Vaguely on topic

So, I was wasting my time on Youtube, and I came across the following clip from 1967, it aims to predict what home computers will be like in you guessed it, the year 2000 eight years ago:



which may be one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time.

Like most clips that aim to predict the future, it's sort of right in some ways, way off the mark in other ways, but what is most revealing about it, as in most of these attempts to predict the future is the absolute, unquestioned, rock-solid assumption that, while technology might advance, the underlying social relationships, as they exist at the time, will remain unchanged.
So, of course, Mom uses the home computer to go shopping but the bills get sent to Dad's computer to be paid.
I mean but of course. Surely we wouldn't expect a mere woman to pay her own bills.
And while you might say hey, that's not what the point of the piece was they didn't set out to predict social changes, but just technological ones, it's clear that the two are unavoidably connected.

The way in which our society changes effects the demands that we place on technology. The proliferation of cell phones the fact that pretty much everybody men, women, even kids, have them, carry them all the time, has to do with the fact that so much of our society is no longer "home base" oriented. We no longer can depend on a "Mom at Home" to be there to answer a phone, or to get a package, or to be there when the guy comes to check the gas or to get the kid at school when she's sick.
When I was a kid, kids would just go out and play. When our kids grew up, you had to make "play dates" because Moms work, and they had schedules and their kids had schedules and you had to arrange for the kids to get together. You couldn't just shove 'em out the door and let them hook up.
So everybody has to be linked up in a different way. So the technology responds to the way that our social relationships have changed.

To be able to effectively predict the technology, you have to include predictions about the way in which society is likely to change.

I say this, of course, because when you watch old futurist science fiction films from the fifties or sixties (never mind from the thirties) they're guilty of exactly the same thing. Technology is advanced while, socially, the worlds of those films are indistinguishable from the worlds of the times in which they're made.

Maybe that's unavoidable. I mean, could you imagine what a 1930's audience would make of a movie taking place in the year 2000 that actually showed them what we were really like? If the guy from "Just Imagine" had woken up and found himself "here" instead of in that world with the flying cars? He wouldn't have known what to make of us and those audiences wouldn't have known what to make of us.

It isn't interesting exercise to watch those movies and to realize how many of the things that they thought would change haven't changed" cars driving on roads are about the same, plumbing's the same, our government's not much different, the majority of the lines that divide most nations are unchanged and yet so much of the things that they imagine wouldn't change, *have changed, like the presumptions and expectations relating to sexual equality and racial equality.

It poses a challenge to anybody who takes on the task of framing a movie that takes place in the future. To make it accessible to modern audiences, you almost have to embody contemporary concerns you have to set it, in a sense, "in the present" in terms of the social relationships.
But to do so pretty much dooms the movie to become dated. I can watch something like "Things to Come" or "Forbidden Planet" and enjoy them, but even enjoying them, there is a level of absurdity to them (more to Things to Come than Forbidden Planet, because of its explicitly predictive nature) because they are so clearly rooted in the social relations of their times.
So it's the year twenty-one-whatever, and you have someone responding to a "household disentegrator beam" by saying, "Why, it's a housewife's dream" right, because, of course, in the year, twenty- one-whatever the men will go out exploring the cosmos and the women will stay home and take care of the kids and the kitchen and the occasional Id Monster.
And even if we attempt to predict where the social relationships may go, we're as likely to get it wrong as to get it right.

So what is the solution?
NMS