While reading The Verge’s excellent longform piece on the Alden StaRRcar (great work, Adi!), I was struck by something: the word “futuristic” has dual meaning. Such is the world we live in, where we live in the “future” but we don’t live in “the future”.

So what do I mean by this? It’s complicated. Let’s look at the literal meaning of the word “future”. It means, obviously, something that is to happen in a time ahead of ours, but still in a timeline of sorts — I say of sorts because it feels pretty reasonable to assume that time is not linear like we think of it in a traditional timeline fashion.

Taking it literally, we can never reach “the future”. It’s always ahead of us, always that one step in front that we can never catch up to because we can’t go any faster. But we do live in the future — but it’s not the future that was imagined by futurists in the mid 20th century, with flying cars, personal rapid transport (hat-tip to The Verge) and jetpacks. Instead, we’ve progressed pretty naturally from then — we still have cars which, for all intents and purposes, look the same as they did in 1960; we still work 9–5 office jobs; we still have a society dominated by people with power over the little people, instead of the de-centralised power that was dreamt of with wistful eyes. OK, yes, we have the internet, handheld computers, Facebook, Artificial Intelligence and “futuristic” things like that. But it’s not the future that was imagined by our fathers and their fathers.

When we think of the word “futuristic”, many of us probably think of flying box-shape cars, of personal jetpacks for short, quick trips, of monorail-like roads in the sky, because this is what has been ingrained into us and our ancestors for near on 200 years. But the world has moved on: if we take the word “futuristic” into a 21st century context (and we’re only 16 years into this century), we think of AI, of incredibly powerful neural networks, of self-driving cars, of virtual and augmented reality. While some of these were dreamt up by the fururists in the mid 20th century, a lot of it wasn’t, because the internet has had such an effect on our lives, bigger than anyone ever foresaw.

I’m fascinated by “the future”. It has always fascinated me, moreso than any singular man-made concept — and yes, I do believe “the future” is a man-made idea, because we always want to imagine how we’ll live in the future, always wondering why we never achieved the greatness that was catapulted on us in the 1960s.

Facebook is “futuristic”; 1.55 billion people connected by one network, all around the word. Self-driving cars are futuristic; robots driving cars better than humans can. AI, while still in its infancy, is futuristic; a computer can beat a human champion at Go, an incredibly hard, strategic game which stumps many “average” humans.

It’s simultaneously obvious and not obvious that how “the future” works is by inspiring us to create better solutions for problems we face. In effect, everything we do, good or bad, is in an attempt to make our lives better — it is that way by definition, whether we work in a dead-end office job or work at a tiny company developing a new neural network. We may ask ourselves “Ugh, why can’t we just live in the future and have robots to do this for us?”, but in effect, we do. We are in the future; just not the future that was imagined for us.