Why does the future seem farther away than the past?

[Zarathustra]

Whether it's planning for retirement, or watching your kids grow up, the future always seems so impossibly far away. Remember the Conan O'Brian skit, "In the year 2000..."? It was funny, at least in part, because we always expect big changes in the future even if the future isn't very far away (especially for years with big round numbers, usually divisible by 10). The first Conan skit was in 1997. It's even funnier and more ironic when they've done it after 2000, because of course "2000" doesn't sound nearly so futuristic when it's in the past!

But we have smart people like Ray Kurzweil predicting that robots will be as smart as humans by the year 2029! That's just a little more than a decade away. To put that in perspective, smartphones are 10 years old this year. Do they seem all that much smarter to you? Do you really do very much more with them? In the 80s, weren't we expecting flying cars by now? Remember, the second Back to the Future movie was set in 2015, which seemed far enough away that anything might be possible in 1985.

I realize that there is some rational justification for this expectation, driven largely by the geometric growth of computer power (doubling every two years), but aside from the Internet, our lives are not all that different from they were 30 years ago. But people expect the next 10 to be transformative? A complete paradigm shift? Why? Well, in my opinion, mostly because people are engaging in science fiction, rather than science.

We've talked about things like robots replacing humans in the Tank. We don't have to get into the social/political aspects here, but it might be interesting to talk about the technical aspects if anyone is interested and wants to avoid politics. I see very smart people (like Google execs) in the computer field using the same doom-and-gloom examples over and over, examples that are easily disproven by someone in a completely, unrelated field, like truck driving. In fact, that's one of the examples I keep seeing in articles and debates. Because people think that self-driving cars are right around the corner, they think we'll replace any kind of driver, no matter how dangerous and complicated their job is ... failing to explain why self-flying planes haven't replaced pilots even though we've had autopilot for decades. [As I point out in the Tank, truck drivers do much more than drive trucks, daily tasks which would require a fully humanoid android as sophisticated as Data to perform them all. We're many decades away from that.]

Obviously, very smart, techno-savvy people are prone to error in their predictions of the future, sometimes for simple reasons like having no idea what a truck driver actually does. Is it any wonder that people who have no idea how the brain works are ridiculously overconfident about the ability of computers to think? If a Google exec can have no clue of the fact that truck drivers must manually hook up brake lines to their trailers with their hands, how many crucial connections are they unaware of for the brain? I bet billions of them.

I honestly don't treat many "futurists'" predictions any more seriously than a Conan O'Brian skit. We've been waiting for the robot revolution for almost 100 years now since Asimov first wrote down their Laws. I predict we'll be waiting a lot longer yet.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

The future seems farther away than the past because the past is always with us given that we remember it. When you hear a song that you used to like 10, 15, 20, or 30 years ago it can take you back to that time immediately and you can remember some things from that time as if they were yesterday. However, to try and imagine what something will be like in only 5 years, not to mention 10 or 20 years, is impossible because you don't know what other things may happen between now and then.

Don't forget: The Matrix is closer to Return of the Jedi than it is to Wonder Woman.

[Avatar]

There's no way to predict the occurrence of genius. It only takes one technical leap to bridge untold amounts of time. The past is known, the future isn't.

--A

[Lazy Luke]

If the pyrite stone represents the Earth, and the reading lamp represents the Sun, then the glass can represent the curvature of space. Refraction of spacetime then shows the pyrite to have slightly diminished in size, proving that distance is relative until intermediated by spacetime, hence, time also is relative. The past and the future must therefore coexist but inseparate by the curvature of space, illustrated by the two photos.
This optical illusion is something like the odd perception of the future as farther away than the past, where distance feels more futuristic than what has presently gone before.



The leftover grapes don't represent anything in particular.