“Are you ready for science fiction? Well. I have this robot in the story…and he can talk! He can do basic calculations, AND speak the answers!!! ISN’T THAT WILD???”
producer pulls out iPhone
“Hey Siri, whats 4,684,854,853 divided by 7?”
“669,264,979”
And this joke exchange would have been more impressive if everyone hadn’t known that I’m on a cell phone, with a built in calculator.
Seriously, any cell phone today would have been called INSANE in the 1970s.
I mean think about it. In the late 1960s Maxwell Smart talked into a shoe phone. And it was considered crazy high tech. So much so that as a kid in the late 80s, it was STILL crazy high tech to just have a phone. Just out and about.
I’m now old enough to know that technically cell phones existed at that time. But the fact that I was unaware they existed should serve as a stark contrast between cell phones in 1988 vs 2025. Ask any 5 year old today what a cell phone is, and they’ll know. Now have them watch the original Get Smart series, and watch them get confused by why he has a cell phone inside his shoe. I would bet they wouldn’t be as excited as I was when I saw how cool the shoe phone was. Today, it would be weird.
To be fair though, the opening sequence with the doors, IS still cool as fuck.
The funnier thing would be having them react to hearing ChatGPT answer a question verbally asked "How many R’s are in the word strawberry? and hearing ChatGPT answer back verbally “Four.”
Like, a computer program could convert sounds to written text, understand it was a question that needed a number for the answer, and then completely beef it on the answer.
See the voice-activated 'joymaker' from The Age of The Pussyfoot , by Frederik Pohl, 1966: http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1026
If you can imagine a combination of telephone, credit card, alarm clock, pocket bar, reference library, and full-time secretary, you will have sketched some of the functions provided by your joymaker.
… Pocket bar? Googling it gets me nowhere. Surely he didn’t mean a bar of alcoholic drinks? Maybe a pocket pry bar?
You were right the first time. It dispenses meds, stimulants, intoxicants and so on from reservoirs within it.
It says a lot about the culture of the 60s and/or Pohl himself, that the first conceivable use for “instant ordering” would be for drugs.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Yeah, science fiction has a very small set of fictional science goals.
That’s basically the whole wish-list of technology/magic science fiction. Or fiction in general.
And from a technology standpoint we are incredibly far along on most of these points. (Except the last one, but that’s a systemic issue, not a technology one.)