xkcd.WTF!?

Explanation ➲

This comic shows a Cueball from 2021 who is once again discussing the future's technology with White Hat, this time in 1991 instead of 2010. White Hat is awed by the advances in technology, but is not expecting that the law combating laser attacks on passenger aircraft is not the most important thing mentioned.

"Laser attacks on airliners" sounds dramatic and important, and White Hat probably thinks that laser weapons have been developed and used to attack aircraft. Given that "a [US] federal law" has been passed to combat such attacks, White Hat may be envisioning a future where US citizens have access to laser guns, and some reckless individuals have been firing them at airplanes. (If it were some other group like terrorists or foreign militaries, a federal law would be unlikely to dissuade them.)

In reality, the "lasers" in question are low-powered laser pointers, which some people aim at passenger airliners as a (dangerous) prank. When the beam hits the airplane, it cannot damage the plane itself, much less shoot it from the sky;^{[citation needed]} it can, however, blind the pilot, which poses a threat to them and their passengers. A law (18 USC §39A) was thus passed in 2012 to criminalize this.

The robot fighting TV shows mentioned include BattleBots, Robot Wars and MegaBots, the earliest of which started in 1998. In them, machines armed with a variety of weapons fight in an arena. These are not technically robots or drones in the traditional sense of operating autonomously; for the most part, they are either remote controlled, or are piloted by humans and have only rudimentary on-board computer systems. They are certainly not controlled by AI. Also, while these shows have been popular enough to return to the air after periods of hiatus, they are not nearly as popular as sports involving humans.

In this comic, "cordless phone" may be meant literally, meaning any wireless phone without a cord. That's distinct from common parlance where "cordless phone" is distinct from a cellular phone, and is a wireless extension of a landline (typically of limited range, i.e. within a home and perhaps its immediate outside area). It seems likely that Cueball was using a term he believed a 1991 citizen would more easily relate to. Although cell phones had been in use for over a decade by 1991, they were most commonly depicted as a foible of a stereotypical "businessman", typically accompanied by displays of distraction, classism and self-importance. The term "cell phone" was at that time frequently used to refer to older analog cellular networks, with many mobile users proud of their new CDMA or GSM "digital" phones, as distinct from true "cellular" systems which have been deprecated since that time (this distinction has since disappeared from common usage). A more general term used in modern parlance, such as "mobile phone" or "wireless phone" may have been less recognizable to the average person in 1991. Describing a cell phone as "a cordless phone [where you can] send news stories to your friends" would be a reasonable way of describing a cell phone to a person of that era.

Additionally, cellular phones today do not have much longer range than cellular phones of 1991 (in fact most have less range, due to their lower transmission power and use of higher frequencies, as well as indirectly due to increasing crowding on most wireless frequencies). Cordless phones reliant on a land-line may exhibit somewhat longer range than they did in 1991, due to improvements in digital error correction and audio compression. Although the effective range of a single transmission at a given power and frequency would otherwise be reduced by interference from the proliferation of other wireless devices outside functional range and/or operating independently. Satellite phones also offer more terrestrial range than cellular or cordless landline phones, however their functional range has not greatly increased since 1991 either (being already sufficient to reach a satellite within line-of-sight above). A possible explanation for a perceived "longer range" is that cellular phone towers are much more omnipresent than in 1991, granting cellular devices much greater functional area even though their functional range from one tower is typically less than in 1991.

Sharing on social media has distorted what news stories people encounter. Instead of a curated selection of important^{[citation needed]} news fact-checked by a newspaper or tv/radio broadcast from a large corporate media conglomerate, we see only what people similar to us found interesting.

By most reasonable measures, the most important technologies on the list could be seen as the rise of mobile phones and the ability to easily share news stories (aside of course, from any perceived advent of high-powered laser weapons or televised robotic warfare). The first of these, mobile phone usage (and smartphones in particular) has led to a dramatic change in how people communicate, with a large amount of communication now remote, which was not as convenient in the 1990s (requiring, for example, setting up roaming at the carrier's office before taking the phone to another city) and impossible for most people a few decades prior: Low frequency wireless for personal communication was relatively uncommon in the early '90s and remains so today. Sharing of news stories person-to-person is partly blamed for the spread of fake news; misinformation has become more and more politically, legally and socially significant in the past few years. While wireless communication has certainly had enormous and wide-ranging effects, the factuality of the data communicated is arguably of greater importance than the means of its communication. The joke is that the impact of a technology on society isn't really about how exciting or dangerous it might look at first glance.

The title text horrifies '90s White Hat, as it not only refers to a pandemic serious enough to induce lockdowns, but mentions it casually, in reference to the existence of computer webcams. COVID-19 is already a hugely impactful deadly disease, but by mentioning it without details, it leaves White Hat to guess as to the details. Cueball doesn't specify whether there have been one or more pandemics (the plural use of 'lockdowns' could be taken to imply that there were more than one — of course there were, spread across both geography and time, but most people will have encountered one or more across the same pandemic, rather than multiple pandemics serious enough to each promote at least one lockdown), or how serious they were, how long-lasting or how many lives were lost to them. In consequence, White Hat could easily be assuming a dystopian future even worse than what really happened.