Thoughts of progress past

Now the main text of the book is complete (yay), I may do smaller posts here more often – and some larger ones, too.
For now, I just reviewed David Knight’s nice new book on 19th Century science, The Making of Modern Science (Polity) – forthcoming in Times Higher Ed – and among many other things [...]

Future shock revisited

Wanted to go to a local screening last night, but indoors with ‘flu or some viral relative – so obviously I looked for the main attraction on YouTube, and of course it is there: Future Shock (1972), in five jerky parts.
It is a pretty fair attempt to convey the themes of the book on film. [...]

when the future was cool

I’ve been thinking again about retrofutures, nostalgia for what we were told it was going to be like and all that
not sure if this will go in the book, but as a some time cultural historian it fascinates even when it is almost entirely speculative
anyhow, latest and most splendid exhibit is this video of the [...]

Flying cars relaunched (not)

forget the flu commentaries, what we need is flying cars
sorry, that should read, what we need is sensible discussion of why flying cars aren’t going to happen, and here is one, for a change…
which doesn’t mean the next flying car “in development” won’t be leapt upon with grateful cries by journalists the world over
bit like [...]

(yet another) flying car

Damn thing just won’t go away…
This one is “practical”, though. I see. You can fly it on a light sport aircraft licence, apparently. Inevitably, it will be commercially available in “late 2011″. Orders taken now. I don’t care: I’m still tagging this as futures past.
Oh, and built by MIT students. Easy to forget they have [...]

Limits to Growth got it right…

New Scientist recently ran a suite of features on the need to re-think our assumptions about economic growth which was reminiscent of the 1970s (and that’s fine by me). They follow up this week by highlighting an interesting paper from Graham Turner of CSIRO in Autralia, now published in the Journal Global Environmental Change but [...]

US future intelligence

Nothing like getting your retaliation in first…   Entertaining US lefty commentator Tom Engelhardt (who I recall meeting at Pantheon books way back in the ’80s) has an entertaining pre-emptive demolition of the US National Intelligence Council’s next Global Trends assessment, apparently due for release in December.
He reviews what was in previous editions, and concludes that, [...]

Archaeologies of the Future

Fredric Jameson has registered faintly on my radar for years, but I’ve never followed his trajectory. But a title like Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions demanded a look as I tick off titles with the f-word in them.
It’s an undeniably impressive piece of work, which would demand [...]

Wells the discoverer

H.G. Wells famously grew more pessimistic as he grew older (see Mind at the End of Its Tether…).  He certainly started out optimistic about the possibility of foresight. Here he is looking down from the summit of Laplacean confidence in January 1902
“Until a scientific theory yields confident forecasts you know it is unsound and tentative. [...]

middling optimism

Reviews of the future from the recent past are always instructive. Jonathan Margolis’ A Brief History of the Future (2000) is a breezy journalistic look at predictions of all kinds, though spends more time on gadgets, and sociology than global scenarios. He comes down in favour of a kind of qualified optimism, based [...]