History of the anticipated future

Speaking of Kevin Kelly, he has a nice consideration of the differences between expected and unanticipated futures.  Kelly starts from an old Arthur C. Clarke book (which I fondly remember), then comes up with a fun chart:

What a fun classroom prompt, or party game, this should be!  I'd require specifying sources - jetpacks from Lost in Space, the Web from Chip Delany's uncompleted diptych, and so on.

Comments

[steve]

A course I'm teaching takes a folkloristics approach to digital culture, and discussed "the future as folklore" recently -- what we assume the future will be, and how that reflects our process of making the present similar to the way urban legends do. I'll have to bring this to their attention.