the damn paperless office that IBM promised us in the mid-1980s?

That's what I really want to know. I'm sick of printing out paper copies of information so that we can back up the electronic system. It sucks, hard-core.

I was thinking about this just the other day. About when I got my very first computer, back in 83 I think it was - 2nd-hand because new ones were insanely expensive in New Zealand. It was a good one because it had two, count 'em TWO floppy disk drives and an amber screen rather than green. But now I had two big boxes in my livingroom - the TV and the monitor. Gah, I thought, if only I could watch TV on my monitor!

Fast forward to 2007 and I'm in the UK, slumped on the sofa with my laptop - which of course doesn't even HAVE a floppy disk drive and cost less than the 1983 amber-screen clunker - watching a movie on it while I wait for my sister back in NZ to get her webcam running so we can video-chat. Yes a jetcar would be cool, but my laptop is much, much cooler, truly.

"Futurology"? How quaint.

Science Fiction works of the 30's are more forward looking than any movie or TV show since Star Wars and Trek. I think what is missing from this discussion is a sense for the truly deep time and vast distances that an SF world view encompasses. Think "Against the Fall of Night", not Buck Rogers.

Our predictions serve more as a mirror of current times, than a vision of the future. Whatever "humanity" might be after a billion years, it won't match Clarke's vision of unending resurrected generations tended benevolently by a colossal mainframe. But if such a species could continue to be called human, I'm with Art - we'll continue to need jesters to upset our bioengineered applecarts.

As usual with such discussions (and perhaps with all Salon discussions), it is the unexamined premises through which the contributors reveal themselves. We won't (and don't) have cocktails to increase our IQ - because IQ doesn't exist. See Gould's "Mismeasure of Man".

Transportation remains alluring. Tomorrowland is all about vehicles: Monorail, Autopia, Skyway, People Mover, Rocket to the Moon. The reason that this was our grandparent's SF, and not ours, is simply that transportation is more and more moot. I'm writing this from home via my office VPN.

The next big thing? It doesn't take the IQ of David McCallum to predict biotechnology.

The fundamental question isn't the possibility of cloning or jetpacks - the question is what will we do with these possibilities?

technically you are correct, and being a geography buff, I do know this fact. By most common agreement Asia extends all the way to central Turkey and the Urals or even slightly further into Europe. Since Dubai is on the Arabian peninsula, sandwiched as it is between Asia and Africa, there might be some other questions in calling it part of Asia. I guess I was thinking 'classic' Asia (say, the Black Sea and East) in most people's minds when I said it wasn't in Asia per se.

Read Fahrenheit 451 and get back to me. Ray Bradbury pretty much nailed the modern mindset in 1953.

I had an art professor once who said that the primary defining characteristic of the Americans was that their mythology was in the future: it described where they were going, not where they had come from.

The real thing that changed was that somewhere in the 70's, information and marketing got so good that commercialism, which used to wreck counterculture bursts of creativity about a year or two into their development, began to cash in and chase any new thing as it occured instead. The bohemian side of society became a place where nothing could build or evolve. New ideas went straight to market, musicians and bands were built by the record companies using studio talent and pretty faces. Styles, which had been wrested away from the fashion industry for cyclic periods of time were now fully in control, endlessly precessing through the same old ideas because they had killed off the element of surprise that led to anything new.

I watch Sci-Fi both for enjoyment and to see what others think the future should be, in part so I can help create it. Lately, it hasn't been as jam packed with anything new. It's too bad, we risk losing what my professor said was our defining quality, all because it's too hard to be sure you can make a ton of money if you have to wait to see what happens next.

asia goes from haifa to haiphong. it's BIG. (china would like to trademark "asian" but that's pending an agreement with the cartographers union.) dubai *is* the scifi future. they don't have jet-packs but they *do* have a ski slope in the desert (refrigerated and domed). insane enough? they also get hardly any(3%) revenue from oil any more, having instead concentrated on the free trade port, media and tourism. no robots per se, but they do have indentured workers from all parts of the world and which total 83% of the population. that fits my idea of the future, an enlaved disneyland.

unfortunately, as technology and life gets more complex, I am seeing a predilection for elites to set up ever more perfect false facade government/military/industrial complexes. This is currently going gangbusters in America, with super-doublespeak in the government, a curiously uninquisitive media not prying the curtain back, and creation of better ways to control and monitor people. These PROGRAMS seem to be the whole ultimate purpose of existence, for the populace to feed and care for their own jailers. This naturally leads to the supposition that all of our existence is a nested dolls Matrix within a Matrix where the more advanced species above us place the less advanced like us into nested fishbowl realities, perfect simulacra of a reality we are not allowed to REALLY experience. Sad, really to think there is nothing but totalitarianism pretending to offer freedom, on into the eternal future. What great things are we missing out on?