What colour is the future, actually? The question isn’t as silly as it might sound at first. It came up recently in a conversation with colleagues. Because if you ask an AI for a picture of the future these days, it usually comes out blue, or at least bluish.
That’s nothing new, of course. At some point, legions of designers toiling in the salt mines of stock imagery decided that the future is blue. Even rather old images of the future are somewhat blueish.
Film and television are no different. The Enterprise always had a bluish shimmer. Luke’s and Obi-Wan’s lightsabers were blue. Flickering, faintly bluish neon tubes were standard equipment for any sci-fi scene with a shred of self-respect.
The models learned all of this, and so the future they draw for us is, well, blue.
But that still doesn’t explain why the future is blue. So I asked ChatGPT: “The future has the colour we give it. It is not only what is coming towards us, but also what we make of it today.” Thanks for nothing, you stochastic know-it-all. Master of tautology. If the rooster crows on the dung heap, the weather will change, or it will stay as it is. Or do helpful answers require an account?
Volkswagen once said in a commercial: “Blue makes you happy.” Happy, however, is not exactly the first word that comes to mind when I look into the future right now. In places, I see black. Elsewhere, a deep brown. And all of it on a base of rather fetching grey. Sometimes blue even worries me. Especially when it’s just a thin coat with another colour showing through underneath.
But really, it’s obvious why the future is blue. The past is moving away from us, the future is coming towards us. So naturally the future has to look blue to us. The Doppler effect at work. Elementary.
