Some more on the subject in a few Less Wrong articles:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/xl/eutopia_is_scary/ argues that any much better society -- including any utopia worthy of the name -- is going to be different in ways to counterintuitive that they would sound scary. The present would seem the same way to someone from a hundred years ago; why would the future seem normal?
And from a completely different web site, I have seen one work of fiction that bucks the trend by being set in a utopia so good that you might actually want to live there:
* This is a straight conceptual extrapolation of current technology and designs. The only thing that I don't see coming from today's tech is the holographic projects. Oddly, most of the design seems to look like Apple-inspired tech. Does Apple consciously design to look like a sci-fi future? Or do their views of the future become shaped like Apple?
* In the cubes, there are no walls. The cube-dweller did not have headphones. Major, major "graaah"
* There are a ton of animations between slides in the screens. This is a waste of time.
* I didn't see any "stupid" activities like reading Failbook, watching MTV, any of those very popular mental cheetos activities. The future has "stupid" entertainment.
* Transparent fridge door = win. Where do I get one? I like that future!
* Also, one curious thing about this is that this is a presentation of rich people (that's not an indictment). The wealthy people whose houses I've visited who are rich in the US seem to have large amounts of space and everything seems to be insanely tidy (maid service? I don't know). Most less wealthy people have less space and things are a bit more jumbled up and around. This seems to be a conceptualization of a junior executive and her family.
> " There are a ton of animations between slides in the screens. This is a waste of time."*
Given the popularity of iOS and the growing popularity of OSX, I'd argue that most users disagree. Given the direction of Windows 8 it looks like we're getting more animation in the future, not less, and I for one am happy about that. Animation offers important cues as to the nature of the UI and data you're dealing with (the sliding screens of iOS and Android implies a hierarchy without having to waste time/space spelling it out for you, for example).
In any case, the MSFT video bothered me when I first saw it in a way that I couldn't really place, but after thinking about it some, I think my problem is this:
What is all of this utopian future-tech going to do for, well, regular people? The woman in the video is clearly very wealthy - I mean hell, her hotel has someone just standing around waiting for her cab from the airport. Her (presumable) husband and child live in a home far larger and more luxurious than anything my sorry middle-class ass grew up with. It feels... elitist.
Yeah okay, so jetsetting VPs and rich people have some sweet-ass tech in the future... but where is the technology for the everyman? I'd much rather watch/read about what technology of the future will do for everyone, not just the minted upper-class. Maybe it's just the economy we've had recently, but the video feels slightly repulsive in the fact that their vision of future technology apparently has no middle-class people, or indeed, middle-class concerns.
That's a good point - in the present technology between the upper and middle classes aren't that different, but in the video it sure as hell looks that way.
Hyper-productive terminals for the creative class? What about industry? What about people working more mundane jobs instead of some future-eco-glamor-green-creative one? What will this crazy utopia-tech do for them?
I wish they spent at least a few more seconds looking at what this crazy utopia-tech does for the cab driver, or the bellhop, or the grocery store where the husband/daughter have to get their food from. Because right now it's a video of "what can future technology do for executives and her highly-paid future-eco-green-creative direct reports who work on ephemeral things that don't seem to have the slightest connection to reality".
There were so many opportunities here to explore what this tech will do to improve the lives of, well, the majority, but all of it was spent strictly on the upper-class, and that bothers me a bit. Even right now, the majority of the world doesn't work in a chic, well-appointed office. The majority doesn't fly around the world constantly...
First of all-- the technology was shown helping the bellhop in the microsoft video.
My friend works in a warehouse. It's not glamorous, and it's refrigerated, so it's maybe 40 F the whole time. A lot of the warehouse is automated, so he spends most of his time making sure that the equipment is doing what it needs to be doing. So, just one more anecdote about how technology is becoming a part of blue-collar work.
Oh, I'm well aware that technology has pervaded all walks of life - that's kind of my main beef with this video. It seems to wrap itself up entirely in this mythical environmental-engineering company, along with the very wealthy denizens of it, as if that will be the bulk, or even the theme of the world in the future... and in the end come off as rather sterile and soulless.
More interesting than whiz-bang animations of fictitious (and fantastical) office workflows IMO, would be electronic payments for the cab - imagine the woman stepping out of the taxi and seeing the cab cost, along with (something futuristic!) "submitted to expense account" or something. Or, say, traffic overlays on the windshield for the cab driver. Or for the bellhop, something more substantial than how much the guest's bags weigh (really?)
I'm having trouble distilling my thoughts on this - I guess I was expecting to see more problem-solving in a vision of the future rather than a whole lot of whiz-bang animations that look cool but are of dubious use... and solve previous few problems that are compelling.
What more substantial info does the bellhop need? One of the problems with displays of numbers like that is that they are mostly a curiosity unless something breaks, then what you need to see is whatever indicators of brokenness are relevent to identifying and fixing it. And not much is going to break there unless she arrives at a different time or is moved to another room. A future full of attention grabbing displays of data just because we can is not utopian.
Perhaps the cab cost submitted to the expense account happened behind the scenes - why would she need to be alerted about it at all? I imagine the cab was pre-paid by whichever of her staff planned the trip, or provided by the hotel. We don't know, but if this is a display of techno-efficiency around her trip, she doesn't need to know or care either.
On problem solving, it takes loading a dataset into a brain and then time thinking about it; it can't really be shown on a slick video and it doesn't need a particularly futuristic office except to the extent that we see people looking at screens of data/information. "A smaller pump would be more efficient"? As if the software which calculated that needed two people physically meeting to say so.
By necessity, a video like this can't display happenings which don't fit video as a format, and that seems to me to be a lot of everyday life experiences on the smallest scales.
> There are a ton of animations between slides in the screens. This is a waste of time.
If you make them fast enough but still visible they help a lot in showing the context. They can add some metadata which would be worse to explain otherwise.
Of course there are also cases where they are flashy and waste time...
> those very popular mental cheetos activities
It's the first time I see this expression, but I'm afraid I have to steal and use it from now on. I love the comparison.
It looks pretty lonely and soul crushingly transactional. A world where we know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Why don't we invent technologies that let us spend more time with friends and family and less time worrying about the production of goods and services?
Wouldn't it be much more fun for the mother and child to spend time together baking something, than sliding recipes around the world? They've created a vision of the future that allows a father to manage his daughters homework like an employee in a cube farm, simply to avoid interacting with her and spend more time with Excel. Congratulations, but it's far more important to destroy work than relationships.
The medium is the message and this medium says it's far more important to have some slick glass thing 'interacting' with people than to just spend time with them. This ideal takes us so far away from being present in the moment. I could care less about the productivity of the future, I care far more about the personalization of the future.
> Why don't we invent technologies that let us spend more time with friends and family and less time worrying about the production of goods and services?
Because we've been propagandized into wealth/success race and sold out to consumerism. There's less money in spending time with F&F (also it sets bad precedent, that of enjoying life rather than paying for experiences. The 1% can't allow that.)
You hypothesize a world-spanning conspiracy where simple economics works just fine. People work because on average they value the fruits of their labor for the relevant time more than the other things they could be doing, through simple principles of declining marginal utility. If all you did was spend economically unproductive time with friends and family, trading a few of your abundant hours for some other gain would seem like a good trade. (Since it is.)
Where you go wrong is forgetting that "friends and family" time isn't a magical good; it's subject to declining utility, too. (In fact I think you'd find many people would pay some amount of money to not spend all their leisure time with their family, however you define it....)
If you, personally, aren't getting enough F&F time, stop ranting at the distant, half-mythical "1%" and fix it. You'll find they're not actually stopping you.
>> Why don't we invent technologies that let us spend more time with friends and family and less time worrying about the production of good and services ?
Those things aren't achieved by technology. In the 18/19 century , peasants in Russia worked all summer , and in the whole winter they rested in the house with family.
Those things are achieved by a decent social order combined with frugal mentality by individuals and societies.
I agree with this completely. In a sense, the dystopian presentation of a movie like Blade Runner or Akira feels oddly more comforting. Street venders, gangs of kids doing nothing in particular, smokers, etc. Even the cleanest, most polite scandinavian social democracy still has all these things, but they're conveniently left out of these "utopian" visions.
I think, if anything triggers our discomfort, it's the subconscious question of what happened to them.
I feel the same way about sterile utopia vs. messy blade runner-type worlds.
Interestingly I'm reading Snow Crash right now, which takes place in a world that is arguable similar to the one in Blade Runner, but the anarcho-capitalist aspect of the America depicted just really gives me the creeps.
One of the main problems about technological visions of utopia is that they so often assume that perfection is the absence of problems. Perhaps, but the more a world approaches that perfection, the more limited it becomes by necessity. Hence, the glimpse of Microsoft's world of optimal productivity is a glimpse of an intellectual and spiritual desert: meetings without purposes, productivity with nothing to produce. Human ingenuity exists to solve problems, so it's extremely ironic what emerges when we project to a world where technological ingenuity has vanquished the problems we deal with today.
Yes, but it's in some abstract, distant part of the world that hasn't yet been transformed by MS technology. So this company is trying to do the right thing and help them from afar, in the end goal of spreading Utopia, connectivity, and screen technology.
Utopia as its often depicted does suck, but the video shown by Microsoft is in no way utopian - it looks like the present, only with more displays (and invisible batteries).
Also, it's 6 minutes of software perfection - I have that sometimes... before Windows throws me an error, my Bluetooth stack fails and disconnects my headphones, my virtual machine hangs up, my phone's browser freezes and I can't close it (damn you Android) and my virtual desktops all meddle with each other since Windows (sigh) can't handle them natively and Dexpot just crashed :-).
So we have a bunch of screens to look forward to? Yay, looking at screens of various sizes and sitting at desks. Wow, what an improvement in the quality of life? Wouldn't you say?
This is absurd I mean in an uninspired way. It is absurdly uninspired. Why is technology today so concerned with what can be displayed? The people in these videos are basically holding iPhones and wearing 3d glasses. Carrying a brick around with me was never appealing no matter how far the screen extends to the edge.
The phone (brick) is NOT the best form factor for mobile technology. It is not attached to your body and only complicates the business of living day to day living... "Where did I put my brick and my keys?" All of these ideas of carrying around screens and sitting at office desks looking at screens are only visions of Utopia to people waiting to die.
The guy in the office is using a keyboard. The girl is writing on the screen with a pen.
And not seeing someone creating content is far from unrealistic: most people nowadays don't either. Content is creating by a small minority, even if the tools are widely available.
Funny how someone can disagree that Microsoft sells excellent keyboards. If, however, someone else makes keyboards better than the natural or the curve, I want to know.
I think the fact Microsoft considers one of its current models to be futuristic enough to figure in that video relevant to the discussion. They think people will use keyboards in the future and they'll be small, wireless and curved.
It's good to see the tone of "utopia videos" hasn't changed in 8 years. Also interesting to see that slate type devices have been people's minds far longer than the iPhone has existed.
Also interesting is how the vast majority of predictions in the video have come true - phones as transaction devices, front/back cameras/video calling, mobile music via phones, etc.
I happen to be re-reading Aldous Huxley's Island now. It's a utopia, and it isn't creepy at all: it's warm, tropical, physical, intentionally low-tech, productivity isn't a priority and technology (where it's accepted) actually serves to increase the time people spend living their lives. And it's very sexual, not "post-sexual".
I don't know how something imagined by a major corporation like Microsoft could ever be seen as a utopia. Yes, the streets are clean, but who the hell wants to live in a Microsoft future. Plastic generic people, a world so standardized that it doesn't matter where you are, human relations reduced to business transactions all under the watchful eye of omnipresent computers... it's classical dystopia, a world gone even worse than the "Blade Runner" world.
I noticed it because the first voice you hear sounded like gibberish, and a second later my brain recognized it as Afrikaans and I understood it. It's crazy how what is at one moment unintelligible noise can suddenly have a meaning.
I imagine in future there will be working groups of people that will spontaneously emerge from nowhere. and disappear the same way.
Like one driver leaving as he wish and another is taking role.
My problem with the video is that it's the kind of depiction you get when there is nobody able or willing to say "this is impossible to do". Every display seems capable to project 3D images in the air, some of them translucent, others opaque. At the same time, there are screens hung on walls (or on fridge doors). There is also a translucent touchscreen that seems to project different images on each side. Technically, it's about as plausible as http://pomegranatephone.com/
As for the translucent screen, projecting different images on each side is (at the same time) is just an assumption. It could very easily have a accelerometer to detect the 'flip' and change based on that.
OK. There is both light subtraction and emission happening on both sides. You could have a middle-layer of LCD shutters between a sandwich of translucent LEDs.
But I think the worst offenders are the desktop-mounted 3D display and the projection-capable PDA.
I am aware you can light up a voxel of air with enough energy. I am not sure you can do it in full-color, from a battery or whether the user would be able to interact with it without an aluminized fire suit. If I had that kind of power source in my pocket, I'd be warping space into stable wormholes instead of taking cabs.
One thing i think a lot of futuristic guesses miss but that got pretty well illustrated in the movie Minority Report, is that the future will include a VAST amount of advertising. All this technology wont be invented to make our lives better, it'll be invented to make money.
I think the iPhone would be the best current day example of it. A product of excellence that was created to make money (and boy did it) but has a secondary application of making our lives better.
There's a huge difference. Advertising makes money by making our lives worse. Something like the iPhone makes money by making our lives better. They're fundamentally opposing forces.
It's the same reason why 'heaven' has a problem. If heaven is what you want, you can just install yourself now on a morfine or heroin drip, wait till you die and hope it exists (not that you will care at that point). As a child Jehova witnesses rang my doorbell to explain heaven;
"Heaven is like a growing garden, with all the fruit you want!"
"I hate fruit"
"For you it's a garden with what you want!"
"MSX computers?"
"If that's what you want! And there is no pain and suffering; it's only great!"
"If I die now, I won't miss my parents?"
"It will be only great!"
"But how? My parents and sister and friends are not there?"
"You won't remember them!"
"Eh...."
"It will be only good for eternity!"
etc.
Heaven makes no sense at all, nor does utopia. We need pain and suffering to be alive. Hopefully not too much, but too little is so dull, you can just sniff dope 24/7. He is right about that; all scifi has crap; Voyager is kind of utopian (no need for money in the federation, enough food etc), but they still need conflict.
And the MS world is not utopia; that's MS utopia (maybe) (making tons of money because people sitting in front of screens). BillG went for the cool aid to talk to computers many years ago, SIRI makes it happen now, not by MS. We are in utopia now (in the western world) by many past definitions.
It's creepy if you remember gesturing in the air is very tiring. Unless the UI is very efficient and you get done really quickly, the most noticeable characteristic of future humans would be Schwarzenegger-arms.
This brings up the concept of "Kool-Aid". I'm not talking about the Jonestown suicide, but about social groups that think too highly of themselves to accept criticism. Such communities tend to be viciously intolerant of outsiders, hostile to internal dissent, and deeply hypocritical, especially among the leadership.
These false utopias are so unpleasant to deal with and the people who reach high positions in them are so hideous that one develops a reflexive dislike of anything that looks "utopian".
Afghanistan, under the Taliban, was a utopia. So was the Soviet Union. So is corporate capitalism, if a relatively bland one.
And the turkey buzzards from the Dark Crystal, wall street, the military, Wall Street, political parties, academia so ummm nearly everything. It is difficult for human groups to be open minded and self critical of their own belief systems.
Did we watch the same video? Apple makes much more usable and sane UIs than the jumbled, awkward-looking (but pretty) ones depicted in the Microsoft Productivity Future 2011.
Well, I was referring to the architecture. But yeah, it's funny how Microsoft can't even conceive of a future without ugly layers of Excel spreadsheets and graphs, and powerpoint animations.
On the title, YMMV. Enough people find Disneyland non-creepy enough and even attractive that it stays in business.
On the second half of the article, these are ads. They're going to show people happily doing productive things with their futuristic devices, not gritty mobsters calling in hits from across the continent or terrorists using GPS and Google Images to make sure they're blowing up the right building or all the people left unemployed by the advance of technology standing in a bread line. They want you to feel happy about their corporate branding. If they leave you feeling creepy, they might be overdoing it.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/xl/eutopia_is_scary/ argues that any much better society -- including any utopia worthy of the name -- is going to be different in ways to counterintuitive that they would sound scary. The present would seem the same way to someone from a hundred years ago; why would the future seem normal?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/ Has some attempts to come up with "weirdtopias", bizarre visions of the future that sound oddly compelling. It's a fun exercise.
And from a completely different web site, I have seen one work of fiction that bucks the trend by being set in a utopia so good that you might actually want to live there:
http://cityofreality.com/
So, you know, not all utopias are creepy and sinister.