Honest question: When you were younger, what would the future be?
The question seems simple, but hides a bigger puzzle. Do we imagine the future or only project our desires with a valid date? The tomorrow we dream is a prophecy or a mirror? And who answers for it: science, desire or fear?
When we were kids, the answer was ready: the cars would fly, everyone would have a robot at home, and then we would be going back and forth from other planets like who takes a road. The future was a place. It had date, it had color, it had soundtrack. It happens that "at that time" is now and the promised tomorrow arrived. Only of unknown.
The connection: a tomorrow that arrived incognito
I had this kind of relationship with the De Volta overboard for the Future II: neither was I skateboarding straight, but the board took my sleep away. What fascinated me was not that it floated with rules. It didn't go up much. It kept constant speed. And on the water it simply failed: "these boards don't work in the water", warns the gang boy. It was an impossible object that behaved like a real object. It took years to understand what the script already knew: it's not the impossible that convinces it is the impossible with limitations.
The promised future came exactly like this: it fulfilled the promises in the wrong direction and yet hit the target. The flying car exists you summon it by application and it comes with air-conditioning plate and smell. The video phone exists and we passed a whole pandemic discovering that it preferred the store. The domestic robot exists in the form of a disk that sucks the floor while you work. We do not receive the magical objects; we receive their results without the aura. The future rarely delivers the dream thing delivers the dissolution of the problem that the thing would solve.
Augustine, in the fourth century, had already formulated the trap. In Confessions, he proposes that there are three presents: "the gift of past things is memory; the present of things present is vision; the present of future things is expectation". The future, therefore, never comes: when it arrives, it becomes present. The only dwelling that he has is imagination. And every expectation reveals more about who expects than about what is expected. The future that we dream of is a portrait of the present that we have with better enlightenment.
The future of objects against the future of systems
Comparing the fiction of the past with the reality of the present is to realize that we missed the category. The old future was a catalogue of objects: floating boards, cars with glass bubbles, Metal employees with apron. The real future was made of invisible systems networks, algorithms, services that do not appear on any poster and changed everything.
The Jetsons, first launched in 1962 and set in 2062, designed a technology that changes everything except the problems: George continues with the unbearable boss, Jane continues to buy too much by the videophone, Judy continues to fifteen years. The design understood what we have been learning for decades: innovation redraws the scene, not the character. As of 2001: A Space Odyssey predicted bases on the Moon and interstellar airlines but did not preview the internet. Fiction sees what moves; it is blind to what connects.
And there is the tone turn. The dyslipia always existed Metropolis is from 1927, Admirable New World from 1932, 1984 from 1949. But in those times, it was the exception that frightened by contrast: optimism was the standard tone of imagination, from "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow", from Disney to the Golden Age of scientific fiction. Today, the map was reversed: from Vorazes Games to Black Mirror, dystopia is the starting point, and the most revealing symptom is this to write a hopeful future now, it is necessary to invent a subgenre with a manifesto name: hopepunk, solarpunk. Pessimism has become tone; optimism has become the position that declares itself.
What futurologists have erred and why
There is a law that explains almost all of this in one sentence. Roy Amara, of the Institute for the Future, formulated it as follows: we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short term and underestimate its effect in the long term. We hoped for hoverboards in 2015 and we barely realize the internet coming though it has transformed civilization more than a thousand floating boards together.
Alvin Toffler, in The Shock of the Future (1970), predicted that tomorrow's problem would be "too much change in time to be missed." He got the diagnosis and missed the symptom: the shock would not come from rockets, but from the overload of information. Buckminster Fuller calculated that human knowledge doubled every century until 1900, every twenty-five years after the Second War and at a rate of months, today. When the world folded faster than the cultural cycle of a film, predicting became a lost game. Futurologists extrapolated the visible machines that moved and were blind to the invisible: machines that thought and connected. The future was in the wrong places. Not in the garage: in the network.
And the actual hoverboard? There is. Magnetic levitation platforms developed by Lexus and Hendo float for real but only on special Metal tracks, because physics also collects its rules. It is Clarke's third law "all sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" read the opposite: magic existed, only with requirements that the script did not mention. Writers invent the rules; nature also does not pay royalties. "Where is my flying car?" maybe it is the wrong question of our time.
The philosopher of hope and the philosopher of fear
Two philosophical works of the twentieth century function as the poles of our relationship with tomorrow and explain the tone turn better than any list of films.
Ernst Bloch, in The Hope Principle, proposed something radical: dreaming of the future is not escape, it is structure. For him, the "dirty dreams" the fantasies awakened about what could be are the compass of history: all utopia is an educated desire, a rehearsal of what does not yet exist. Jetsons were exactly that: the collective day dream of a generation that needed to believe that the machine would liberate. Bloch would say that removing this imagination from the future is not realism is impoverishment.
Hans Jonas, in The Principle Responsibility, responded from another point, with an argument that grew aggravated well: technology gave humanity a power whose consequences travel in time and space faster than our ethics made, as he said, to the neighbor, to the gesture, to the here and now. Hence his proposal of fear heuristics: when the risk is existential, imagine catastrophe is not pessimism, it is methodological prudence. I read thus, the displacement of Black Mirror is not fashion: it is Jonas popularized. Fear migrated from nuclear war to the intimacy of the television of the Great Brother to the device that we ourselves carry and we cannot leave.
But Bloch would warn the reverse: a civilization that only tests the disaster in the mirror ends up building what it tries. Imagination is rehearsal, and what we rehears repeatedly we realize eventually. The synthesis maybe is this: hope with method, fear with proportion dream as who builds, fear as who calculates.
The absurd ideas we embrace with open eyes
The story of the future has a chapter that optimists prefer to forget: that of ideas that seemed to be absolute benefits and that we embrace with enthusiasm until they prove absurd. The pattern is repeated without exception: the gain is immediate and visible, the damage is late and diluted. Therefore, no era recognizes the absurd itself: in the present, there is only optimism with few data.
At the beginning of the 20th century, radio was the promise of health: there was a folder of radio teeth (Doramad), radioactive water in bottles (Radithor) and spas where it was breathed out. Industrial Eben Byers took over 400 bottles of Radithor's jaws broke before he realized the error. Asbestos was the "miracle mineral", so sure that the sparkling snow used in the films of The Wizard of Oz, in 1939, was made of it. DDT was so benign that they sprayed children in picnics, entitled to jingle: "DDT is good for me". Ford drew the Nucleon, in 1958, a walking car with nuclear reactor in the trunk. The rocket mail delivered real letters the first postal jet flight was in 1931, in Austria, and in 1959 an American missile Regulus delivered three thousand letters in twenty-two minutes. And the control of time was a civilizational Meta: after sowing clouds in 1946, the American military prolonged monsoons in Vietnam as a weapon of war Operation Popeye, which led the world to sign, in 1978, the treaty banning climate wars. Even dinner on a pill seemed like the logical destination of food.
None of these ideas seemed absurd in their time; they all looked like the future. And this is where the uncomfortable question lies, to what justifies this entire article: what is our radio toothpaste? Artificial intelligence in everything and in everyone? Genetic editing transmitted to children? Permanent location? Microplastics in blood? I don't know and it's exactly because we don't know that the question matters. In fifty years, someone will write this same article, and we will be his naive ones.
The mirror
Augustine would say that the question I started with will always have the same structure: expectation. We never found the future we only found our expectations of him, already won, stacked like graduation photos. And every expectation is a portrait of who produced it. The Space Age dreamed of objects because it had rockets; we dream of dystopia because we have screens. The future you imagine is not tomorrow. It is yours today talking with an accent of tomorrow.
So again: how do you imagine in twenty years? And the question that really matters: what does your answer reveal about yours today?
We don't inherit the future of our grandparents we pay his bill in benefits. The best inheritance we can leave to the next one tomorrow is to make more honest promises, and every honest promise should come with the only thing that makes any credible technology: clear rules. Like a good hoverboard: you don't have to fly high you need to know where it doesn't float.