A 1960s Future

I watched an episode of the Jetsons tonight, specifically I watched the first episode.  I had a feeling of nostalgia I needed to satisfy and it was the first thing to come to mind.  After watching the episode it made me think about the visions of the future that we had in the past.

The Jetsons first aired in 1962 which will be 54 years ago this year.  It envisioned a world where we lived in apartments suspended high in the sky - albeit in the cartoon the design of these apartments is that akin to the Space Needle, the concept of living in ever higher structures is something that they got partially right.  As for the world of work, they envisioned people doing a simple menial task of pressing a button - again while many of our jobs are not yet that simple, with the increasing use of technology we are inching ever closer to that reality.  Schools were envisioned to have lost actual names and been so many in number they were referred to by number instead - this one hasn't come to fruition despite our rising population.

In the very first episode the family get a robot butler.  This has been a dream of science fiction for decades and we still haven't made this a practical reality; although we do have more and more integration of technology in our homes and the robotics industry is beginning to bring forth specialist markets where we have robots designed to do a specific thing.  The barrier to this being practical remains to be the application of machine learning, or artificial intelligence - something which despite making great strides still illudes us. 

Some elements of the show are less visual and more verbal; dialogue hints at the type of world that would exist where kids at school in the USA would take a school trip to Europe for the day, or go to Hawaii to go swimming as if it was 3 blocks away.  That alludes to travel that is much faster than we have today, which also still remains a dream.  We do however live in an era where some of our transport limitations are not limited by the technology itself but by economics.  Supersonic air travel for example is something we have been capable for decades, yet after the Concorde disaster, commercial supersonic travel pretty much died.  One would imagine with the price of oil being what it is today that fuel for planes needed for this type of travel would make it more economically viable.  Similar economic restrictions exist as barriers to high speed rail; namely the cost of upgrading tracks and replacing rolling stock. 

Video calling is also shown in the cartoon - that one they got right on the money.  They also hinted at the prominence of credit and charging things rather than using cash, which again they got right on the money - literally.  The fashion however never caught on, many of the affectations of future fashion where needless to say the least and gimmicky.  The tendency to take anything mundane and stick an antenna on top of it to make it seem futuristic is something prevalent of the time.  The need for visible antennae on things is something we escaped over the last 2 decades or so. 

All things considered their vision of the future was not a million miles off the truth.  While the state of the world today might not line up with their vision completely, looking forward to new technology and our own visions of the future, we have similar desires in many ways.

My question of the day is simply what vision of the future do you think was most accurate in TV, Film, or books that you have read?