In the 90s I want to say it was a grunge techno-hacker future reminiscent of Max Hedroom. What was that called? Cyber-something.

I suppose Cyberpunk was roughly 1985 to 1995. At a stretch you could say 1980 to 2000, With Mondo 2000 slap in the middle of it hitting a peak in 1990.

Of course, what I'm really asking is what futurism looks like today. There's a very few ScciFi authors working on stories set 10-30 years out, mostly quite dystopian. Where's the aggressively optimistic futurism description of how wonderful life is going to be in 2035?

Star Trek?

The Star Trek timeline isn't happy for the first half of the 21st century.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/World_War_III
Quote: Rising from the ashes of the Eugenics Wars of the mid-1990s, the era of World War III was a period of global conflict on Earth that eventually escalated into a nuclear cataclysm and genocidal war over issues including genetic manipulation and Human genome enhancement. World War III itself ultimately lasted from 2026 through 2053, and resulted in the death of some 600 million Humans.

You get the odd postcard from future ecologically harmonious metropolises, and there are loads of human 2.0 and technological utopians knocking about, but there does seem to be a lack of an easily discernible futurist aesthetic in the early 21st century. I guess it stems from the intuitively implausibility of meliorism in our age. A lot of people find it hard to believe in the possibility of progress.

Next time you meet a Guardian reader, try being aggressively optimistic. They hate that.

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-future-probably/

On the pessimism which contemporary lives engender: 

"The Neuromancer trilogy takes place in a vision of 2030 as imagined from the vantage point of 1984 — Gibson explains in this essay collection [Distrust That Particular Flavour] that all science fiction is really about the time it was written — incorporating a reasonably prescient vision of “cyberspace,” a term with whose coinage the author is credited. By 2008, the closest we had got to that future was selling plastic tat to rave kids and getting meaty tourist hands shoved up my cyber-skirt. I routinely found myself wondering: What was the point? Why we were investing so much energy in this fictional future, this increasingly alien world of tech implants and floating cities and exciting angular haircuts, when it’s hard enough to live in the present on $7 an hour? The modern working world had made a joke of the gritty, glittering “cyber” future William Gibson once imagined, and now it was attempting to sell it back to us."


On the deeper level of anxiety which optimism leads to:

"At some point in 2012, we’re going to have to seriously consider the possibility that the world might not end any time soon — that human society might continue, and that we might have some part to play in that trajectory.

And isn’t that the most frightening idea of all?"

-that point about the emotional tranquillity of armageddon could be interestingly developed....

Dammit, Max, dammit! The "emotional tranquillity of armageddon" indeed!

One I saw recently and liked. " The job of SciFi is not to imagine the car. But rather to explore the implications of the traffic jam".

Meanwhile, we should all be able to think about the difference between the state of the world 30 years ago and now. And the potential difference between the world now and what it might be like in 30 years time. So that's 1982 vs 2012 vs 2042. 30 years is right on the cusp of where some development can change the game completely so a future 30 years out should be understandable even though not completely predictable. So for instance, fusion power will still be 30 years out, but GATACA will be a commodity. Just as back in 1982, fusion power was 30 years out but everything was clearly going digital[1] and about to be connected.

30 years is also a human lifespan type period. Even if you can't personally remember 30 years back, you kind of know what the world was like then. If you;re reading this, you have a reasonable chance of personally seeing the world 30 years in the future.

[1]The 80s, the decade that consumer electronics went mainstream.

But imagining the future and imagining the past are very different exercises with very different epistemic constraints, no? Even if there are certainties about the trajectory of technological development over the next 30 years, there does seem to be a lack of a pop-culture futurist aesthetic in the present day, does there not?

I think that it is largely to do with the unpredictability of the trajectory of SOCIAL technological development over the next 30 years. Of course, there will be lots of other factors in play here. For example, the visibility of the seeds of the future: even a future populated by Gataca style bio-cyborgs is inevitable, present day biotech is largely confined to the lab, outside the view of the layman. Thus the layman does not so readily imagine one, even if it is easily done, hence the lack of a clear biocyborg aesthetic in popular culture. Whereas, because everyone has seen smartphones do all the clever things they do, lots of people imagine them doing back flips and augmented reality and what not. Maybe there is also something about the increasing trend to invisible technology? 

Nevertheless, I maintain that a large part of it is due to the unpredictable political and social times we live in. After all, the emergence of biocyborgs is predicated on biotech researchers getting funding, which is looking a little unpredictable in present times - though the easiest thing to imagine is them not getting any, is it not?

The thing about 30 years back is to help thinking about what a 30 prediction forward might look like. I think professional futurists tend to overplay the differences in 30 years because there are large aspects of the world that simply haven't changed much in the previous 30 years. If 2012 is just 1982 with more electronic gadgets, perhaps 2042 is most likely to be just 2012 with more gadgets and not a post-apocalyptic nightmare, panopticon police state, heavy-weather waterworld or Brave New World/Startrek techno-utopia.

Bio-engineering seems to be one of those techs with unforeseen implications. They'll likely be more prosaic but more far-reaching. Think Monsanto monocultures, health insurance with pre-existing conditions, diesel from algae, child sex choice in the 3rd world rather than bio-cyborgs from California with perfect teeth and unfortunate haircuts.

[edited to add] Gah! I'm sorry. I've made the mistake of thinking the future is American. Again.

Well, we do have to remember that the last 30 years were some of the most peaceful in human history. Imagine what a time traveller from 1912 to 1942 would say about what he found. 'Post-apocalyptic nightmare' would be quite fitting.

Also, I just spent 3 weeks in suburban Houstan Texas. Trust me, panopticon society is upon us.

Finally, if the climate models are even remotely correct, we won't have waterworld by 2030 but there will certainly be more extreme weather, desertification, food/resource shortages and lots of climate refugees and all the political and social implications of that.

But yes, I think most of the implications of biotech which you list are pretty predictable from a present day perspective and agree that, despite them, the everyday life-world of the average westerner will remain qualitatively very similar but for what seem on the surface to be banal alterations (there is something interesting there about our constructing of the life-world so as to make it similar to what we know, hence avoiding 'future nausea').

Nevertheless Hollywood on the whole chooses NOT to explore those implications in any positive or even neutral way. Rather, it provides us - along with most of the rest of our cultural industries - with a deluge of apocalyptic imaginings.

I guess there are two questions here: what will be the world be like? Why are people, on the whole, only given a certain type of answer to that question in the present day? Perhaps it is POSSIBLE to answer the first question non-apocalyptically, but that does not negate the fact that, for the most part, it IS answered in that way.

As for the 'emotional tranquillity of armagedon', I watched this last night Seeking a Friend for the End of the World Official Trailer #1 - Steve Carell Movie (2012) HD

It fizzled out quite quickly, but it had lots of stuff to say about how death allows one to drop emotional baggage and the analogous process at the societal level...

The future isn't distributed evenly. The last 30 years have been more dramatic in developing countries compared to the West.