1623: 2016 Conversation Guide

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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

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Open to editing, but perhaps a useful start. 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 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 Years day: 1624: 2016).

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 been developed in a somewhat workable fashions and analogues, 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 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). This is of course a reference to the game 1608: Hoverboard where it is shown how a real hoverboard should work...

The very concept of the hoverboard, in particular, is 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...

A much bigger challenge in levitation is the 'sky city', with various forms from fiction (e.g. Bespin, Mortal Engines Quartet). 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 of some kind 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 prototypes being tried out, and may actually end up featuring in our immediate future, even if not in 2016. Google has built a very good prototype but it needs improvement. Meanwhile the long-held science-fantasy aim to create a robot that can do odd tasks has been limited or a differently implemented and the fully omnicapable version is probably almost as far out of reach as it always was considered to be. "Jeeves" as a less than superb robot butler may be a reference to the robot of that name that can be "built" by characters in the popular MMORPG {w|World_of_Warcraft}.

Transcript

[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 entires 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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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 ~~~~)