The future’s not what it used to be.
By all accounts, it should be here by now. The new millennium is old enough to vote. NASA has been in space for half a century. Virtually every house has a computer, and every pocket a smaller, cuter one.
And yet the promised future is incomplete. Where, as the refrain goes, is my flying car? Our jetpacks? Why does it even still rain on us? Is it not the future?
Well, yes and no. Some of our promised future gizmos have already arrived — even if they’re prohibitively expensive — and some are literally impossible. As novelist and future fabulist William Gibson has said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
Ultimately, the future is whatever you make it, Doc tells us in Back to the Future Part III. So here’s what we’ve made of some of the most popular promised technologies.
