Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow: Living in Your Grandparents Future
Speakers
Event date
March 13, 2025

Jason Robinson takes a look back at the future we were promised, and the reasons it never arrived.

Leaving Verticon 2025, one of the world's biggest vertical aviation conferences, Jason was struck by a very startling fact: we have flying cars. They haven't hit wide commercial use yet (and maybe never will), but the technology that the FAA has designated as something between a helicopter and an airplane, is the keystone technology that past generations assumed meant that the future had officially arrived. The Jetsons taught us what the future should look like, but how come we don't recognize it when we're living in it?Taking stock of the current technology landscape and how it's evolved his own craft -- from the 3D printer, to AI, to personal robots and self-driving cars, Jason makes a point of reminding us that, while reality doesn't resemble sci-fi, we live in a world scarcely imaginable by previous generations. Our own inability to recognize that is a symptom of our tendency to discount the present, or at least to forget that the contemporary era was, at one point in the past, itself a work of fiction. Our clues about what the future might contain are so often made to seem hyperbolic, or at least to belong to the realm of the sci-fi writers. This can easily mask the wonders of the world we currently live in, and to prematurely close off our imaginations as to what the future can be. If we brought the world of The Jetsons to life with our flying cars and personal robots, then who's to say we can't push for even more? Waking ourselves up to the progress of the present should give us more confidence in pushing towards a better future.