Keeping track of progress

Golden Age SF promised us a future that still eludes us.

Cheap and limitless power from fusion? Hah! True AIs, the kind that can be your Internet avatar or operate a multi-purpose home robot? Hah! Hah! Space colonization? Yeah, right. Space tourism, only if you're a millionaire. Commercial air travel is no faster than in the Sixties (and actually much slower end to end, when adjusted for TSA delays and ATC congestion). People have built flying cars, but they're (IMO) silly curiosities, poor choices as either a plane or a car.

Of course SF mostly missed computing and computers. We do have a wondrous Internet, smartphones, and personal computers that run rings around the mainframes on which I learned to program.

Still: even the Internet/smartphones/PCs sometimes disappoint. How much Internet capacity supports pointless drivel? (I'm thinking: 500 *million* people on Facebook. Umm, why? Plenty o' porn. 99% of what's on YouTube. And don't get me started on Twitter.) And how many smartphone apps are totally trivial?

Although I buy a new PC every few years, always vastly more powerful than the last, it's hardly because of progress. Invariably the old computer can still process words, calculate spreadsheets, browse the web, and email to my satisfaction. No, the reasons to buy a new computer are (a) because the old bloated, unreliable, nonsecure OS will no longer be supported, so that Microsoft can make me buy a new bloated, unreliable, nonsecure OS and (b) to run a new generation of security software against the @#$%! who write malware.

And yet there *is* progress. Witness: the Global Positioning System. For not much over a hundred bucks (although you can certainly spend more, for more features), you can own a GPS receiver to locate yourself precisely anywhere in the world and plan your route to most anywhere else. For sure, the Golden Age prognosticators entirely missed that possibility.

I got to thinking about what the GPS entails. It's a very impressive list:

On the space end:

• reliable, portable, very precise atomic clocks.
• reliable satellites to host the clocks and transmit the time.
• reliable satellite-launching capability to build and maintain the GPS satellite constellation.
• physics knowledge to understand and correct for the effects of special and general relativity. (A clock zipping by in free fall does not experience the passage of time in the same way as does a stationary person on Earth.)

And for the little device in your car:

• bright, hi-res, color displays.
• powerful microprocessors and clever software to calculate (from the arrival times of clock signals from any in-sight GPS satellites) -- in nothing flat -- your position and and your alternate routes.
• high-density memory to store millions of points of interest and untold amounts of road topography.
• clever user-interface design to make it all intuitive to use.

I'll throw in broadband Internet to the home to distribute the huge files of map updates and points of interest. And some brands of GPS receiver leverage a *useful* instance of social networking -- collecting real-world, time-of-day-sensitive experience on traffic conditions with which to fine-tune route planning.

(And yes, GPS on a smartphone *is* a practical, nontrivial app.)

Now there's a future I can get excited about -- in a good way.

If you're curious, here's the GPS receiver that I recently acquired and am so enamored of.