Observer Ivan Talachev says that the future promised by science fiction writers in the books and films of our youth will remain on the pages and on the screen. Forever and ever.
2017 year. There are still no flying cars. Levitating skateboards only exist in projects. Sneakers with automatic lacing are still not common, but a luxury at $ 800 per pair. Instead of virtual reality - social networks with memes about Dmitry Malikov and Diana Shurygina. Instead of omnipotent hackers - dvach, a group of social renegades without moral guidelines, but with plenty of free time.
The children of the nineties were raised by TV and books instead of busy parents. The near future then after "Back to the Future", "Neuromancer" and "Minority Opinion" looked like a time of miracles - it was literally required to wait out the boring five to ten years, and that's it: half will live on the Moon (if you're lucky, then on Mars), and the other half is to hang around in virtual reality. Terrible diseases will be cured, and the world will be ruled by smart (and necessarily kind) machines.
No matter how it is. Ten years passed, then fifteen and twenty. During this time, exactly two things have changed: now everyone carries with them plastic or steel remnants with a screen and these stylish bars for the annual income of workers in the third world are connected through invisible channels to each other. All. Diseases have remained, and the world is not even ruled by giant corporations, as promised by the writers Sterling and Gibson, for example Facebook or Google, and not by Jewish masons with reptilians. The world in general, it seems, no one controls.
No virtual reality worked either. Everything that happens on the screens of our phones is better, brighter and more beautiful for a long time than the gray routine outside the multi-inch matrixes. The latest advances in the development of technologies for virtual reality headsets (PS VR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive) will still serve the porn industry in the future. Not a single person is worried about the news about the application of these technologies in industry or medicine. I can imagine the sadness of the creators: it's as if in the world of "Star Wars" the inventors of the first lightsaber realized that it would most often serve as a dildo.
In 2007, every person with Internet access swore and swore that they did not watch TV, used the disparaging word "zombie" and prophesied a quick death to television. The predictions did not come true: the main topic for public discussions sounds like "is it possible to have sex with a sleeping underage girl if she behaves like a hide?" To be more convincing, the question was asked five times in prime time by the country's largest television channel. I hoped that such discussions were a thing of the past with the long-haired Dmitry Nagiyev and the Okna program, but no. Sometimes they come back.
We invented the Internet and social networks, which science fiction writers have promised us since almost the mid-seventies. But instead of exchanging information and other benefits, we look at loud fools who sometimes cannot connect three words in a meaningful sentence, but flawlessly mount and set lighting in the frame. The Internet has been a territory of complete freedom for so long and so diligently denied the usual dogmas that it is completely incomprehensible how those who became them became its heroes: PewDiePie, Ivangai and Katya Klep with Maria Wei. This is not the future that science fiction promised, this is some kind of cruel joke.
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Maybe science will help? No, it's even worse there. Scientists are torn in half between the thirst for discovery and the desire to warn the inhabitants of the end of the world. Today they happily present new exoplanets, although only yesterday they proved that the fuel produced by mankind is enough for our children to find the events of the film "Mad Max" in reality. We plan to colonize Mars and fantasize about going to build a dream city right in the middle of Schiaparelli crater, while diseases like the flu develop antibiotic resistance year after year.
And what is the pressing question that worries the people more now? How to prevent the extinction of humanity as a species? How to stop global warming? How to insure against a mutated flu, which can easily mow down a tenth of the world's population in one season? Or where are our fucking flying cars?
No. Does resin actually flow from the monument of the last emperor of a country that ceased to exist almost a century ago?
There is hope that the future will come when hundreds of service drones will fly in the sky over cities, and unmanned vehicles will drive on the roads. But then our relatives will come to the rescue and will start throwing stones at the quadcopters and throwing the autopilot under the wheels, explaining that if the machine is not controlled by a person, it is definitely controlled by the devil.
Sometimes it seems that if we are not destined to see the world from the second part of "Back to the Future" or "Neuromancer" by William Gibson, it would not hurt for the prophecy from the movie "Terminator" to come true. Then Shurygin, myrrh-streaming busts and other nonsense will give way to really important knowledge: how to cook rats, how to take care of plasma weapons and where the T-600 model has vulnerable points.
Ivan Talachev