this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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I mean yeah but the point is that technological advancement was still a common occurance. Like, yeah a sensationalized article about self driving cars would blow some minds but to most i think it wouldn't really make any bigger waves then basic cars already were at the time. How can they be blown away by the concept of self driving when the vehicle itself is so new and interesting you know? AI is so abstract that even today most people don't understand it, 100 years ago it'd just be "another new thing" just like it is today.. We are actually less accustomed to ground shaking new inventions so I'd argue that 100 years ago a lot of our modern tech would be less exciting given the regularity in which things were changing then.
Social upheaval however is ALWAYS a huge deal, especially for the time. Bear in mind that Progressivism is a fairly new ideology in the States. For literally hundreds of years social change came at a snails pace and took serious, concerted effort. Nowadays we are on average much more open to change and accepting of diversity in all it's forms, but there's a reason everyone remembers the name Martin Luther King Jr., versus.... Ruth Bader Ginsburg I guess?
"XXI-century people carry in their pockets a machine that lets then see what's happenning on the other side of the planet as it happens, check the biggest encyclopedia there is without having the go to a library, talk live to people anywhere in the World and which can calculate the most complex mathematical problems in a fraction of a second".
It's not technological change that would be unimaginable but rather what ended up being done with it as, at least judging by SciFi films over the years, people tend to look at what they have and more or less lineraly project forward.
I mean, look what what Metropolis expected the future would be or even the 1970s film and TV-series idea of the kind of materials, design and human machine interfaces the future would have (it's kinda funny to look at the CRT-display-based "future" tech of 70s TV series).
Mind you, socially mankind doesn't seem to have evolved much in these 100 years, but in terms of Tech and the possibilities openned by it, it has.
It's a pattern that emerges over and over again. Technology is reasonably easy to predict (we're still using 1920s physics after all) but the way people will react to and interact with technology is completely impossible to see coming. Like, our guesses are about as good as random chance; that's why nobody saw PCs and smartphones coming and then turned around and poured a lot of money into 3D TVs and wearables.
I don't think it would be impossible to model somehow, but I've yet to see any convincing work in that direction.
It's an interesting one, the Tom Swift series from around 1910 has him in rocket ships using wireless photo telephones, electric rifles, and all sorts of sci-fi before world war one - it doesn't have many female characters, certainly no gay characters.
There is a suffragette character arguing for the right to vote in the 1910 novel, a right women wouldn't gain for another ten years in the USA - so a hundred years ago they were in an era where the start of social change is beginning but to what extent people would expect that to continue is hard to say.
Metropolis is an interesting example too because they did have more advanced AI than we currently have - the maschinenmench Maria; an often submissive, vulnerable, emotional, manipulative, motherly and generally very stereotypically (for the time) feminine character.
I think people in the 1920s expected in the next century technology to advance a hundred miles and social issues to change maybe an inch. I can think of sci-fi from that era with black characters but none with an expectation of civil rights for those black characters.