The future doesn’t age very well. I’ll be more specific. Nothing is lost in translation when the future is predicted using words. Take George Orwell’s 1984. Although the year in the title is more than three decades old, the dystopian vision is still about to happen. It’s a future that, despite the sell-by date on its label, shivers with impending doom.

Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea is an even older narrative: it was published in 1870. And yet, 145 years later, Captain Nemo still roams the seas of the future on board his Nautilus.

Yet when it comes to film, the future expires the moment it is projected on the silver screen. The first series of Star Trek has tachyon beams, transporters, spaceships and cloaking devices. However, despite technologies that still haven’t been invented, Star Trek looks as uncomfortable in its futuristic costumes as Captain Kirk in his tight fitting tunic cinched-in at the waist with a bio monitor belt.

But perhaps the best film example is the second instalment of Back to the Future in which Doc Brown, Marty McFly and Jennifer Parker travel to the future, precisely to the year just started: 2015. Comparisons are unavoidable. And by comparing the film’s version of 2015 and the year we are living right now, we can see that even if the film got some things right – pocket communicators, instant access to knowledge, flat panel television sets, head-mounted displays, smartwatches, video chats and self-lacing shoes, which Nike will start selling this year – there is still plenty that it got wrong. Look out of the window and youwill not see any flying cars, hoverboards andair motorways.

However, don’t blame the film. It’s not that Back to the Future II failed to depict future technology accurately. It’s just that technology has over-delivered.

Just a quarter of a century ago, I didn’t watch any television because, well, we didn’t have one: they were still an exotic rarity, as were telephones and video recorders. Whenever my teachers wanted to speak to my parents, they would send a note with me. If I needed to know something, I would queue up on Wednesday afternoon at the local library and hope that nobody else was keen on borrowing the latest issue of The Children’s Digest. And if someone had to ask me what Facebook was – that would have been strange – I would have slapped him in the face with a book (cue the inevitable note from the teacher).

Fast forward to today and all the knowledge in the world can fit on a storage device the size of your fingernail. We can monitor our whereabouts, health and what our friends are up to through a smartwatch. We have gesture-based user interfaces, self-driving cars and an app for just about anything you can imagine.

So yes, we might have failed in coming up with an affordable flying car. But we have developed the kind of technology that makes flying cars look old.

techeditor@timesofmalta.com

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