A Sense of Doubt blog post #1625 - PALEO-FUTURE - No One's Coming; It's up to us

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1625 -  PALEO-FUTURE - No One's Coming; It's up to us

Some great stuff to share today.

First, the Paleo-Future blog (plus an older post from its 1.0 version), and then a great article by Dan Hon, a Portlandia resident, who I have been reading and following for some time, and just some portions of that REALLY LONG Medium article that uses a lot of the same imagery.

Here's PALEOFUTURE - https://paleofuture.com/

From the Associated Press description:

A television screen is inset into an avant-garde cabinet for canned music called the "Kuba Komet" at the Radio and Television Exhibition in Frankfurt, West Germany, Aug. 5, 1957. As well as the television set, the Komet houses a radio, a record player and a tape recorder. The upper part of the assembly swings on a vertical axis to face any direction. 

tv, television, tv history, komet, west germany, frankfurt

And now an older post from paleo-future 1.0


http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/2007/08/living-room-of-future-1979.html

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 22, 2007

Living Room of the Future (1979)

This image appears in the 1979 book Future Cities: Homes and Living into the 21st Century and illustrates the living room of the (paleo)future.


This living room has many electronic gadgets which are either in use already or are being developed for people to buy in the 1980s.

1. Giant-size TV. Based on the designs already available, this one has a super-bright screen for daylight viewing and stereo sound system.

2. Electronic video movie camera, requires no film, just a spool of tape. Within ten years video cameras like this could be replaced by 3-D holographic recorders.

3. Flat screen TV. No longer a bulky box, TV has shrunk to a thickness of less than five centimetres. This one is used to order shopping via a computerised shopping centre a few kilometres away. The system takes orders and indicates if any items are not in stock.

4. Video disc player used for recording off the TV and for replaying favourite films.

5. Domestic robot rolls in with drinks. One robot, the Quasar, is already on sale in the USA. Reports indicate that it may be little more than a toy however, so it will be a few years before 'Star Wars' robots tramp through our homes.

6. Mail slot. By 1990, most mail will be sent in electronic form. Posting a letter will consist of placing it in front of a copier in your home or at the post office. The electronic read-out will be flashed up to a satellite, to be beamed to its destination. Like many other electronic ideas, the savings in time and energy could be enormous.

The picture [above] takes you into the living room of a house of the future. The basics will probably be similar - windows, furniture, carpet and TV. There will be one big change though - the number of electronic gadgets in use.

The same computer revolution which has resulted in calculators and digital watches could, through the 1980s and '90s, revolutionise people's living habits.

Television is changing from a box to stare at into a useful two-way tool. Electronic newspapers are already available - pushing the button on a handset lets you read 'pages' of news, weather, puzzles and quizzes.

TV-telephones should be a practical reality by the mid 1980s. Xerox copying over the telephone already exists. Combining the two could result in millions of office workers being able to work at home if they wish. There is little need to work in a central office if a computer can store records, copiers can send information from place to place and people can talk on TV-telephones.

Many people may prefer to carry on working in an office with others, but for those who are happy at home, the savings in travelling time would be useful. Even better would be the money saved on transport costs to and from work.

See also:
Future Cities: Homes and Living into the 21st Century (1979)
Closer Than We Think! Robot Housemaid (1959)
Closer Than We Think! Lunar Mailbag (1960)
Online Shopping (1967)
1999 A.D. (1967)
The Electronic Newspaper (1978)
Startling Changes in Housing in Year 2000 (Chicago Tribune, 1961)
Monsanto House of the Future (1957-1967)
Picturephone as the perpetual technology of the future
Frigidaire Kitchen of the Future (1957)

https://paleofuture.com/blog/2013/12/6/this-1969-internet-radio-looked-pretty-slick

and more great stuff from Dan Hon

https://medium.com/@hondanhon/no-ones-coming-it-s-up-to-us-de8d9442d0d

No one’s coming. It’s up to us.

Dan Hon

Feb 9, 2018 · 23 min read

Adapted from “We Are The Very Model Of Modern Humanist Technologists”, a lightning talk given at #foocamp 2017 in San Francisco on Saturday, November 4th, 2017. For context, a lightning talk is normally around five minutes long.

Last autumn, I was invited to Foo Camp, an unconference organized by O’Reilly Media. O’Reilly have held Foo Camps since 2003, and the events are invitation-only (hence the name: Friends of O’Reilly).

Foo Camp 2017’s theme was about how we (i.e. the attendees and, I understand, technologists in general) could “bring about a better future by making smart choices about the intersection of technology and the economy.”

This intersection of technology and the economy (which is a bit of a, shall we say, passive way of describing the current economic change and disruption) is clearly an interest of Tim O’Reilly’s (the eponymous O’Reilly); he’s recently written a book, WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, about the subject.

One part of the unconference structure of a Foo Camp is the lightning talks: quick, 5 minute “provocative” talks about a subject. I’d been thinking and writing about technology’s role in society for a while in my newsletter(admittedly from an amateur, non-academic point of view), so Foo Camp’s lightning talks provided a good opportunity to pull my thoughts together in front of an audience of peers and experts.

The talk I submitted was titled “The very model of modern humanist technologists”, and this essay is an adaptation for a wider audience.

They showed a fairer future.

In that future, everyone would belong, and nobody would feel left out. Who wouldn’t want that?

(Later, I would have the experience and wisdom to look back on these images and think about everything that wasn’t in these paintings of the future, about all the people and cultures who were missing.)

For a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, this vision of the future, of fitting in, of being accepted was seductive. Especially so for a second-generation immigrant.

And over the course of the 80s and 90s, it felt like there was a consensus forming: computers would be a massive part of our future. They’d be integral in bringing in about those visions of a fairer, more equitable future.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow, 1996

In my talk, I made this point by using the infamous match cut from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, of humanity’s monolith-manipulated ancestors learning to use bones as tools and jumping in time to a space-faring civilization.

“You know, that part in 2001 when Kubrick masterfully match cuts from a bone-as-tool-and-weapon to a space faring civilization”

If technology is the solution to human problems, we need to do the human work to figure out and agree what our problems are and the kind of society we want. Then we can figure out what technology we want and need to bring about the society we want. Otherwise we’re back to a coordination problem: which problems, what ones?

In my talk I put forward the suspicion that many of the technologists gathered in the room weren’t attending just because smarter decisions needed to be made with regard to considered technology and the future of the economy. I suspected that many were in the room because, at the end of the day, everything wasn’t going quite as well as we thought or wished.

Because the better future promised by the books we grew up with didn’t automatically happen when enough people got connected.

Because we know we need to do better.

Because inequality is rising, not decreasing.

Because of what feels like rising incidences of hate and abuse, like gamergate.

Because of algorithmic cruelty.

Because of YouTube and Logan Paul and YouTube and child exploitation.

Because right now, it feels like things are getting worse.

Here’s what I think.

I think we need to figure out what society we want first. The future we want. And then we figure out the technology, the tools, that will get us there.

Because if we’re a tool-making, tool-using species that uses technology to solve human problems, then the real question is this: what problems shall we choose to solve?

continue reading at


https://medium.com/@hondanhon/no-ones-coming-it-s-up-to-us-de8d9442d0d

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1908.02 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1490 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.