Futures That Never Were

and I really love science fiction. No big shock there, I'm sure I love stories that involve cool and futuristic technology and you know, technically, stories that they play out in such a way that, if done well, it says something interesting about what it is to be human when you get down to it. A lot of science fiction isn't so much about the pew pew lasers and the zoom zoom spaceships. It's really more about stuff like resilience and hope and hubrists and enmity and other very you know,

human qualities. So when you strip it all away, a good science fiction story you should tell us more about, you know, humanity. Now, when you create a science fiction story, you have to set it somewhere and some win. And

that's what brings us to today's topic. I wanted to talk about some science fiction stories that were set in the years two thousand to two thousand twenty one, So over the last twenty one years, now, not necessarily written during that time, but set in that time, like this would be the futuristic setting, because sometimes it's fun to go back and talk about some of the wild things that writers imagined happening by now. And sometimes they predict

stuff that comes true in some form or another. A lot of times they predict stuff that we just don't have yet. And I don't mean for this to be a Hey, isn't it fun that they thought we would be using holograms by now? Although there are a couple of instances of that in this episode, but it's not meant to poke fun at the futurists who were imagining the world. In some cases, the writer clearly was thinking, what is a year that's far enough out from today

that this could seem plausible. In other cases, the writer might just have arbitrarily picked a year because the year itself isn't really what's important, Like you might say in the distant year of two thousand nine, but what you really just mean is at a time that's in the future, right, So in some cases, I think a lot of science fiction stories, when they have a year, you might as well just replace that year with, you know, in the future.

But we're gonna ignore that, and we're gonna poke fun at some movies and some of their predictions, and not just movies, other stories too. So I'm gonna look at a lot of stories that were produced before the year the story is set in. So, in other words, these stories have to at least on some level make predictions about the future. A lot of science fiction films are

set the same year they came out. A lot of science fiction stories are set the same year they come out, so those become more like alternate present rather than futuristic. So I'm ignoring all those, and I'm really focusing on

ones that are more about projecting into the future. This also is not going to be an exhaustive list, either, because there have been a lot of stories that have been set between two thousand and two thousand twenty one, not as many as I thought there would be, or at least, based upon my research, not as many as I thought there would be. But there's still quite a few, and I'm gonna try and stick with ones that are either really famous or just super fun examples. So I

may very well skip over some of your favorites. For that, I apologize I cannot cover them. All, but let's get to it um And also before I get into the twenty first century, let's have a couple of honorable mentions in here. For example, George Orwell's Four is a phenomenal novel. It describes the world as being governed by giant, totalitarian

authorities who essentially have divvied up the world. And it's a world that's constantly under surveillance, like the government is looking at everything that's going on, and the government tries to regulate not just what people are allowed to do, but even so much as how people are allowed to think. It's a pretty terrifying story, and it's one I think we can still recognize as being relevant today, whether it's

in the form of authoritarian governments. I mean, you can look at some of China's initiatives and say, like, oh, I see some similarities there. You can also arguably look at the U k. And the United States and say there's some elements there too. We also have seen the rise of mega powerful corporations, which in some ways have taken on some of the aspects that Orwell had attributed to governments, Like we're seeing companies take on that kind of of role and take on that kind of power.

We're almost four decades decades out from the setting of that novel, and you know, we haven't quite reached the level of dystopia described in the book, but you can make a decent argument that a lot of the elements that were or well described have kind of crept into our actual world today. And granted, you know, some of those were things that he was observing at the time he wrote it, which was well before. Another honorable mention I have to add in here is the Star Trek

original series episode Space Seed. The episode first aired in nineteen sixty seven, and the year in which the episode happens is supposed to be twenty two sixty seven. Uh, but it references something that should have happened in our past. It would have happened between those two years. This is

the episode that introduced the iconic character con Nunioning. So in Star Trek lore, the world plunged into a global conflict in the nineteen nineties called the Eugenics Wars, and Cohn was one of several people who are part of a long term experiment that was focused on selective breeding of humans, and the idea being that this is a process that would eventually produce exceptional human beings. Eugenics is a real horrifying thing. It's also an incredibly racist thing.

It's it's it's bad, y'all. But anyway, this was sort of the thing that Star Trek was pitching it as. So con is supposed to be stronger and more intelligent

than your average person. In later Star Trek properties, his backstory gets tweaked a little bit, so he's actually the result not just of selective breeding, but of genetic engineering, because people recognize that any sort of selective breeding process would not progress to a point that you would have, you know, people with obviously superior human qualities within a couple of generations. That would take a very long time to really do. And again, eugenics is horrifying lee awful. Anyway.

Within Star Trek lore, Kahn and his genetically superior colleagues managed to conquer about a third of the Earth before they were defeated, and then Kahn's crew escaped Earth. Most of the genetically engineered humans were captured and sentenced to death in the nineties, but Cohn and his crew escape on a ship called the Botany Bay, and they go into suspended animation and just go on a trip out into space to escape their capture, and then a couple

hundred years later, the enterprise happens across them. Now, obviously a lot of the stuff that was predicted back in nineteen sixty seven never happened. There have been no eugenics wars. Thankfully, we don't have the ability to genetically modify humans to the point of guaranteeing that they are going to be stronger and more intelligent. But there are ongoing discussions and

scientific circles about the ethics of genetic modification in general. Like, obviously we've been doing a lot of work in genetic modification. The development of crisper is a great example, but we're still very much at the early stages of science when it comes to genetically modifying things. And more than that, uh, we still have these big ethical debates on at what

point do you say this is too far? Is it okay to do genetic modification if you are trying to make certain that someone is not born with a condition that would otherwise inhibit them or or negatively impact their quality of life? Is it okay if you go beyond that, if you say, well, let's make sure that they have certain qualities like blue eyes, or you go even further than that and say, let's make them stronger and more intelligent.

This is an area that is thoroughly investigated by science fiction and it's one where we have real discussions going on today. Uh As for other science stuff that happens in that that story, obviously we don't have a way to put people in suspended animation, certainly not with any way of halting aging completely and yet still being able to revive the person with no adverse effects. We don't have that capability. Uh. This is also an area of

intense interest. I mean, cryonics is a real thing in the sense that there are people who are working on it. Often the push for chronics comes from rich people who are terrified of dying. But yeah, we haven't cracked that one yet either. Beyond all that, we don't actually have a spacecraft that humans could crew that is meant to escape our solar system, let alone just wander the galaxy. So yes, space Seeds plot depends upon stuff that just

didn't happen, and much of it couldn't have happened. Clearly the writer's didn't you know they needed to have CON's backstory happened sometime between the present day of nineteen sixty seven and the Star Trek date of twenty two sixty seven, plus it needed to be far enough back in the history of Star Trek's world so that the average person in Star Trek wouldn't immediately recognize the name of con and know who that is just on the face of it. So I get it. But it's a great example of

predictions made in science fiction that just didn't happen. All right, let's talk about some of the stuff that was predicted to happen within the last twenty one years, And for the year two thousand, I would like to submit the film Death Race two thousand. This one was made back in nineteen seventy five. This was a Roger Corman production. And Corman is one of those folks in Hollywood who really was able to stretch a dollar as far as

it could go. Typically his films are really low budget affairs, but he's been behind some pretty fun movies. Like Roger Corman film is probably gonna be super low budget, but it doesn't mean that it's not going to be good or at least entertaining. I consider Death Race two thousand to be a pretty entertaining movie. There's a nasty satirical edge to the movie, a really nasty one, but I

find it fascinating. So in the lore of the movie, the world went through a massive economic crash in nineteen seventy nine, remember this film came out in seventy That economic crash then made the United States unstable and at some point the military overthrew the government and replace the democratically elected representatives with a totalitarian military regime. The government also co opted religion, so the state and the church are united. This was an effort to consolidate power and

to keep the huddled masses distracted. Uh. The government has this incredibly violent coast to coast race called the Annual Transcontinental Road Race. It's meant to entertain people and redirect their attention so they, you know, they don't realize how bad things are and they don't get smart ideas like demanding rights and stuff. So the race has this brutal

scoring system. Not only do you get points for you know, being fast, you also get points for killing innocent people along the way, like if you run down a pedestrian, those are extra points. So this is a way for an authoritarian government to retain control of a population, and also, you know, is a message saying no one is safe. This is a really common theme in stories that feature

dystopian futures. I'm sure you can think of some examples yourself, but you can find it in movies like Rollerball, Uh, The Hunger Games, Battle Royal, The Running Man, and many more. Um. One of the drivers in the Death Race two thousand movie is the government backed Frankenstein, who is said to at least be part machine due to having sustained numerous injuries and past competitions, and that he's while he's you at least partly machine, he's also practically unkillable. So we've

got some cyborg stuff going on here. Except spoiler alert, if you've not watched Death Rays two thousand and you really want to, you probably want to skip this next bit. But it turns out that Frankenstein isn't just one man. Instead, the government finds someone to pose as Frankenstein for each race, and should one of them die, they just get another

person to pose as Frankenstein for the next one. So Frankenstein's outfit is a disguise in other words, and it creates the illusion that the government has access to indestructible agents. It's another way of sending the message of we're more powerful than you are, so don't bother resisting. Now. I won't spoil how the film ends except to say there are a lot of kind of double and triple crosses going on and stuff. It's kind of bonkers. But the

tech and death rays two thousand isn't particularly outlandish. It's more about how society has devolved into this bloodthirsty and yet suppressed mob. And I'm sure depending upon your own you know, ideology, you might see some parallels in the real world. Moving on to two thousand one, we have Hey, look, it's two thousand one, a space odyssey. The novel and the movie are both considered classics, but they also project the level of technological sophistication that we have not yet reached,

not even in twenty twenty one. Uh. We could probably forgive some of that because the stories that influenced two thousand one came out of the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties.

The movie version premiered in nineteen sixty eight, so at that time we were still just on the verge of going to the moon for the first time, it probably seemed inevitable that we would continue to make incredible progress, right Like, we were already within the span of a decade making incredible strides towards the stars, so I guess like it seemed kind of natural that we would continue

that momentum. So in the story of two thousand one, there's a lunar base, and that's something we obviously don't have yet. NASA's Artemis program, in which the agency plans to return and send cruise to the Moon for the first time since the early nineteen seventies, has hit some snags. Currently, the agency says that a lunar landing will now take place in twenty five at the earliest. The original plan was to get there by four, but delays in various

aspects of the mission have made that impossible. So no lunar base for us just yet. And there are those who question whether a lunar base is even a logical stepping stone, but it exists in the film anyway. There's also a space station in the movie. This is obviously something that we have achieved, but the story also has astronauts traveling to Jupiter via spaceship with some passengers in

suspended animation. And we've already covered the suspended animation thing, but we obviously also haven't made any missions to go further out than our own Moon, and we haven't done that since the nineteen seventies, at least not with humans on board. We have sent, you know, unmanned spacecraft much further out, but not with a human crew. In some sections of two thousand one, the Jupiter mission section. UH,

spacecraft generate artificial gravity by spinning. So the spacecraft acts like a centrifuge, and when you've got a rotating mass, there's this pseudo force that we call centrifugal force, even though it's not a quote unquote real force. UH. This

is directed radially outwards from the axis of rotation. So if you imagine a bicycle wheel that has a pole that goes right through the middle of the wheel and it spins around the pole, the centrifugal force pushes outward along the circumference of the wheel, as this is ninety

degrees out from the axis of rotation. So if you had a spacecraft shaped like a wheel and it's rotating, people could walk along the uh the well inner part of the wheel, but on the outer edge of it if you If that makes sense, like if you were inside a bicycle wheel, your feet would be on the rubber that would be on the outside, and you could walk around that way like you would have artificial gravity

that way. The amount of artificial gravity would be dependent upon the speed of rotation as well as how large the spacecraft was. Uh. There are some problems doing this, however, because the magnitude of centrifugal force depends partly upon the distance from that axis of rotation, and that would mean that our heads, which are clearly a little closer to the axis, would be experiencing a different amount of force

than our feet would. So it would work from a physics standpoint, but you might not feel so great if you were to actually try it out in practice. The primary antagonist for two thousand one is an artificially intelligent computer system called How, which is everyone points out means that each letter is just off by one from IBM. Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote this, says that's a coincidence.

The system develops its own motivation and experiences something akin to fear as it pleads with a character not to deactivate it. So How goes eighte and kills nearly all the crew before it is deactivated, But as it's being deactivated,

it's it's essentially pleading for its own life. While the discipline of artificial intelligence has advanced dramatically since the nineteen sixties, you know, we are still as of yet not able to do anything close to what how could do, And there's an ongoing debate on whether things like consciousness and emotional motivation can even emerge out of technological systems, or if they can, what level of complexity we would first

need to achieve in order for that to happen. There are other technologies in two thousand one that have come true. There's a sort of tablet computer device that you can see in a couple of scenes, and obviously that's a tech that we have today, though it would be a little bit after two thousand one before we got one that was really practical and you know, something that would work in the mainstream consumer market. Voice activation is in the movie. That's come a long way, and we've got

numerous systems that work with that. Also, a lot of the stuff shown in two thousand one is pretty darn accurate from a technical perspective. For example, there's no sound in space, right because you don't have enough particles out there to allow vibrations to carry in space. So Kubrick made sure that shots that were in outer space, like in the exteriors, were silent. That was a good touch. When we come back, we'll continue our journey through futuristic

stories that were off by us the hair. But first, let's listen to these messages, all right. Before the break, we talked about two thousand one, which is widely considered to be a cinematic masterpiece, and it's also a pretty divisive film. Some folks don't like it so much that I think it's a little boring, like watching paint dry. I might be in that camp. I appreciate the movie for what it is, but I do not find it very entertaining. I find it hard to stay awake watching it.

That's on me, that's not on the movie anyway. Our next film is definitely not a classic. It's a movie that did not do well critically or commercially, and I am talking about Bicentennial Man. The film is about a household robot, one that is bipedal. It has a human like body, and over time, this robot develops emotions and motivations of its own. So it's kind of like How

in that regard. Only while How became a homicidal maniac determined to complete a mission, the robot character of Andrew and Bicentennial Man becomes so sweet he'll end up giving you cavities. It's Robin Williams as schmaltziest. But if we distill the movie down to the basics, we could say that it's about a robot with artificial intelligence that gains sentience, self awareness, and consciousness. And then how would humanity perceive

that kind of a machine. How would humans react? Would they extend the idea of personhood to encompass an artificial being, or would humans dismiss that as unthinkable and refuse to acknowledge that a robot's humanlike qualities make it a person. These are questions that folks are actually asking right now. I mean, in the EU, there are committees that are dedicated into looking into the idea of granting personhood for robots and artificial intelligence. Should they reach a level of

sophistication that would necessitate such a thing. Bi Centennial Man starts off in two thousand five, and I'm sure I do not need to point out to you we did not get intelligent bipedal helper robots in two thousand five. We don't have them now, and there are lots of reasons for that will put the AI side apart because we already talked about that with how so there's no need to tread over that again. But let's talk about

bipedal robots. So we don't have a ton of these because, as it turns out, it's very hard to engineer a bipedal robot. Getting the robot to move so that it's not you know, just falling all over the place is a non trivial problem. Balance is tough, maneuverability is tough. We do have some robots that are bipedal, and they are even some famous examples like Asimo, but um, you know, they they're still very limited. I mean, Asimo could actually run.

It was a little hoppy run and made it look like Asimo really needed to get to the Little Robots Room pretty quickly, but it had its own limitations and restrictions. It was largely under you know, annual control or very very limited autonomous control. That's part of the reason we typically see robots that depend upon wheels or treads to move around because those components are far less complicated than legs from an engineering perspective, they work on a simpler principle,

and they're easier to repair if things go wrong. If you're looking at ways to simplify your robot design, getting rid of legs is a no brainer. However, a lot of human environments work best if you have legs. By the way, this is a big problem, not just for robots. I'm talking about accessibility in general. It's why we have laws that are meant to guarantee accessibility, because otherwise people who depend upon tech like wheelchairs to get around would

find themselves locked out of a lot of experiences. I mean, they already do, but it would be even worse. And while we've had some progress on making the world more accessible, the fact is that the default design choice tends to favor people who can walk around. The stairs are just

a simple example of that. Well, that's a pretty tough challenge for robots to One of darpast robotics challenges was for groups to design a bipedal robot that could complete several tasks autonomously, including doing such things as operating a vehicle opening a door, walking through a doorway, picking up a power tool, using the power tool appropriately, and so on, and even things like opening a door, which would be a pretty trivial task for many people, became a big

engineering challenge, and walking through the door was another big one. There are actually lots of videos of several robots just playing tipping right over at that point. This challenge happened a decade after two thousand five, after the the setting of the beginning of Bicentennial Man, so from a basic robotics standard, we're far off from having that become a reality.

I'm not going to comment on the quality of the movie, but the argument on whether or not robots should be granted personhood is a really interesting one, and it's also an idea that pops up in the film AI And as I mentioned, it's kind of an ongoing discussion here in the real world today. Now we're going to jump ahead to twenty mostly because very few well known futuristic stories were set between two thousand five and twenty But that means now we have to talk about the year

we make contact. This is actually the sequel to two thousand one Space Odyssey. The film twenty ten came out in the book came out two years earlier. And yes, I know this sounds confusing because I'm using lots of years here, but it was a nineteen eighties version of what twenty ten would look like. Anyway, nine years have gone by since the events of the first film, and there are a lot of questions that are left back on Earth, and the big ones are what the heck

happened out there? All those astronauts died, what happened to them? And then one of them might not have died but definitely disappeared. What happened to that guy? So twenty ten obviously has some of the same issues when it comes to the predicted tech that we saw in two thousand one, so we're not going to go over all that again. Interestingly, it also assumes that in the Soviet Union is still

a thing. In the film, the U S and the U s s are are entering into essentially another kind of Cold War space race, in this case a mission to find out what the heck happened in the events of two thousand one. Of course, the real Soviet Union

dissolved in the early nineteen nineties. It did not exist by the movie answers the question about why How went bonkers in the first film, and it turns out that the crew were unknowingly on a secret miss mission, and that mission had not been laid out to them, so they didn't have any awareness of it. How however, was aware of the secret mission, but was supposed to keep that under wraps while appearing to facilitate the covers story mission,

the one that the astronauts thought they were on. But that meant that there was a conflict with How's programming because it was supposed to be a transparent and honest system, and that brought How into an irreconcilable quandary. The computer system was obligated to follow its mission, but that mission

included parameters that would violate the systems programming, so How snapped. Now, setting aside the AI issues that we've already discussed, this touches on another common element in speculative fiction, that of artificial intelligence encountering some sort of problem or scenario that subsequently causes it to harm people. Uh. One of the basic ideas in Western science fiction goes to the three

major laws of robotics, as defined by Isaac Asimov. They state that, first, a robot cannot harm a human or allow a human to come to harm by failing to prevent it. Second, a robot must obey any order given to it by a human, provided that it doesn't violate the first law. And Third, the robot must protect itself as long as it doesn't conflict with the first two laws. But science fiction is full of scenarios in which AI

causes harm or even leads to extinction level events. The classic, perhaps most cliche example of this is the idea that you create a supercomputer, and you your hope is that the supercomputer, which is far more intelligent than any human being, will be able to solve massive real world problems, so it will be able to do things that humans can't

do the humans aren't smart enough to do. And then you tell it to bring about world peace, and then the supercomputer comes to the conclusion that the only way to guarantee world peace is to wipe out all of humanity. That way, there's no one left to declare war on anyone else. That classic sci fi cliche. The other stuff that happens in ten goes more into the realm of fantasy than science fiction, So I'm not going to get into the rest here yere. Uh. It's definitely a very

different movie than two thousand one. It's less poetic, it's a little more narrative. I don't think it's a better film than two thousand one. I do think it's one I can watch more easily than two thousand one. All Right, but let's move up to I thought about including I Am Legend in this lineup that actually came out in

two thousand seven but was set in twelve. However, there's not really any tech to speak of in I Am Legend, and we're currently living through a global pandemic, so I don't think we really need to talk about a fictional version. So instead we're gonna talk about and I can't believe I'm following up like with this, but John Carpenter's film Escape from l A. It hurts me to talk about this movie. I would have much preferred to talk about

Escape from New York. I know that Carpenter thinks Escape from l A is a superior film to Escape from New York. I respectfully disagree. The film Escape from New York was set in the late nineties, so it's outside the window for this episode. But Escape from l A is a lot like Escape from New York, but not as entertaining in my opinion. It was made in which actually was the year before the setting of Escape from New York. The basic premises that over several years, Los

Angeles descends into crime and chaos. It's a lost cause. Then there's an earthquake and that causes Los Angeles to effectively become an island separate from the California mainland. And then there is a dictator who declares himself President of the US for life, who then seizes control and he uh declares that Los Angeles is effectively a prison. He has walls built around the city, and if you break any laws in the United States, well you're gonna get sent to l a where you have to just kind

of try and survive anyway. The main character is Snake Bliskin, who's a former military man. He's been come a nihilist. He doesn't really believe in anything. He detests the world

as it has turned out to be. And he's also a criminal and he's going to be sentenced to Los Angeles, but he's offered a part pardon if he can retrieve a remote control that controls a satellite based weapons system, and this weapon can blast targeted regions with an electromagnetic pulse that's strong enough to disable you know, electrical systems. The dictator of the United States plans on using the weapon on his various enemies around the world, essentially kind

of sending him on a path for world domination. And to make sure that Pliskin plays ball, the government injects what they say is a virus that will kill him within ten hours unless he gets an antidote. This blot, by the way, is almost identical to Escape from New York. The particulars are different, but the idea is is virtually the same. Some of the technologies shown in the film include that satellite based e MP or electromagnetic pulse weapon.

E m p s are real. In fact, they really happen in nature, and a sufficiently powerful electromagnetic pulse can cause electronics to overload and fail. Uh. If it's powerful enough, it can damage electronics to the point where they won't work anymore. You'll have to repair them or replace them.

So lightning is one type of an electromagnetic pulse. A coronal mass ejection or CMME from a star like the Sun can create a magnetic field strong enough to be an e m P. That's why you'll hear about times where there's a lot of solar activity potentially interfering with electronics. Here on Earth, nuclear explosions generate e m P s uh. A really powerful pulse could cause power lines to snap. You would have an excess of electrical current and voltage

in the power lines. They wouldn't be able to handle it, and they can snap right then and there. Computer systems are particularly vulnerable to electromagnetic pulses. So an e MP weapon is not just possible, it's something that exists, and it's a lot of a lot of militaries around the world have worked on refining them over the years, because if you have a weapon that can destroy communication infrastructure without actually causing physical destruction to the region itself, that's

a super high value weapon. That being said, I am not aware of any system that could produce a powerful e MP blast that you could base on a satellite platform. Um it essentially just becomes a laser gun weapon in the movie, And I can't think of a way where you would be able to do this unless you had like nuclear explosives in orbit. Even then you would have to really find a way to direct that pulse to

have maximum effectiveness. The movie also features a personal holographic projector that's capable of producing a three dimensional hologram that's convincing enough to fool people who are standing in the same area. Right Like, if you were in a room and someone were using this, you would think that that was actually a person there, not a hologram. That's all effective it is within the movie. It even casts a shadow behind it in the scene where it plays a

big part in the film. Obviously, we have not developed that kind of technology. There are some pretty nifty effects that we can create to simulate holograms under very specific conditions, but generally speaking, this is way beyond our capabilities. Oh also, one of the actors in the movie would later go on to become the Countess of Devon. True story, it really did happen. All right, We got a few more stories we want to talk about, but first let's take

another quick break. Okay, we're up to two thousand and fifteen, and it's time to talk about flying cars. In fact, those pop up a couple of times, but this is the first one, and you knew we were going to have to get around to it, because is when about half of Back to the Future Part two takes place.

If you've never seen the movie, well, first you got the first Back to the Future, which follows a character named Marty McFly as he accidentally travels back from nineteen eighty five to nineteen fifty five and then, through some misadventures, has to figure out a way to make his parents fall in love with each other or else he'll never

have existed. So it's your classic temporal paradox scenario. But in the sequel, which came out in nineteen eighty nine, Marty's friend and mentor, Doc brown Uh, convinces Marty five Marty that he has to travel to the far off

future of in order to help Marty's kids. At least that's the first section of Back to the Future Part two, so we get to visit and things are a little different from our real world version of They are a lot more day glow for one thing, a lot of like fluorescent colors, and in the Back to the Future

two version also homes come standard with fax machines. In that version of now maybe in the late eighties, that seem like it was a realistic outcome, but Obviously it's not what are would be in our most homes today. I mean, there's no need for them because we have plenty of electronic systems that don't require paper or toner. But email was not something that people were really thinking

about in Hollywood at levels. Restaurants in the movie have a robo wait staff, and there's a There are a few novelty places around the world, a lot of them in Japan, that use computers and robots in order to serve food, but they are really a novelty and an exception, not the rule. I will say, however, that wait staff is one of those roles that robots and automated systems

could potentially thrive in. And I say that because we're talking about an environment that has a limited set of variable Like if you can only order from a menu, that means you can't just walk into the restaurant and order anything. Right, you couldn't walk into like a Mexican restaurant that didn't have pizza on the menu and say I want a pizza. You typically have to order off

the menu. Now you might be able to order something off menu if the staff like you and the chefs in the back don't mind, but only if the restaurant actually has the necessary ingredients on hand. So robots work well in environments that have a limited number of varia variables, like if they have restrictions on variability, robots do better. It's when you start adding more variables then it becomes

more complicated for a robot to operate. Whether folks would ever see robots as being useful or you know, pleasant to interact with on that level, or whether they would even make economic sense compared to say, hiring human weight staff, those are other matters like technologically it's probably not the most difficult thing in the world to do. The question is that makes sense financially and socially. Like Escape from l A, we see holograms and Back to the Future too.

There's a film Marquee for Jaws film that has a holographic shark emerged from the screen to seemingly attack Marty, which startles him. It's a pretty cool effect, and it is possible to create a three D effect with a screen without the need for three D glasses. Lenticular displays can do this. However, this is a pretty limited effect and typically you need to be positioned in a sweet spot in order to experience it, if you move a little bit to the left or to the right, the

effect changes. You don't get the proper images that are directed towards your eyes, and it will look all messy. From personal experience, I can tell you that looking at three D glasses, or rather three D displays that are glasses free, it's not fun. It can actually bring on some eye strain. It is just it's possible to do. It just wouldn't happen the way it does in the movie. There's also the hydrator oven in the movie that turns like a hockey puck sized pizza into a full sized

cooked pizza in just a matter of moments. The movie doesn't bother to explain how this works. But I mean, the name hydrator suggests that you're adding water to something in order to make it expand to the appropriate size, and simultaneously it's somehow heating up the pizza at the same time. Not sure how that works. Heat transfer isn't magically instantaneous, so I don't know. But they don't bother to explain it because it's just it's just a fun

little accent. It's not it's not meant to be analyzed the way I'm doing it. I'm the jerk here. Then there are all the flying machines like hoverboards and flying cars. There's again not a lot of explanation about how these things work. Presumably the hoverboards are generating some sort of electromagnetic field that counteracts gravity somehow, although I can't even

begin to imagine how you can make that be a thing. Now, you could use something like super conductivity to magnetically lock something into a specific position over a magnetic track, but that would require cooling the the something down to levels of around absolute zero to get it super conductive. It's not really practical. It's really hard to do, and you

would be limited to the magnetic surface itself. So in other words, like you could have a track and you could have a super conductive magnetic hoverboard over that track, and it would hover, and you could push it and it would just effortlessly slide all the way to the end of the track. But it couldn't go off track because it has to have that magnetic base to work, and it has to be locked into a magnetic field. If you go outside of that, you lose the effect.

And obviously we don't have those magical flying cars today, let alone back in we do have some cars that can fly, though the word cars being a little bit generous. The most common variations I see are quad copter like designs. So think of like a quad copter drone that is a drone that has the four propellers that are you know, kind of like the four corners around the drone, only you know, supersize it, make it big enough so that you could have a compartment where a person could sit

inside of it in the middle. Um. There are tons of companies working on making flying cars reality, mostly with the goal of creating a ride hailing service similar to like Uber or lift, in which customers pay to fly across town without having to deal with street traffic. But that technology is going to hinge not just on making the stuff safe and reliable, but also creating the regulations that will guide how the tech can interoperate with you know,

the rest of the environment, like a city. You're gonna have to have rules for that otherwise the potential for disaster is just way too high. Uh. And to me, the biggest p of technology from Back to the Future too, and really the end of the first Back to the Future is Mr fusion. This device presumably uses fusion to generate electricity, and it's enough to provide the one point twenty one jiggawatts of power for the Delorean's time circuits.

Fusion involves fusing atoms together. It's the process that the Sun goes through where it uh it fuses hydrogen atoms into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. The process requires a lot of energy to get started. Like you know, with the Sun, you've got this intense gravitational pull. You've got really dense system there, uh and incredible temperatures. So it's got this amazing amount of energy that can

sustain this process. But here on Earth, I mean, it requires a lot of of energy and pressure to get this thing started. And yeah, the output is potentially even more energy, but sustaining that reaction is very challenging to do. Scientists around the world are working on developing practical fusion reactors.

So far, the amount of energy needed to start and sustain a fusion reaction is greater than what we get out of it, Like we can have a net positive outcome on an individual reaction, but sustaining it so that we can do something useful with it. That's a different matter. If we can get through that, that will be a transformational change for the world. I don't think, however, we're ever going to see fusion reactors that can be small enough to be incorporated into the electrical system of a vehicle,

nor can I imagine a need to do that. And to be fair, the techa back to the Future too was always intended to be whimsical, and some of the stuff we've seen in the movie has kind of come to pass, just not necessarily in the way that it showed up on screen. Alright, let's close out this list with the movie Blade Runner. Blade Runner came out in nineteen eight two, but it's set in the year twenty nineteen.

It's a science fiction film noir kind of movie. Now, if you've never seen it, you should totally watch it. It is an amazing movie. I will warn you. There are some very slowly paced moments in that film, Like there might be some bits where you find yourself saying, get on with it as you watch people very slowly walk around a building for what feels like an eternity,

But the premise is really neat. So in this version of two thousand nineteen, you are in a densely populated and dystopian Los Angeles, and there's this big social problem. So humanity has developed a way to bio engineer synthetic humans. So they're kind of like androids, but they're not robots.

They're made out of gooey, fleshy stuff. I mean, I guess you could call them robots in the sense that they are more like the robots of the original Roslum's Universal Robots, which was the Czechoslovakian play from the early twentieth century. They have a lot more in common with those than with the danger Will Robinson style robots that we think of today. But yeah, we call them replicants

in the movie. Uh. And the reason that humans even made replicants is the same reason that we typically make robots. It's so that we have something to take care of the work that is one of the three ds that is dull, dirty, and dangerous. So these synthetics, these replicants are meant to take on jobs that traditionally humans would

have to do. But it's not very fulfilling work, and it can be very dangerous and both physically and mentally, and have a negative impact on the people who do the work, so the ideas you offload that work to a machine. So in this case, the machine is a synthetic human, and they are not considered to be quote

unquote real. The replicants are meant to be used off world, not on Earth, in other words, but four of them have escaped and made it to Earth in order to experience Earth, and a former police officer who specializes in identifying and tracking down replicants, which is a specific job called a blade runner, is essentially extorted into eliminating these four replicants. Now, I'm not gonna ruin the story. It is worth seeing and it has some of the most

beautiful imagery in early nine science fiction. Also has one of the most famous speeches in science fiction films of all time. But let's talk about the tech. Clearly, we can't create synthetic human beings right now, there's been some amazing research and development in synthetic organs, or replicated and three D printed organs. That stuff is a slutely amazing.

Scientists are creating bio friendly scaffolds, and on the scaffolds they can then print tissue structure, so that research could potentially lead to a future in which we use stuff like a patient's stem cells to create three D printed synthetic organs and use that for stuff like transplants. So

if that panned out, it would revolutionize transplant surgery. You potentially you could cut way down on the risk of the recipient's body rejecting the new organ, because if the organ is created using essentially tissue from the donor like the actual patient, then the body is at least the thought goes more likely to accept the new organ. Yeah, we're not able to make a fully synthetic human being. The replicants on the run in the film are classified

as Nexus six replicants. Google got a little cheeky when through its Motorola Mobility division it no longer has that ada. At the time, it developed an Android phone and it was codenamed Shamu, but when they released it they called it the Nexus six. Cute reference and Blade Runner also features flying cars just like Back to the Future too, and like Back to the Future Too, how they fly isn't important, so I can't really comment on the proposed methods except to say, obviously we don't have it in

real life. The film feature stuff that would be out of place in the real Two thousand nineteen. For instance, the main character looks through tons of polaroid photographs, so today he would more likely be looking through a folder of digital images. He also uses a machine called an esper, which can analyze a two dimensional photograph and then produce views of stuff that are in that photograph that are

from other angles. Like imagine you've taken a still photo of a table, So you're you're standing on one side of the table. You take a picture, you use this thing, you could theory theoretically look at the table from a one degree change in view, like you were standing on the opposite side. Now, computers can do some pretty cool stuff, but doing that in real time isn't something we can easily manage. And also, you know, we would really just be looking at a best guest scenario, like the computer

would be guessing what the other side looked like. It wouldn't really be useful. All right. That is just a quick rundown of some science fiction movies, the main predictions that have not quite turned out the way people envisioned. I hope you enjoyed this rambling discussion of science fiction.

I like doing episodes about sci fi occasionally. It's always fun if you have any movies specifically you would like me to really dive into and talk about from a technical level, like the tech that's either went into making the movie or the tech that's displayed within the movie itself, let me know, or any other topics. I'm eager to hear your thoughts. The best way to get in touch is with Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah.

Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.