Visions of the Future - Page 2

What is it with glass in the mid-century? Joe Eichler used as much of it as he could on his houses, and so did many futurists in their dreams. Another glass-enclosed house from the period, shown in an ad from glass manufacturer Corning Glass Works proclaims that "snow, rain and cold will be banished from tomorrow's lawns by great, glass-like domes covering entire houses and lots. You'll be able to grow flowers outdoors all year-round—and gather them in your air-conditioned yard!"

Ah, how we yearn today for the days of cheap and guiltless energy!
And why stop with glass-enclosed houses? Why not enclose an entire city in glass, and send it floating via rocket power both into space and back through time? Such an image is shown, not in a science publication but in Astounding Science Fiction magazine. This airborne city is surely more fantasy than an attempt at predicting the future.

But who knows? For many decades, people have seriously envisioned human colonies on other planets and moons, and on space stations—including NASA, which back in the 1970s produced compelling artwork showing a circular space station filled with rivers, hills, lakes, and 10,000 humans.

Much of the charm of retrofuturism comes from noting the assumptions behind these oft-naïve imaginings. Wouldn't it be great to have robots do all our work, freeing us up for endless leisure.

Walking and talking robots were all the rage during this period, in science fiction books by Isaac Asimov and others—unlike the non-humanoid robots that today work in every Amazon warehouse. The mid-20th century commercial artist and illustrator Boris Artzybasheff delved into robotics with a series of comic if unnerving images of factories manned by metallic creatures with human or animal features.

In 1966, Time magazine spoke to academics, including systems and nuclear war theorist Herman Kahn, about what the future might be like in the year 2000. Robotics and mechanization were portrayed as potentially leading to utopia.

"By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy," Time wrote. "With government benefits, even nonworking families will have, by one estimate, an annual income of $30-40,000 [$350,000 in today's dollars]."

"In automated industry," the magazine wrote, "not only manual workers, but also secretaries and most middle-level managers, will have been replaced by computers. The remaining executives will be responsible for major decisions and long-range policy. Thus, society will seem idle, by present standards. According to one estimate, only ten percent of the population will be working, and the rest will, in effect, have to be paid to be idle."

Kahn, though, feared potential harm from too much leisure. Time magazine went on: "How to use leisure meaningfully will be a major problem, and Herman Kahn foresaw a pleasure-oriented society full of 'wholesome degeneracy.'"

The same Time article, by the way, also predicted that robots might do our home cooking by 2000.

"An A.D. 2000 housewife may well make out her menu for the week, put the necessary food into the proper storage spaces, and feed her program to a small computer. The experts at Stanford Research Institute visualize mechanical arms getting out the preselected food, cooking and serving it," the magazine wrote.