1623: 2016 Conversation Guide
| 2016 Conversation Guide |
 Title text: The real loser in an argument about the meaning of the word 'hoverboard' is anyone who leaves that argument on foot. |
Explanation[edit]
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As each year turns (or other milestone dates, perhaps set out in popular fiction) it is common enough to remember that what is now the present was once considered the future!
This New Year comic, published just prior to the start of the New Year, 2016, aims to clarify a number of the things one might have expected by now. (Another New Year comic followed on New Year's Day: 1624: 2016, making it two in a row with titles beginning with 2016...) The classic target of personal futurology is the ability to levitate or fly, to varying degrees. This topic was discussed before in 864: Flying Cars, where Megan suggests that the real advances in futuristic technology are in computers and electronics, rather than methods of flying.
- Flying car
Various forms of flying car have had varying degrees of success (although it's debatable whether these examples are actually cars or just small airplanes), but the comic points out that the regular helicopter is as close as most of us would ever get to levitating personal vehicles.
- Jetpack
"Where's my jet pack?" is a common trope. There are various systems and analogues that could be considered jet packs in some sense, but devices to let individuals fly on earth would be extremely dangerous, even if they could be made practical. A functioning jetpack would risk elevating people to dangerous altitudes while potentially accelerating them to dangerous velocities, make it both difficult and dangerous to steer. The high likelihood of fatal crashes means that a viable product is unlikely to ever exist.
- Moon colony
The basic science and engineering exists exists to build some form of permanently manned settlement on the moon, but doing so would be extremely expensive. The technology to exploit lunar resources, either for construction or life support, has not yet been developed, so all equipment and supplies would need to be continually transported from earth. Commercial potential of such a base would be extremely limited, and no organization or group has been willing to spend the kind of money it would take.
- Self-driving car
Randall notes that these are "coming surprisingly soon." Self-driving cars have not become nearly as ubiquitous as was frequently predicted in 2016. As of 2024 (9 years after the release of this comic), there are various forms of self-driving with various degrees of advancement. The most impressive would be Tesla's full self-driving beta, which is capable of performing acceptably in most situations, except for parking lot navigation. Other than Tesla, companies such as Google, Waabi, and Euler Motors are working on self-driving vehicles, though Tesla remains the most well-known amongst the general public. All these vehicles still require a human driver present.
Self-driving cars has become a recurring topic on xkcd and they were mentioned again already in the title text of 1625: Substitutions 2 just two comics after this one.
- Floating sky city
Various science fiction sources imagined the idea of floating cities (e.g. Bespin, Mortal Engines Quartet). In reality, this seems highly unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. Absent some form of levitation technology that doesn't even exist as a concept yet, the only ways to keep things floating inside a planet's atmosphere are to make use of either buoyancy or continually providing thrust and/or lift. But "cities are heavy". The amount of mass that any kind of city would have would require either an implausibly large volume to float by buoyancy, or an incredible amount of energy (continually provided) to supply thrust or lift. With any foreseeable technology, that's unlikely to ever be practical.
- Hoverboard
The levitating Hoverboard has been popularised by the Back To The Future franchise of films, with several attempts to fully emulate such a device with air-blast or magnetic levitation, but the term "Hoverboard" has ended up being applied to a Segway-like personal transport system that has at least become a mass-produced device (albeit with a number of safety concerns) even if it doesn't fly or levitate. The very concept of the hoverboard was therefore predicted to be reduced mostly to arguments between opposing camps of opinions; and then, in the title-text, the conclusion that giving up and resorting to old-fashioned walking is inferior to any of the possible alternatives.
- Robot butler
A long-held science fiction vision is a robot (presumably humanoid), that can perform household tasks, taking that burden off people. Randall mentions "Jeeves", saying "he wasn't that great". This is presumably a reference to the early search site Ask Jeeves, which used a stereotypical butler name. The concept was that the search engine could take on tasks for you, much as a butler would. However, it was only a search engine, incapable of performing any physical tasks, extremely limited in the non-physical tasks it could perform, limited in its accessibility, and not even a particularly good search engine in the first place.
In a broader sense, there do exist an increasing number of automated systems to do specific household tasks (such as vacuuming), and voice-activated systems that can perform virtual tasks, like keeping schedules and looking up information, are increasingly widespread. To date, though, a generalized robot that can perform variety of physical tasks does not yet exist in a practical form. Robots (both humanoid and otherwise) that can move and operate semi-autonomously are under development, but are neither sufficiently advanced nor sufficiently cost effective to replace human labor in most instances.
Transcript[edit]
- [A chart with three columns of text with only one entry to the left - which is written in the middle of the panel. Then there is one line going right from this text but soon it splits into seven lines going either up (3), almost straight (2) or down (2) ending in arrows that points to the next column with seven entries for different possible future inventions. From each of these entries a horizontal arrow continues to the last column at the right with seven more entries commenting on these inventions.]
- It's 2016 – Where's my...
- Flying car → They're called "helicopters"
- Jetpack → Turns out people are huge wimps about crashing
- Moon colony → No one has put up the cash
- Self-driving car → Coming surprisingly soon
- Floating sky city → Turns out cities are heavy
- Hoverboard → This question is now ambiguous thanks to a new scooter thing (and will lead to an argument about the meaning of "hoverboard" which is way less interesting than either kind of hoverboard)
- Robot butler → He was called "Jeeves" and he wasn't that great
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refresh comments!Discussion
Isn't Jeeves also the name of the butler in the play "Joseph and the amazing technicolor dreamcoat?"
- No. He was described as "the Jeeves of his time" That's like saying he was the Rolls-royce of butlers. It doesn't say what his name was (but at least it rhymes with a cook in his prime). 162.158.38.226 16:50, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
In response to the title text, "You know, it's such a beautiful day that I think I'll walk." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Such_a_Beautiful_Day. 198.41.238.32 07:23, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
A number of "inventions" from various science fiction stories of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries are listed with how they have progressed in the present. Some are currently being used (flying car) but in a different manner than originally imagined (helicopters, which use rotating blades rather than stationary airfoils -- wings -- for lift). Some are impractical for physical reasons (floating sky city) and some have economic (moon colony) or social impediments (jetpack). The entry for "hoverboard" and the title text refer to two different kinds: the science fiction version in "Back to the Future" is a skateboard with some form of levitation instead of wheels, while the current version is a short skateboard that has more freedom of motion but less stable balance than a conventional skateboard.
There are two possibilities for "robot butler": either it refers to the "ask Jeeves" search engine or implies that P. G. Wodehouse's "perfect gentleman's gentleman" was a robot. The Dining Logician (talk) 08:36, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
Jeeves is also the name of a "robot butler" in World of Warcraft. Although it's a pretty convenient item even if it's 4 years old, it's not that great compared to what you would expect from a true "robot butler". Jeeves merely allows you to repair your equipment or access your bank, both of which are really easy to do anyway. 108.162.228.89 14:03, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
My reply:
- We live in a parallel future. Who in the 1950s extrapolated smartphones and the Internet?
- Flight technology has advanced a lot in this millennium (e.g. ArcaBoard, drones, etc).
- So have AI & robotics (e.g. cybernetics, drones, roomba, Siri, teledildonics, etc).
-- Frankie (talk) 12:29, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
Apart from the slight problem of the two actors involved being somewhat sadly aged (in different ways), there was this for Back To The Future Day, that this reminds me of... 162.158.152.227 12:59, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
So, to prevent edit conflicts I wrote the plaintext explanation and then went back in for links. Which then got edit conflicted, so I had to work quickly to combine the two. I think I then managed to get Condor70's contributions back in, but obviously it's open to further checking. See main-page history for my/their interventions... 162.158.152.227 14:18, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
...additionally, the time I took to work out what references to add could perhaps have been aleviated if I'd instead added a table to let us list (and link to) both fictional and factual examples that have developed, without cluttering the main explanation text with anything but the bare-necessity wiki(/nonwiki)linking. But I'll leave it alone, for now. Might be food for thought, though. 162.158.152.227 14:28, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
In response to flying cars: http://www.terrafugia.com/ 173.245.54.56 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
