4 stars
Humans have always had a real drive to imagine what life would be like for people in the future - the kinds of technologies we'd have at our fingertips, perhaps flying cars, robot butlers, hyperloop highspeed transport, and so forth. So why don't we actually have any of that tech available to us, the clamoring public, yet? Technology has improved leaps and bounds over the intervening decades, but as is clearly outlined in this book, tech may look like it moves quickly but there are many tiny baby steps that have to be taken in the meantime and there are a lot more setbacks than we might not otherwise have been aware. Many of the technologies that were imagined years ago are here in some basic form or another but the majority are not technically feasible yet as consumer products. This book aims to provide the answers to the question "why not?"

I do appreciate that "The Long History of the Future" as a clever title is two-fold: firstly, that the history of technology itself is long and winding and ever-continuing; secondly, the book goes into quite a bit of lengthy detail within each of the chapters dedicated to a particular tech or gadgets that we thought we'd possess by now. I also really enjoyed all the vignettes and footnotes that the author includes in each of the various sections, my favourites of which are the chapters on Cyborgs & Brain-Computer Interfaces, and Smart Cities. For example, I had no idea about the history of streetlights in Toronto until I read this and now I have a cool bit of trivia to whip out at parties! In all honesty, as someone with a very basic science background, I found this a refreshingly comprehensible history of technology, jampacked with all kinds of tech info and history but laid out in a way that's quite easy to follow for us scientific non-specialists.

Thanks to NetGalley, author Nicole Kobie, and Bloomsbury Sigma (USA) for providing me with a free digital advance readers copy of this book to read and review. All opinions are my own and are provided voluntarily.

An interesting tour through the longer-than-you-might-expect history behind some eternally "just around the corner" tech (e.g. AI, self-driving cars, <i>flying</i> cars, bionics/cyborgs, etc. - all it's missing is cold fusion). Just don't read it if you don't like having cold water thrown on your dreams of a high-tech future!

I enjoyed this book. Nicole Kobie paints a portrait of technology that is not quite ready for prime time. With a combination of her own journey, lucid explanations, conversational tone, and some humour, Kobie gives the history of these developments and explains why they have not progressed as much as predicted. Kobie comes across as neither a Luddite nor an alarmist, but as someone genuinely interested in technology. This book is well worth reading. Thank you to Netgalley and Bloomsbury USA for the advance reader copy.

Has it always seemed like the future is right around the corner or are we, just now, on the precipice of something amazing? Long-time tech writer Nicole Kobie has seen a lot of “the next big thing” over the years. Her book The Long History of the Future looks at the promises of technology and the missteps, almost-theres, and and failures along the way.

Recently, I read/reviewed a similar book on AI and the metaverse (Our Next Reality); this covers similar ground but from a more journalistic and more skeptical perspective. Kobie takes us not just through AI and the metaverse but through driverless cars, robots, cyborgs and more. The bad news? You probably aren’t going to have a robot butler to serve your every whim any time soon. The good news? That AI-driven robot may not be coming for your job (or your life) as fast as some doomsayers may think. What’s most fascinating in this book is just how long some of these technologies have been around (driverless car systems were being experimented with in the 1930s). Sometimes, ideas were waiting for technology to catch up, sometimes even when the tech arrived, society simply wasn’t ready.

Kobie’s book is a good reminder of the drawbacks of always looking forward, imagining that either unlimited prosperity or a dystopian hellscape awaits us. The truth is always somewhere in the middle. There are real benefits to cars that have some but not full self-driving capabilities and AI that is capable but stops short of artificial general intelligence. We may not all get flying cars but more electric vehicles for short flights could be a real benefit for hospitals and other public services. We are not becoming cyborgs, but implants and prosthetics can do real good for people dealing with a disability. Fully automated “smart cities” are probably a pipe dream, but the more we address transportation and civic concerns, the better our cities get. The downside of all of this, as Kobie shows through story after story, is so much waste — failed transportation systems (maglev anyone?), devices produced and sent to landfills (farewell Nintendo’s Virtual Boy), whole city plans abandoned, and decades of research with little result.

But still we soldier on, and get, if not all the way there, at least toward that better-than-nothing middle. It turns out that coping with that middle, making the most of it, and regulating against its misuse is truly the work of all of us. Kobie offers a more realistic version of the future, not a utopia but simply a long progression toward a better tomorrow.