where information, communication, and entertainment has advanced in amazing ways, but I still have to clean my own toilet with a good old fashioned brush. My car may be nifty by 70s standards, but its not the superfast grav-train or personal flight pack I honestly expected to have here in 2009. We seem no closer to putting a man on Mars than we did back then. I don’t have a robot butler, and it seems unlikely that I’m going to get one.

Speaking of which, a week or so ago, I read Mike Resnick’s story, Article of Faith. It’s a nicely written story, but it as a Hugo nominee it reads like something that should have won awards in the 1970s (or the 1950s), not today. The idea of humanoid robot butlers cleaning up after us seems at best quaint, and at worst, utterly out of touch with the future that the present is cooking up for us now. I can’t take stories like that seriously anymore. The future of the past is no longer the future of the present. I wish sometimes that wasn’t the case. I miss that future. I miss the idea of robots, rocketships, and ray guns. But nostalgia doesn’t drive the future.