Exhibiting the Future: New Technology on Public Display

In the modern world, our understanding of the present is often shaped by science fiction fantasies about what is to come. Ironically, the most influential of these visions of the future are already decades old. We are already living in the times when they were supposed to have come true. In this article, the author analyses the origins and evolution of the imaginary future of artificial intelligence in the 1950s and 1960s. By showing that the future is what it used to be, he argues that it is time for us to invent new futures.