Science Fiction and the Banking System

I've been involved in the banking and investing systems of our country a lot over the last few weeks.  It occurred to me that several science fiction writers, those who bothered to have an economic system in their futures, envisioned systems quite like what we have today, but none of them went as far as reality has gone.

Many stories contained credit systems whereby ordinary folks carried only a card, which they used to pay for everything, from a pack of gum to an airplane ticket, to a hover-car, to a home.  Several predicted a future where everyone got a basic living from the government, and could earn more by doing jobs only humans could do - creative tasks, etc.  (Tea-partiers, take note!)  Of course, that supposed that all non-creative tasks would be done by machines.  The plots usually revolved around individuals who were not in the system, for some reason or another, and couldn't get food or shelter.

These people were uniformly capable and ingenious, and managed to bring the economic system down, while living in the cracks - thereby causing worldwide society to collapse.  They usually wound up in positions of power in the new order.  Humanity was naturally better off as a result, too.

The reality is that we have banking and investing systems today which allow us to do everything via the internet.  In the stories, terminals were placed in businesses, street corners, etc. and allowed the citizens to transact their business or purchase goods there.  No one thought we could do everything from the computer in our home, or on the street or other public place.  Wi-Fi was not a concept in most of these stories.

If we take this to the extreme, we have Asimov's universe of the "Pebble in the Sky" group of stories.  In them, he envisioned a future where habitable planets were so plentiful that people could each inhabit one of their own; and became so isolated, communicating via his version of video chat, that they became unable to be together at all; remaining isolated from childhood until death.  Note that he failed to describe how new children came about!

I'm waiting for machines to take over all the mundane business of everyday living, so that I can sit back and enjoy the fruits of their labors.

Dick Tracy and the Smart Cell Phone

Many years ago, the 1930's I think, (maybe the '20's, even) there began a comic strip called Dick Tracy.  It was characterized by weird looking villains, a jut-jawed cop, wildly colored cars - like the ones on the street today, and a contraption Dick Tracy and the rest of the cops used for communication, the wrist radio.  It was a watch type contraption with a band which they talked into like a walkie-talkie, or cell phone.

Note that radios at that time used tubes, not even transistors, and two-way radios weighed in the tens of pounds at their lightest.  Chester Gould, the author, anticipated lightweight circuitry and private use of the electromagnetic spectrum not 20 years after the first public radio stations went on the air - my dad had one of those early radios - it was about four feet tall and weighed 55 pounds!

Not content with radios, in the 60's, Gould created the wrist TV, a two-way television for the wrist.  It actually operated pretty much the same as our current smart phones, only it was smaller.  I'll guess the next generations of smart phones will be equally small - I've seen one prototype that fits into a pair of glasses.  (Anyone who builds one can buy the idea from me cheap!  See my previous blog.)

Sad to say, Gould died before the cell phone explosion, so he never saw his brainchild become reality.  I read somewhere that the wrist radio was intended to be a joke and he never expected it to come true.  What do we know about the future, anyway?
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Next time I will discuss some of the things we take for granted in our daily lives, that the writers of the fifties, and before, completely missed.