Spaceships, Flying Cars, and HAL

2029 Is Just Around the Corner

According to Tim Burton, we have three years left to build a space station crewed by genetically engineered chimpanzees.

In his 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes, the year is 2029. Astronauts aboard the Oberon, a sophisticated space research station, run deep-space missions with the casual confidence of a modern airline. The spacecraft are sleek. The infrastructure is vast. The chimps are flying the pods.

Unless NASA has been keeping some spectacular secrets, we’re going to miss that deadline.

I saw that film in a theater. I saw nearly every film in this essay in a theater, because if it was science fiction, that's where I went. Then I bought the VHS tape. Then, eventually, I threw the VHS tape away. Today almost all of them live in my iTunes library, a shelf of the future that no longer takes up any shelf at all.

Not one of those films predicted where I'd end up keeping it.

That's the joke running underneath a century of science fiction. Eventually, the distant future it imagined becomes the present we're actually living in, and the results range from hilarious to embarrassing to genuinely prophetic. We are now living past the expiration dates on a hundred years of Hollywood predictions.

Hollywood got plenty wrong. That part is easy. The harder question is why it got certain things spectacularly wrong while being uncannily right about others. Because science fiction, it turns out, is a precise record of what we once believed progress was supposed to look like¹.

2001: A Space Odyssey. We Got HAL. We Didn't Get the Space Station.

When Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, America was racing the Soviet Union to the Moon. Space exploration was not merely a technological ambition. It was a cultural obsession.

So Kubrick drew the obvious line forward. By 2001, humanity would have enormous rotating space stations, Pan Am flights into orbit, permanent lunar bases, and a crewed spacecraft on its way to Jupiter.

He also imagined HAL 9000, a computer capable of conversation, reasoning, manipulation, and, ultimately, murder.

We missed the space infrastructure by a considerable margin.

But HAL? I'm writing this article with the assistance of a machine that can converse², reason through problems, and discuss the philosophical implications of its own existence.

It hasn't tried to kill me. Yet.

Kubrick got one more thing right, and almost nobody noticed until the lawyers did. On the way to Jupiter, his astronauts eat breakfast while watching the news on thin, flat tablets. In 2011, when Apple sued Samsung for copying the iPad, Samsung's lawyers pointed to that scene as prior art. Kubrick imagined the device four decades early. What he couldn't imagine was the rest of us holding it on the couch, going nowhere.

He overestimated how fast we would move our bodies and underestimated how fast we would teach machines to think.³ In 1968, progress was measured in distance. How far could we travel? What new worlds could we reach? Today, progress is measured in intelligence. What can a machine understand? What can it create? What will it decide on our behalf?

We didn't build Kubrick's future. We built a different one.

Back to the Future Part II. Where's My Hoverboard?

In 1989, Back to the Future Part II took Marty McFly forward to October 21, 2015. The future was a wonderfully ridiculous place filled with flying cars, hoverboards, self-lacing sneakers, and a holographic shark advertising Jaws 19.

When October 21, 2015 actually arrived, the internet celebrated like it was the Super Bowl. Everyone wanted to know where their hoverboard was.

But the film deserves more credit than the jokes give it.

Video calls? Daily life. Biometric payments? Your thumb now unlocks your phone and pays for lunch. Wearable screens, voice-controlled homes, a television playing six channels at once? All here. Nike even shipped the self-lacing sneakers, which turned out to be a solution in search of a shoelace problem.

Now look at what's sitting around the McFly house in 2015. Fax machines. Several of them. When Marty's future self gets fired, the news arrives on paper, printing out in multiple rooms at once.

In 1989, the fax was the future. So the filmmakers filled 2015 with faxes.

Blade Runner. The Future Was 2019. Apparently.

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, released in 1982, presented one of cinema's most enduring visions of the future. Los Angeles, November 2019. A rain-soaked megacity of neon advertising, immense corporate power, flying police cars, artificial humans, and off-world colonies.

November 2019 came and went without a single replicant demanding an extension to its four-year lifespan.

The details have aged strangely. The skyline glows with logos for Pan Am, Atari, and Bell, companies that would collapse, break apart, or fade long before 2019. And when Deckard needs to call Rachael, he walks into a bar and uses a video payphone. The film could imagine artificial humans indistinguishable from the real thing. It couldn't imagine a phone in your pocket.

And yet Blade Runner understood something essential about the direction of society. Its future was dominated by corporations rather than governments. Technology had blurred the line between authentic and artificial. Cities were culturally hybrid, the environment was degraded, and the wealthy had sealed themselves off from the lives of ordinary people.

Most of all, the film asked a question that lands harder today than it did in 1982: What actually makes us human?

Scott explored it through manufactured beings who possessed memories, emotions, desires, and a ferocious instinct to survive. Today, we're asking versions of the same question about artificial intelligence. Can a machine be creative? Can it understand emotion? And if it eventually behaves in ways indistinguishable from us, what does that do to our definition of us?

Ridley Scott got the flying cars wrong.

He got the existential crisis right.

The Running Man and Minority Report. The Gadgets Were Never the Point.

Some science fiction barely cared about technology at all.

The Running Man, released in 1987 and set in 2017, puts Arnold Schwarzenegger on a television game show where contestants are hunted and killed for the entertainment of millions. We didn't get the televised death matches. We got reality television, algorithmically optimized outrage, livestreamed humiliation, and an attention economy that rewards escalation. The film's real prediction was that people would accept almost anything as entertainment, provided it was packaged properly. That one aged just fine.

Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, released in 2002 and set in 2054, imagined personalized advertising, biometric identification, gesture-controlled interfaces, ubiquitous surveillance, and a police department that arrests people for crimes they haven't committed yet. We're nearly three decades early, and most of it is already recognizable. Advertising follows us across every platform. Facial recognition picks individuals out of crowds. Algorithms score risk and recommend decisions. We never built the psychics, but anticipating human behavior from data has become a central ambition of governments and corporations alike.

The disturbing part of Minority Report was never the technology. It was the ethics. Who owns the information that describes us? Who gets to decide what our behavior means? And at what point does predicting a person's actions become a license to control them?

Spielberg set those questions in 2054. We started asking them decades early.

Technology changes. Human appetites don't.

Demolition Man. Welcome to the Sanitized Future.

Then there's Demolition Man, the gloriously absurd 1993 action film starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes. Most of the story takes place in 2032, in a society where violence has all but disappeared, language is heavily regulated, unhealthy behavior is discouraged, and Taco Bell has emerged victorious from the Franchise Wars. Outside the United States, Taco Bell was swapped for Pizza Hut in post-production. Even the future gets localized.

2032 is six years away.

The restaurant prediction remains unproven. The satire holds up beautifully. Its imagined future is one in which society has traded a considerable amount of personal freedom for safety, predictability, and comfort. Everything is clean, controlled, monitored, and designed to eliminate unpleasantness.

It's a future that has confused the absence of friction with the presence of happiness.⁴

For a film best remembered for three mysterious seashells in the bathroom, that's a surprisingly sophisticated idea.

Why Hollywood Keeps Getting the Future Wrong

Science fiction has consistently overestimated the speed at which we would transform the physical world⁵ and underestimated the speed at which we would transform the informational one.

We expected flying cars. We got smartphones.

We expected robot servants. We got software agents.

We expected colonies on Mars. We got virtual communities inhabited by billions of people.

We expected enormous machines that would change how we moved through the world. Instead, we built invisible systems that changed how the world moves around us.

This isn't because filmmakers lacked imagination. They imagined the future using the most compelling technologies and anxieties of their own moment. In the 1960s, the space race made interplanetary travel feel inevitable. In the 1980s, Japan's economic rise, corporate globalization, and rapid urbanization produced dense, neon-lit megacities. In the 1990s, the personal computer and early internet pushed the conversation toward virtual reality and networked existence. By the 2000s, surveillance, terrorism, and data collection had become the defining fears.

Each era projected its present forward. Each era filled the future with its own fax machines.

But progress rarely travels in straight lines. It takes unexpected turns, runs into economic and social resistance, and occasionally accelerates in areas nobody thought mattered.

The future doesn't arrive as a complete package. It arrives unevenly, with miraculous breakthroughs in one field sitting next to stubbornly primitive systems in another.

I can generate photorealistic film footage from a paragraph of text. That's roughly half of what I do for a living now. A delayed flight can still cost me an hour on hold with an airline.

We can sequence a genome in hours, yet still struggle to build affordable housing.

We can hold a conversation with artificial intelligence, yet we'd rather swipe through a dating app than start one on a bar stool.

Technological progress has a peculiar sense of priorities.

The Future We Couldn't Imagine

The most revealing thing about science fiction isn't what it got wrong. It's what it got right without understanding.

In 1966, Star Trek handed Captain Kirk a flip phone. Three decades later, the flip phone in your pocket looked almost exactly like it. Two years after Kirk, Kubrick put a tablet on a breakfast table. Science fiction had the hardware early.

But Kirk used his communicator for exactly one thing: calling the ship. Nobody on the Enterprise used it to check a map, pay for dinner, photograph their lunch, or argue with a stranger at two in the morning. What nobody anticipated was the sheer range of human life that would collapse into a small rectangle of glass.

Our relationships, entertainment, finances, navigation, photography, news, work, shopping, identity, and now our conversations with artificial intelligence all converge on a device we carry in our pockets.

It is one of the most consequential technologies in human history. Yet almost no classic science-fiction film imagined a future in which people would spend so much of their lives looking down at something they held in their hands.

Hollywood was looking up.⁶

At spaceships. At skyscrapers. At flying cars. At enormous screens and towering machines.

The revolution was happening at the scale of a palm.

And then came generative artificial intelligence.

For decades, science fiction imagined intelligent machines as bodies. Robots that walked, talked, cleaned our houses, fought our wars, or tried to exterminate us.

Instead, artificial intelligence arrived for most people as a text box.⁷

No chrome-plated body. No glowing red eyes. No mechanical footsteps echoing through a futuristic corridor.

Just a blinking cursor and an invitation to ask a question.

From that unremarkable interface came the ability to write software, generate images, compose music, analyze complex information, make films, and collaborate on ideas. One of the most profound transformations in human history entered our daily lives through something that looks like a search bar.

One filmmaker saw it coming. In Spike Jonze's Her, released in 2013, the AI is a voice in an earpiece, not a robot, and the film isn't really about technology at all. It's about loneliness. Its hero earns his living writing intimate letters on behalf of strangers who can't find the words themselves. Jonze gave him the job we would hand to machines within a decade.⁸ Her got it right because it was looking at people, not hardware.

We didn't get the future they imagined.

We got the future they couldn't.

The Difference Between What We Can Build and What We Want

The future also rarely resembles the movies for a reason that has little to do with engineering. Science fiction is very good at imagining what technology will make possible. It's far less reliable at predicting what people will actually want.

Those are two very different things.

Consider the flying car, the single most persistent symbol of a future that never arrived.

On October 15, 2026, while I was finishing this essay, Elon Musk rolled a new Tesla Roadster up a ramp at a SpaceX facility in Texas. It climbed, flipped in midair on jets of compressed air, and landed on its wheels. Nobody was behind the wheel, Musk explained, "to make sure we don't kill anyone." Then he posted the verdict: "Turns out the future does have flying cars." Production is slated for 2028, a date anyone who has followed Musk's timelines will treat with the usual respect.

A Smithsonian curator for vertical flight supplied the footnote: "We are literally talking about hopping."

Even if the hop becomes a flight, the flying car is a regulatory problem, an infrastructure problem, an energy problem, and an insurance problem long before it's an engineering one.

Mostly, though, it's a terrible idea. Do we actually want millions of privately piloted vehicles flying over our neighborhoods? The noise, the safety risks, the maintenance? Do we want the guy who nearly sideswiped us on the expressway this morning piloting something directly above our house?

Feasible doesn't mean desirable.

The same gap runs through a surprising number of futuristic promises.

Virtual reality has been about to transport us into entirely new worlds for decades, and the technology is now genuinely impressive. Most people still prefer watching movies on televisions, attending concerts in person, and meeting friends for dinner without strapping a computer to their faces.

Smart homes can automate lights, temperature, appliances, and security. But a home that anticipates our needs is very different from one that makes us troubleshoot its software before we can turn on the damn kitchen lights.

And autonomous systems now promise to plan our schedules, recommend our meals, select our entertainment, write our correspondence, and make more and more decisions on our behalf.

Some of that will be wonderful.

Some of it may leave us wondering where the experience of living actually went.

We have a peculiar relationship with convenience.

We spend billions developing technologies that eliminate effort from our lives, then spend billions more buying that effort back.⁹

We take elevators to offices, then pay for gym memberships to climb simulated stairs. We automate food preparation, then spend weekends learning to bake sourdough. We can stream virtually every recording ever made, yet people still pay for the ritual of sliding a record from its sleeve and lowering a needle onto vinyl.

We seek convenience when the effort feels like an obstacle. We seek participation when the effort is part of the reward. Technological futurism almost always misses that distinction. Convenience reduces the effort required to achieve an outcome. Fulfillment lives in the process.

Demolition Man understood this. Its frictionless future is spotless, safe, and dead inside.

A perfectly automated future might be extraordinarily efficient.

It might also be spectacularly boring.

Human beings are not consistent creatures. We want convenience and adventure. Predictability and surprise. Efficiency and romance. Safety and risk. We want technology to make our lives easier, but we also want our lives to feel like something more than a series of effortlessly completed transactions.

The future isn't a collection of technologies waiting to be invented. It's an ongoing negotiation between what technology makes possible and what human beings find meaningful.

What Are We Getting Wrong About 2050?

If the filmmakers of 1968, 1982, and 1989 were so wrong about our present, what are today's filmmakers getting wrong about the next 25 years?

Our contemporary science fiction is filled with artificial intelligence, climate catastrophe, autonomous machines, genetic engineering, virtual worlds, and humanity becoming something fundamentally different from what it is today. Some of it will prove uncannily accurate. Some of it will look as ridiculous in 2050 as a fax machine in Marty McFly's kitchen.

The most important changes will probably be the ones we're barely discussing. The next great revolution may not involve machines at all. It may be biological. It may be economic, with the relationship between labor, productivity, and human value changing beyond recognition.

Or it may be cultural.

What if the future is defined less by the technologies we adopt than by the technologies we choose to resist?

As artificial intelligence generates virtually unlimited content, human-made work acquires new value. As virtual experiences become more immersive, physical presence becomes more desirable. As automation eliminates effort, the chance to do something difficult, imperfect, or unpredictable becomes a form of luxury.

The handwritten letter in a world of instant communication. The live performance in a world of generated entertainment. The long journey in a world of virtual destinations. The handmade object in a world of automated production.

I've been calling this the Presence Economy¹⁰: the point at which being there, doing it yourself, and doing it with other people becomes the scarce thing. Not because the alternatives are technologically inferior, but because the experience of doing something matters as much as the result.

That would be a gloriously ironic outcome for a century that has spent so much energy trying to eliminate inconvenience.

The most advanced societies may not be the ones that automate everything. They may be the ones sophisticated enough to understand what shouldn't be automated.

Science fiction has traditionally depicted progress as the accumulation of extraordinary capabilities. Faster transportation. Smarter machines. Greater control over nature. The conquest of distance, time, and perhaps mortality itself.

But the defining question of the future may not be what we can do.

It may be what we choose to do.

That's a far more difficult prediction to make, because it requires understanding not merely the trajectory of technology but the contradictions of human nature. Human beings are very good at inventing things, and far less predictable when it comes to deciding how to live with them.

Some Assembly Required

In 1968, Stanley Kubrick imagined that by 2001, humans would be traveling routinely through space while conversing with intelligent computers.

In 2026, we converse with intelligent computers while almost all of us remain firmly planted on Earth.

We got the conversation.

We're still waiting for the spaceship.

Technology doesn't advance according to a screenplay. It doesn't arrive on schedule, and it rarely respects the expectations of the people who imagined it. Some breakthroughs happen decades early. Others take generations. And occasionally, an entire vision of progress falls out of favor because humanity discovers that it wants something else.

The future doesn't arrive finished. It shows up in pieces, and we decide how to put it together¹¹, guided as much by what we value as by what we invent.

Somewhere, right now, a screenwriter is imagining 2050 with the same confidence that Stanley Kubrick imagined 2001, Ridley Scott imagined 2019, and Tim Burton imagined 2029.

And somewhere in 2050, someone will watch that film and laugh at how spectacularly wrong we were.

They'll probably watch it on a phone.

Looking down.