The 1964 World's Fair had another GM exhibit. Colonization of the Moon. Underwater cities. None of that happened.
What could we have in a World's Fair now that looks ahead? Colonization of Mars? Mars sucks as real estate. There may be research bases there someday, but as a self-sufficient area, it would be tougher than Antarctica or a continental shelf. Robots may some day be a thing, but they still don't work well in unstructured environments.
Fast forward to 2020 and she is spending hours every day on video calls with her grandchildren.
We might have missed on some of our dreams from 1964, but not all of them. We’ll miss more in the future if we don’t articulate them.
I want a roboticized home that cleans itself, that is able to do autorepairs, rooms reconfiguration. I want an auto-laundry and an auto-kitchen. I want it smart enough to manage air flow, temperature and humidity efficiently. I want all that to be voice activated. Please make it offline to not depend on some cloud thingies.
I want a powerwall and solar panels, I want an automated herbs garden. I want things to be upgradable and fixable without destroying walls.
If you give me room on the exhibit, I'll throw in an automated greenhouse to produce a lot of the food and maybe an automated workshop that would be able to produce/repair small items.
That's doable, that's not here yet, but we have most of the tech.
The next frontier is not space, it is automation. I would go to a World's Fair that showed a future where we would have less work to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney%27s_Carousel_of_Pr...
It showed the progress of the kitchen over the years and ended with a push button kitchen like The Jetsons
I agree with you though. I want all of the things you listed. In particular, I want something that can dust (clean all the dust from my shelves, tables, books, etc..). I wonder if it could be done with small drones that can fly into the shelves with tiny dusters.
I want my walls and ceiling to be displays like from Total Recall for cheap (say under $500 per wall)
I want sound proofing between apartments, also cheap so there's no excuse for an apartment not to have it.
Even so, I'm in, if it comes with an option to not be voice activated. Nothing about modern computing is more frustrating than voice interfaces, except perhaps windows updates.
Solarpunk needs a lot of development though. One issue seems to be it too often coincides with someone's idea of a futuristic Utopia.
Hence it is conflict free, rather boring and doesn't do much to stir interest.
Mars has something of a CO2 atmosphere, and might have more accessible water. The soil may be more usable as well.
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard (...)
With a few more years of AI, I want software that can automate engineering - so, I can say “figure out a factorio layout that makes 1 rocket per minute”. Then “play factorio from scratch to liftoff”.
Translated into the real world, I want to a robot that can build a brick wall, and an AI that can design and manufacture the brick wall building robot. I think this is structurally the same problem as “play factorio” - the only difference being a few orders of magnitude of complexity.
Ultimately I want to be able to take a few minimal pieces of robotics and drones and stuff into the wilderness (or Mars) and say “build me a house like this with working solar panels and plumbing”, and it can gather resources, design and assemble intermediate machines (Eg sawmills) and bootstrap the manufacturing needed to arrange atoms in any specifically described way.
This is both a utopian and dystopian technology. At scale the same technology could be used to both clean up the great pacific garbage patch, and convert the Amazon rainforest into a massive industrial wasteland. I don’t think this is as far away from our current technology as we imagine it to be. (Decades not centuries)
"Ok, AlexaDev. I want you to build a SaaS with the following product requirements ..."
[after a half-hour chat]
"Alright Dave, the MVP is in your shopping cart at a price of $5,000. If you host on AWS then I will be your product development team and evolve your service based on usage statistics and customer feedback for an additional $2,000 monthly subscription fee."
(Of course things will be different, as source code will be proprietary walled garden stuff besides some OSS config scripts, there'll be no fixed-price, and AWS is abstracted away behind the AI services)
half-/s
I think the pace of change is such that we can't predict what will be with much certainty, but we can imagine and capture the public's imagination. That may help drive change toward what we want to see, and I think that in itself might be a good reason for a World's Fair - not to predict a future, but to collectively imagine the future we want so that we have a more clear cut vision to strive for.
Moon missions had been suspended until last year or so. If NASA had kept at it, I'm sure some level of colonization, at least rotating manned missions a la ISS would have happened by now.
A world without war, where laws were enforced equally on the mighty and the weak alike?
Well, to start with, the massive restructuring of industry and everyday life needed to mitigate or begin reversing the effects of climate change.
Also, the "science showcase" is a thing of the past, the BIE switched to "individual country showcase" a couple of years ago, which makes the whole thing a lot less appealing IMHO, but that's another issue.
It's overall a nationalistic country level flex at the expense of the local area. It's part of why only big countries host it, the side affects will only affect one city and you have other places to sustain the nationwide economy despite the hit.
That's not what a world's fair is. A modern world's fair would be essentially a bunch of companies showing off their latest inventions, in a highly coordinated and controlled way, for marketing purposes.
A better analogy would be something like E3, a video game convention which is struggling to find its purpose in a world where it's easier and more effective from a marketing standpoint to just release a video of your new game. I think it's no coincidence that world's fairs stopped being as important right around the time mass communication became ubiquitous.
But to refute more directly, the unplanned interactions with other visitors, being able to talk directly with makers who built the things you’re seeing, the viral sense of wonder; all are good reasons to have it in-person.
Better parties, though.
One futuristic thing that has stuck with me from the Millennium expo was a demonstration of structural/mechanical and electrochemical simulation of the human body with computers, for example the skeletal, muscular, and circulatory systems. Which of course can be augmented with models of various organs and micro-level models of cellular interaction and cell internals. The brilliant bit seemed to be the idea of using a finite element and/or modular decomposition, potentially at multiple levels of resolution and abstraction. It seemed like the sort of thing that could yield huge benefits in medicine, health/fitness, education, and video games/animation. ;-)
But
I am also very Cold War revival. We should be launching competitive science wars with each other, not unlike the Olympics. Set objectives, set time periods, when the time and objective expire all knowledge gained is pooled and published for the world, for free. National or International propaganda campaigns to recruit for teams. Spies, espionage, moles. Not just a science fair, but something a bit more dirty and fun.
Complete with threats of total annihilation?
> We should be launching competitive science wars with each other
Don't we have this now with competitive global capitalism? I guess it's not the nationstate so much now as the multinational corporation, though, that are the entities competing.
I can kind of understand your wish for a Cold War revival - we certainly had more of a sense of national purpose during that period. But it was driven by fear of the other and I'm not sure that ultimately that's a good motivation.
You'd think that maybe something like a global pandemic would give us a national purpose that would have brought us together, but look what happened, just more fracturing: anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, even covid-deniers.
I do a lot of double/triple clicking to highlight text as I read online (fidgeting, but also helps keep track of where I am). On your site, triple clicking unintentionally hits the twitter share button, which opens a new, unwanted window. Bit annoying.
Medium does something similar, but they offset the button so you have to move cursor in between clicks to actually trigger the button.
Specific, common, digital tics. Another one is control-s after a single line changed. Something immensely satisfying about selecting that perfect block of text and making that “altered document” asterisk go away.
> After the six-month run, the Expo had attracted well over 70 million visitors. The Expo 2010 is also the most expensive fair in the history of World's Fair, with more than 45 billion US dollars invested from the Chinese Government
Apparently, the American pavilion was not among them:
Now that the US Pavilion has been open for several days, its reviews, to be generous, are mixed. Visitors, after a two-hour wait, enjoy the upbeat attitude of the student “ambassadors” who greet them in Mandarin — but few are impressed by the three films that constitute the US Pavilion’s content. (One reporter noted that the price for the three shorts, about $23 million, is more than the production costs of the Oscar-winning film, The Hurt Locker.) The “American people’s” sole walk-on are brief vignettes that flicker on the screen and then are gone. Chinese visitors are reported to have remarked, especially after the hype and long wait, “We expected more from America.” Visitors exit the theater into a large hall dedicated to fawning over the 60-odd corporate sponsors whose names and brands are the only aspects of American life and culture to which the pavilion accords recognition.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/an-epic-failure-of-planni_b_5...
The architecture was pretty good in a few instances, but the cultural elements were about as good as I'd expect from a board of tourism.
I don't know enough about Expo2020 to agree or disagree, but I assumed the author's assessment above was in reference to the series of which the Dubai exhibition is a part.
I'm heading out there next month and will hopefully find something inspiring to help shape our efforts.
In other words, the clearest route to getting people excited about a World Fair involves sacrificing the reason you'd want people excited about a World Fair.
If you haven’t been, there are thousands of art projects at a grand scale, things that take up blocks of space a piece, and they are built by artists from around the world, giving everyone a global perspective of what is possible.
I also love the idea of showcasing what is possible for a society. There is a true sense of community, immediacy, and collaboration where everyone there is an active participant.
There are dozens of smaller events with similar properties, likely one nearby.
I kind of feel that these were the exact goals of the original world fairs too.
At any rate, World's Fairs are still happening, just not in the US... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_fair
...wait eagerly for Jessica Watkins to take the first step on Mars
There's an unfortunate name collision, I didn't know who Jessica Watkins was so Googled her, and the top results are for a Jessica Watkins who participated in the attack on the USA Capitol... I spent a moment pondering what her link to Mars was.. but farther down the results list is NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins.
It's a shame that the astronaut has her search results cluttered by the insurrectionist. Back when I was doing online dating, I shared a name (and similar age and nearby city) with the brother of a recently convicted serial killer, searching for my name brought up articles about him... I warned potential dates that if they looked me up online, I'm not that guy (which, I suppose, is exactly what the brother of a serial killer would say).
You lost me at “Hyperloop”. How is that a vision of the future when we know for a fact that the idea doesn’t make practical sense?
Every school and career choice I've made was based on some inspirational spark that hit me there.
I'm a little younger, and Tomorrowland at Disney was that for me.
Most Fairs struggle with this because the organizing body has no control over the content of most of the Pavilions. By privately organizing and operating it, the new World's Fair will function more like Epcot where we craft the experience pulling in corporations, countries, and ngo's as we see fit.
Lastly, the Fairgrounds are generally split up into themes with each of the companies/countries hosting their own Pavilion. The map from the 1964 New York World's Fair is a pretty good example of this: http://www.nywf64.com/maps01.shtml
For example, over a hundred years later, Chicago is still making money from the economic, social, and infrastructure benefits of its fairs.
Because of the way the economy works, this can be said of absolutely any expenditure anywhere anytime for any reason. If even one project laborer buys a cup of coffee on the job, at least $4 of value then gets sent out into circulation in a way that has been plausibly colored by the construction of the Big Money Pit of 1849.
At some point in the last twenty years or so, it became less about companies demoing next year’s products and more about really grand visions of the future (of course, where the company in question was the centerpiece of this grand vision). I believe it was Panasonic in 2020 who had a huge booth showing off a flying car concept, accompanied by a wall-to-wall LED display showing a video of families in the future taking it to work/school/etc.
Once I realized that CES is less of a marketing event and more of a modern World’s Fair, I really started to enjoy it a lot more. Even with the corporatism. Can’t wait to (hopefully) go again next year!
But Burning Man to me seems like a bit of a World's Fair. I met some people who brought a massive insect-inspired art car from Australia..
You can see more innovation in an afternoon spent on blogs than you would ever see in a 6-month long, static display of corporate bullshit.
They had an exhibit called “MoneyZone” which included a tunnel made out of £1 million in crisp fifties.
Good times.
Is there supporting evidence of these assertions? There are some interesting ideas in here, but I’m not seeing anything to back them up.
Have calls to action/RFPs, and have a conference of some sort - the goal is to have one cohesive demo per track. Distribute this thinking across the world, like Pioneer.app does instead of consolidating it in one country or geographical area.
And live cast it to everyone.
Both takes are missing the mark about what a World Fair is about. Here's why.
The 3 decades after 1945 were a time when economies of formerly allied nations were booming. In France, these years äre known as the "Trente Glorieuses". Many more countries had their own "economic miracle" during this time. Even West-Germany and Austria had their own "Wirtschaftwunder" as their economies bounced back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_econ...
Many parts of the world were still formal colonies to Western nations, or their economies hadn't fully modernized yet to a point where a sizable middle-class has access to democratized /commoditized comforts of a Western lifestyle e.g. aviation, healthcare, education, even sanitation, access to media and so on.
Not to mention the spectre of the Cold War that loomed over these decades.
Against this historic backdrop, the fair is notable because it was a showcase of mid-20th century American culture and technology. That shouldn't really come as a surprise since it was firmly organized within the sphere of influence of America's hegemony.
Such were the times in 1965. And they are incomparable to 2021. The organization of a World Fair in 1965 happened in a vastly different context, with vastly different incentives, interests and motives then it does in 2021.
The author misses that completely and marches blindly onward hence:
> Today, World's Fairs have been rebranded as "International Expositions" that occur every 5 years, and are a hollow shell of their former glory. They no longer showcase the promise of the future or celebrate achievement. Instead, they serve as national branding exercises, infrastructure development projects masquerading as innovation, architecture competitions, and an opportunity to promote tourism. If anything, they're the perfect representation of our current vision for the future: unfocused and uninspiring.
> But it doesn't have to be this way; we can't afford for it to be this way.
> The world has changed dramatically since 1984. We now live in the most incredible time in human history. The internet has brought billions of people together and tech companies have given us supercomputers in our pockets. We're starting to build hyperloops and supersonic jets. We're on the cusp of incredible breakthroughs in genetics, biology, medicine, food science, energy, transportation, manufacturing, computing, and robotics. We're finally going back to the moon and then on to Mars. We've once again seen the power of a collective vision with the record-breaking development of the COVID-19 vaccine.
The World's Fair is a reflection of the World in 2021 and the future. With the complexity of representing 7.8 billion people, an array of sovereign nations which didn't exist in 1965. It's an event which competes with against the complexity of a exploding plethora of modern mass media, new stakeholders, emerging markets, and so on fueled by globalisation, digitization and automatisation.
A Fair isn't just an marketing event, it's a global forum that aims beyond other events that present themselves as global fora or gatherings. It's an opportunity for nations and peoples to present a showcase to the world. It gives them the chance to put a message out. In that regard, the World Fair is akin to that other global event where the world gathers: The Olympics.
The organization of the World Fair is no longer rooted in the political or economical global hegemony of a handful of "first-world" (for lack a better term) nations showing off their industrial might and international prowess, such as it was during the latter half of the 20th century.
The Fair is now also home to many new nations and upcoming economies or regional powers who are making their entrance to the World's stage, and to whom the importance isn't plain "technological innovation" but above all showing themselves to the world, what they have to offer to the world, what their aspirations are, what they hope for the futre, and taking part in the global forum.
In that regard, the vision for World Fair extends far beyond technology per the offical website:
https://www.bie-paris.org/site/en/what-is-an-expo
For sure, there's going to the Moon or Mars, and there are hyperloops and driverless cars, or there's even developing a COVID vaccine. These are wonderful developments. But are they really the developments that need to be put front and center at World's Fair at the expense of everything else? Are these the only developments that should matter to 7.8 billion people in 2021?
The second part from this article seems to voice a want for the World's Fair to limit itself to showcasing technology, engineering and media. To me, it sounds like not much more then a want for being able to indulge in advertising when visiting the Fair. And that comes across as, well, rather tone deaf.
A World Fair isn't about merely basking in the marvels of technology or innovation. It's about the humans and humanity that are represented, visit and meet at a Fair.
We live in an era of constant fascinating biological and cosmological discoveries. In the past 3 years we have entered the era of gene therapy healthcare with several genetic treatments recieving approval by he FDA. We are on the cusp of break even if not effective fusion energy.
I cannot deny that the financialization of everything has diminished the moral imperative of some of these efforts but to act as if no one is attacking big problems is silly.
I am 100% confident I would not be hirable by NASA, confident enough in that assertion to shut down without trying. I think you may have some bias from your media bubble coloring your perception if you truly believe what you wrote is true.