January 12, 2012

New Math

Craig Damrauer put together a slideshow at The Atlantic Monthly demonstrating the math of the technology he expected by now:

When you get right down to it a lot of the ‘future’ things I saw in cartoons, TV shows and movies while growing up have come true. We have instant food (TV dinner + microwave), video phones and 3D television. Robots help fight our wars (drones) and the cops are armed with guns they can set on stun. So it’s helpful to see this as a glass half full kind of scenario. However, there are a few things I’d hoped for that I’ve yet to see. Here’s a small selection.

(via @tcarmody)

posted by in math, technology, the future | * | 2 comments 

comments

  1. Michael Smith on January 12th, 2012 at 5:51 pm

    I think about this a little bit in the opposite way. Already things that aren’t that old seem ancient. TVs that don’t hang on a wall, compact disc players, compact discs, DVDs, fax machines, that printer paper with the two stips of little holes on each side, DVDs in the mail, that noise your dial-up modem made…

    I was reading Izzy a book the other day and there was a picture of a home telephone, with a cord, Izzy has never seen one of those in our house but she can video chat with her grandparents on a 5 inch touch-screen telephone – without our assistance.

    Someone involved with the Boy Scouts was telling me that, while the orienteering merit badge was still available, most boys opt for GPS offerings like Geo Caching.

    This is the world we live in.

  2. Deron Bauman on January 12th, 2012 at 6:03 pm

    I think about that too, Michael. It’s kind of confusing when you think about it in the context of Tyler Cowen’s argument about The Great Stagnation, but maybe both things are happening at once: the old order of how we gathered and marked progress is giving way to a new one in which increasingly fragmented chunks carry us away toward an unknown digital future.

    Or something.