Tomorrow's world - but where is it?

Predicting the future is tough. This short 1958 film, Magic Highway, shows how the Disney studios imagined transport would develop in future. More than fifty years on we can see how short of the mark they were. A few predictions had it right. Modern cars do have more electronic safety devices on their dashboards and some use TV cameras for reversing.

But it was the bigger picture that the Disney people failed to understand. Some of this could have been predicted. Had they worked out that greater wealth would have meant more cars, they might have suggested that motorway speeds would have been unable to increase because of congestion. Neither did they factor in safety considerations and energy-saving needs that would influence traffic legislation and traffic speeds.

Some predictions, that cars would run automatically with people doing other things as they motored, may yet happen. But where the forecasters really let themselves down was in understanding social trends. In the film when the car gets to the city, father heads off to his office and mother goes shopping with their son. This was still a time when households had one breadwinner, usually the man. It was a time of married couples and nuclear families, not the diverse relationships we have today.

The most mistaken assumption of all, however, was that technology would give people more leisure time. The futurists did not factor in the need for ever greater productivity in capitalism's duty to compete.

It's clear also that environmental factors do not figure much either. The animators did not envisage that environmental concerns would inhibit road building. Indeed they saw the highway as a beautiful construction in its own right, enhancing, rather than despoiling the countryside.

More than anything, however, the film shows the extent to which Americans had fallen in love with the car. In some respects that has not changed. The love affair continues. But the obsession with speed has been contained. Apparently it did not occur to anyone that people might not need to go to the office or the shops.

Own your own space station

I wonder if there will come a time when some people engage very little with each other outside their family homes and local communities. Some, it seems, already value their virtual worlds as much as the world outside their homes.

Erik Novak, who plays a MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) called Planet Calypso, recently spent $330,000 on a virtual space station called Crystal Palace at an online auction. Not, only that, he regards it as a good deal and who is to say that he's mistaken? Virtual worlds attracted $1bn of investment in thew 12 months to October 2007 although most of this was business purchases.

"This is a stunning investment opportunity and I have complete faith I will recover what I spent relatively quickly," said Novak, whose avatar uses the name of Buzz Erik Lightyear. It's good to see that Disney still has some influence on tomorrow's
world.

Elephant in the room

But elsewhere Disney has a patchy record. In this clip outlining the progress, or lack of it, to Disney's House of Tomorrow, the most worrying trend on display is the obesity of the people looking around. Talk about the elephant in the room!