We got the Future, and have more Future yet to come. …for certain values of “We”. The optimism is the part that we’re a little short on.
I think the big difference is political. The generation outlining the Future above had a slightly difference context. 1935: social security established, 1938: a 40-hour/5-day work week established, 1945: the most effectively aggressive fascists the world could recall were defeated (classifying the Mongol invasion as oligarchic), somewhere in there the Great Depression was overcome. This have a natural optimism that progress in technology would be used to the benefit of the whole, with the specific inventors and manufacturers rewarded, but not to the detriment of others. They expected to have to be a bit politically active to get what was needed done, and to keep politics honest. It even made it into the parenting guides of the time (see Dr. Spock’s introduction on the responsibility of parents).
Since then, as near as I can tell, the cultural emphasis in a lot of business and politics caught a case of Machiavelli and shifted from being better, to being cheaper. We had both before, and we still have both now, but the emphasis… there is a bit more of the stench of stagnation, as last years winners try to keep this years kids from creating any new competition. Increasing productivity became a way for the largest companies to give workers less instead of growing more, and the leisure promised by technology was replaced with a combination of the longest workweeks in the western world and higher unemployment. A lot more people seem to have taken to calling politics dirty and not keeping after the politicians to keep citizens interests in mind.
It’s a shift though, not a total change. The makers and open sourcers really show the alternative here. It goes back to competition to be best in the context of working together, and contributing back to the society that gave us the hand up in the first place, and trying to contain and overcome Machiavellian competition. Whether the old school credit unions and distributed manufacturing with drill presses, or the nouveau hackerspaces and distributed manufacturing with soldering irons, the same “we can do it (but I can do it better!)” attitude is still the road to a great Future.
The makers are still trying to help out the huddled masses, instead of focusing on fencing them out. This is the kind of greatness that, combined with some absolutely amazing tech, makes for a future with the kind of awesome that we can eagerly anticipate.
Avoiding the dystopian nightmares we’ve had for decades? Keep after your politicians and don’t expect it to be particularly easy. We’ve already slipped to the point of having “free speech zone” cages at many major speeches for the last decade or so, and the internal surveillance… there’s some work to do. This is where having a Future that we can clearly imagine and really look forward to becomes important. Without it, it’s a lot harder to keep up the work needed to maintain a nation that’s a really great place to live.
And flying cars? I’m OK waiting – 3D printed bone replacements and minimally invasive heart surgery are a fine start. And when do I send in the tissue sample to have spare organs on demand as I age?