Your Flying Car Awaits

Your Flying Car Awaits
Paul Milo

No, the twenty-first century hasn’t been all that the twentieth imagined it would be, but as this fun survey of predictions makes clear, things could have been much worse. I’m not upset about not having flying cars, robot butlers, or lunar vacations and I’m relieved that we haven’t been hit with a massive food or energy crisis yet. For the most part the reason the future failed is that it was too expensive and didn’t have enough consumer demand behind it. Science, like everything else under capitalism, will follow the money. So what we mainly got instead were low, low prices courtesy of big box retailers and online shopping, along with great advances in home and personal entertainment systems. Everything else has pretty much stayed the same, but become more disposable.