1623: 2016 Conversation Guide

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 13:57, 30 December 2015 by Condor70 (talk | contribs) (Explanation)
Jump to: navigation, search
2016 Conversation Guide
The real loser in an argument about the meaning of the word 'hoverboard' is anyone who leaves that argument on foot.
Title text: The real loser in an argument about the meaning of the word 'hoverboard' is anyone who leaves that argument on foot.

Explanation

Ambox notice.png This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a BOT - Please change this comment when editing this page.
If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

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 comic, published just prior to the start of 2016, aims to clarify a number of the things one might have expected by now.

The classic target of personal futurology is the ability to levitate or fly, to varying degrees. "Where's my jetpack?" is one of the memes addressed here, and has actually long ago been developed in a somewhat workable fashion, but is dismissed as being too personally dangerous to have a Jetson-like ubiquity. Similarly, various forms of flying car have had varying degrees of success, but here are ignored to point out that the regular helicopter is as close as most of us would ever get to this technology. The levitating hoverboard has been popularised by the Back To The Future franchise of films, with several attempts to fully emulate such a device, 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).

A much bigger challenge in levitation is the 'floating sky city', with various forms from fiction. In reality, this seems highly unlikely to ever come to pass when there is perfectly good ground to lay the buildings down upon, due to the sheer mass. (But never say never!) It might be considered more reasonable to build a settlement on the Moon. The basic engineering exists, but the comic blames financial pressures for it not yet having come into existence. (Arguably political pressures, or perhaps the lack of them, are also a factor.

From the fields of automation, the self-driving car has had a lot of recent development put into it, with many and varied protypes being tried out, and may actually end up featuring in our immediate future, even if not in 2016. Meanwhile the long-held science-fantasy aim to create a robot that can do odd tasks has been limited or differently implemented and the fully omnicapable version is probably almost as far out of reach as it always was considered to be.

Transcript

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


comment.png add a comment! ⋅ comment.png add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅ Icons-mini-action refresh blue.gif 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:

  1. We live in a parallel future. Who in the 1950s extrapolated smartphones and the Internet?
  2. Flight technology has advanced a lot in this millennium (e.g. ArcaBoard, drones, etc).
  3. 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 ~~~~)