28 points tudell 1 hour ago 10 comments

tusmaaa 1 hour ago | parent

STILL HAVE NOT GOTTEN OUR OWN STORE WITHIN STAR WARS

markus_zhang 1 hour ago | parent

I think with the advancement of LLM many of those AI prophecies have been fulfilled. I found it sad that I’m no longer interested in that future, though.

ale42 57 minutes ago | parent

Some images are so heavily JPEGized that it hurts the eyes to look at them. Unfortunately it looks like the source scans from the IA are so...

Bengalilol 56 minutes ago | parent

I love digging those retro future concepts that echo so well with our times.

As a side note, and border topic, it reminds me of the "My Uncle" (Mon Oncle) sequence of the Villa Arpel from Jacques Tati (who had the finesse to observe the paradoxes of society's evolution).

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuGA4ZNSS8c>

The fountain that switches on when important people get in and switches off when house employees walk by (in order to economize water), the automatic garage door designed like no one would ever need any security switch, the geometric garden where the characters end up walking awkwardly.

ps: I remember seeing those ads in another article. FWIW.

rudolftheone 46 minutes ago | parent

Awesome! I love looking through old tech magazines and remembering how bright and promising the future looked in their pages!

karol 33 minutes ago | parent

The tone of those articles suggests the authors anticipated a very different economic environment, probably in the spirit of "as technical progress marches on, so does the quality of life". So the machines were foretold to organize parties and choose suitable wines.

In reality these 2 went in opposite directions, clearly the speed of tech progress was underestimated and the kind of future economy was wrongly predicted. But hey, these were leisure magazines, who'd take them seriously.

glimshe 29 minutes ago | parent

Quality of life worldwide has had the biggest increase in the history of humanity over the past 50 years due hundreds of millions, if not more, being lifted out of poverty. Its impossible to separate the role of technology from it.

sgt 10 minutes ago | parent

Love reading old computer magazines. In particular MacWorld, MacUser, Linux Journal, etc.

Frieren 8 minutes ago | parent

The future used to be awesome because it was though by average people, scientists, writers, etc. even advertisers were catering for consumers and their hopes and dreams.

Once the future is being designed by CEOs of corporations the value-extracting machine creates the worst of possible futures.

We need to redistribute wealth back to the working class and let us decide a better future. With the current concentration of money and power in a few hands our only future is to repeat the middle ages.