Of all the betrayals of childhood, one that still stings came at the hands of the Weekly Reader. Every six weeks or so the teachers at my progressive little Quaker school would distribute copies of the Reader, and we would seize on it as an alternative to school work. The Reader was a short magazine printed in color on newsprint, and nearly every issue led with a story about an amazing technological development just about to burst forth.

Over the years, the Reader told of many wonders. Superconductors were going to change rail travel so that soon trains would be hovering above the ground, zooming along at hundreds of miles an hour. The ocean's kelp farms were on the verge of ending world hunger. In fact, the kelp industry would be so vital, the Reader reported, that underwater cities would spring up to house the workers, complete with hotels which lucky, landlubbing children might visit. Memory fails, but I'm pretty sure that in this innovation, as in many others, the United Nations was to play a sizable role. I suspect the prominence of the United Nations in the Reader's pages was part of what made it acceptable to my teachers. Then as now, Turtle Bay was revered by the Society of Friends on theological grounds, though the Reader sold the U.N. to its grade-school audience as yet another bit of whiz-bang futurism.

Few of the Reader's promises were delivered, of course, and modern futurism generally proved a flop. From Walt Disney's stillborn "Experimental

But at least I'm not alone in my disappointment. I discovered a soulmate reading Daniel Wilson's Where's My Jetpack? Wilson, who has a Ph.D. in robotics, inspects the wreckage of futurism, from cryogenic freezing to the space elevator to moon colonies, and explains how the dreams began and why they petered out. In nearly every case, the problem was not inadequate technology but lack of will.

As if that weren't dispiriting enough, my friend Phillip Longman tells me that progress is actually slowing down. Between 1910 and 1960, indoor plumbing, electricity, and automobiles became common. Jet airplanes were invented, and a space program was begun that in a few short years would put a man on the moon. Nuclear power, plastics, lasers, and computers--the stuff of science fiction in 1910--all had been developed by 1960.

But from 1960 to 2007, little changed. With the exception of the Internet, on which the jury is still out, most of the advances of the last 50 years are merely improvements on existing technology. Previous generations conquered disease, went into space, and split the atom. We came up with the iPhone.

Actually, it's worse than that: In some areas, the opposite of the futurists' predictions has come true. Where once they dreamed of advanced food pills, we're shopping for heirloom tomatoes at farmers' markets. The space program went from nonexistence to the moon in 11 years, but today the best we can do is orbit the earth the way the Gemini astronauts did in 1965. Should we ever decide to go back to the moon, I doubt we could do it in less than 11 years.