"Life X years in the future" has been a popular topic for books and other media for some time now.
The predictors are usually quite wrong. However, in a few cases, they seem to hit the nail right on the head (cell phones). What I'd like to do is reverse engineer the insights or mindset the people who made accurate predictions so that they could be emulated.
At the same time, I want to identify the prejudices or logic errors of the people who are wrong (anti-gravity belts) to help avoid making the same mistakes.
Does anyone have any insight as to why some predictions turn out right? Is it just luck, or is there some greater principle that can help us find out what's ahead?
I would not be surprised if the technological predictions come about from a solid understanding and application of physics. It makes sense that the Bell Labs director would have had a clear sight of what was possible in networking off into the realm of the internet. Similarly, somebody applying physics knowledge would not make the mistake of supposing gravity belts or suppressed lightning or man-made hurricanes. Meanwhile, some calculations about the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere by fuel combustion could tell you something concrete about how its chemistry will change.
Socially, it's less clear. It will probably work well to assume that culture is highly mutable, but human nature isn't.
I think a lot of what people get wrong in these predictions is the social element. Dad's telecommuting to work in the study and smoking Lucky Strikes while Mom - aproned and barefoot - cooks in the kitchen, that sort of thing.
What this misses - aside from the basic incorrectness itself - is that shifts in social perception and overall conscientiousness are major drivers of innovation. So, look at the intersection of what's feasible (with improvements in materials, design, miniaturization, understanding of the human body, etc) and what's wanted (convenience in daily life, improvement of self-image, etc) and you can get things like e-cigarettes, self-driving cars, boner pills, hair loss treatment, yadda yadda.
When I think about failed predictions, the flying car almost immediately comes to mind. You could see them regularly on 50s-60s pop-science and SF magazines covers.
Back then there was the idea that flying machines would soon become affordable on an individual level, and that most people would want to buy their own helicopter or small plane. Quite a few SF novels assumed it was a definite possibility, with the inevitable abandon of cities.
And it made a lot of sense at the time. I remember reading City by Clifford Simak as a kid, which is based on this premise, and thinking that it would soon come. The concept was very tempting.
Simak was a terrible predictor (if "prediction" is even what he was trying to do, vs just writing science fantasy), but his "pastoral scifi" is such a treat to read even today.
It's possible that he was predicting, and that those ideas were common at that time - Clarke's Childhood's End came out just one year after City (1953) and also features personal flying transport and lots of rural life (even though cities still exist).
Well you pointed out one biggie: the known laws of physics. Anti-gravity may be possible, but there is no theory to explain it, and so it’s hard to predict in a positive way. By contrast advances in materials science, miniaturization, novel sources of energy, are more fruitful.
It can also help to look at the state of current laboratory research. Look at where transistors were a ~100 years ago, and then now. Look at materials with great promise on the lab, but which may take similar timescales to become commonplace. It’s not the new discoveries, but the new means of bringing old discoveries to mass market which often defines tech.
Transistors weren't anywhere 100 years ago. The first practical, working transistor was in 1947. The theoretical foundation (quantum mechanics) wasn't particularly solid until the 1920s. So to get from where we were 100 years ago to where we are today, there were both changes in the known laws of physics, and also practical advances.
But then the question becomes 'literally anti-gravity', or more likely, 'personal flying devices'. Certainly not the same thing but, for the most part, the same effect.
When it comes to flying devices for the individual I think the thing we learned about all is just how little we want people raining down on us from the sky. Not to mention the difficulties of air traffic control with a few hundred million people in the air. So ask yourself if FlyingtechX can really solve that?
My vote is on quantum levitation. Wings, jetpacks and mini-helicopters are all already hitting the limitations of their physics and still far away from anything you would casually carry around.
Tangentially related: I read a book on Project Gutenberg titled A.D. 2000, clearly written by an army engineer from the 19th century. There's no plot to speak of, but it's about a guy who desires to travel into the future. The process for traveling in the future basically involved filling a room full of ozone and encasing one in a sort of coffin to place one in a persistent state of unaging sleep. Funnily, part of the process involved shoving asbestos rags in one's nose and mouth.
The style of dress was just minor differences from what one wore in the late 1800's (e.g. black knee-high stockings instead of white). Some long-distance travel involved zeppelins. Newspapers were nationalized, with print being transmitted through a massive array of typewriters connected by the telegraph system (i.e. pressing a key on a connected typewriter in, say, Boston would send a signal to automatically press a key on a typewriter in, say, Los Angeles).
Of course, global peace was secured, social welfare programs were widely expanded, environmentalism was strong. There was also a description of a massive underground vacuum-tube system of transportation which reminded me of hyperloop.
Ultimately, I wouldn't recommend the text for any sort of story; there are two very lengthy chapters devoted to describing the technical specs of a submarine. But it's an interesting curiosity.
> However, in a few cases, they seem to hit the nail right on the head
> Does anyone have any insight as to why some predictions turn out right? Is it just luck, or is there some greater principle that can help us find out what's ahead?
Individuals don't make a lot of forecasts/predictions, but society at a whole does. People who read into these forecasts get "informed" about the potential future, and perhaps even inspired (ie. a self full-filling prophecy; I'm not arguing that's the default though).
The default is as follows: if "one" (see above) makes a lot of forecasts, the likelihood one of them hits the nail on the head increases.
Luck is when a beginner with a crossbow hits the bullseye with one shot. Its just that if you shoot with a shotgun, you're gonna hit something, somewhere. But we're ignoring all the fails here, the misses. They're not relevant so they get ignored. History does essentially the same. The winners write history, and this is an example of that.
We should also not forget that a detailed, technical prediction by say a scientist is something different than say a suit who's trying to just sell their book with a bunch of rough predictions. Ie. not all forecasts/predictions are equal.
Of course, the near hits benefit from the plethora of predictions. “Theories” that essentially produce ranges of predictions across many/most possible outcomes contain no information. Not to discredit you. I look for similar trends, but it’s best to be humble about predictions.
Perhaps when multiple routes present themselves toward a new technology, its emergence becomes imminent. By this reasoning I would predict space travel becoming more routine (with multiple companies like Space X and Blue Origin working toward this goal), quantum computing is realized (lots of ideas on how to make it happen with lots of companies working on it), and self driving cars (lots of companies working on it, it may take a decade).
I recently had a very similar thought. I feel like you could use NLP to analyze the type of language associated with predictions that turned out to be correct vs those that were wrong.
"It has been proved that the temperature at the earth's surface is dependent upon conditions of the atmosphere, and that the universal tropical climate that produced the Coal Age was not due to the earth's internal heat. If we briefly examine the Coal Age we may be enlightened and assisted in our investigations. Enormous quantities of carbon dioxide mingled with the air of that period... Man has consumed the forests. Each year he mines, in the United States alone, two hundred million tons of coal. He has tapped the tanks of petroleum and the founts of gas, and is oxidizing it all - all that vast quantity of carbon - converting it into carbon dioxide...and now we find that the product has accumulated over the surface of the earth and is wielding an influence that is assimilating our climatic conditions more and more to those of the age of coal. ... I advance the theory, that the increased amounts of carbon dioxide that have gathered from all sources into our atmosphere produce, as I have described, the change in the weather and climate of recent years..." - G.W. Furey, M.D., Medical and Surgical Reporter, Volume 63, published in 1890
The initial public record is not that relevant. More importantly, during the 50s scientists had already begun to agree global warming is a serious, occurring issue.
Compared to other issues, however, like the depletion of the ozone layer later on, measures against climate change have had to deal with the oil industry the entire world is still relying on.
If you want an interesting dark view, try Blindsight by P. Watts. It's SF, but it's 10+ hard on Mohs scale of SF hardness, with 100 references to papers in the end. Contains a number of, mmm, interesting social vistas.
Since another replier gave a book for 100 years, here's one of those... http://ageofem.com/ Though I imagine 50 years has a small but non-zero probability in Prof Hanson's distribution, and he's pretty careful of not seeming overly certain: "Conditional on my key assumptions, I expect at least 30% of future situations to be usefully informed by my analysis. Unconditionally, I expect at least 10%."
I know it's a bit further out than 50 years, but I remember enjoying this book/series of essays that discusses what humanity could look like in 1,000,000 C.E.
Not quite the timescale you asked for, but The World in 2050 by Laurence C. Smith was an interesting read. At the time of writing he was predicting things about 40 years ahead.
I'd like to back this up and I am going to use a really bad example - the movie "Back to the Future". When they went from the present back to 1955, the world looked a little different. When the went back to 1885 in "Back to the Future 3", it was a different world. People were running around in dirt streets shooting each other.
Granted these dates are a little different. I would consider the 100 years more from 1900 to 1950 to 2000. In the earlier half century the got the widespread use to electricity, radio, TV, automobiles, airplanes, and in the healthcare we got antibiotics and vaccines. I'm sure someone else could make a much more impressive list than that. Someone from 1900 transported to 1950 would not recognize the world.
We didn't have nearly the same advances from 1950 to 2000. Cell phones and the internet are huge, but that didn't come until the very tail end. Those areas would look like science fiction. Other than that, when you place someone from 1950 in 2000, it just looks like everything got a little better.
Maybe starting with the computers and the internet we will start another big change, particularly with artificial intelligence and automation. But for a big part of those 50 years, a lot less happened than in the previous 50 years.
>In the earlier half century the got the widespread use to electricity, radio, TV, automobiles, airplanes, and in the healthcare we got antibiotics and vaccines.
Plus General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Those were huge advances in human understanding, and are still fundamental to physics.
I understand the singularity and I am not arguing against it. It is reasonable to expect exponential development as a rule, but that doesn't mean development happens smoothly. The intended point was about how foreign the world would look to an average person transplanted 50 years in the future. The original comment asserted the first half of the century had a more dramatic change than the second half, and there is a good argument for this.
The links you provided are very good but they deal more with theory than actual observations by a normal person.
There is one specific concrete example given in those articles - Moore's law. This is a very good example of exponential development, but only to a point. Someone correct me if I am wrong, but Moore's law was helped because its very existence affected the result. To some extent industry even scheduled their advances. If someone lied to Intel and said a competitor was getting much better speeds, I bet you we would have seen some faster improvements.
Many future predictions from the 1950s were based on the promise of unlimited electricity. Once this comes to pass, we can have hovercars and whatnot.
Instead, we got "unlimited" information. Although this doesn't translate as well into physical products, the world still looks/feels wildly futuristic if you orient your perspective correctly.
The world feels wildly futuristic? Can you explain? I was born in 1966. Computer games and the special effects in movies look better, but to claim the world looks wildly futuristic is an exaggeration.
And yet pretty much everyone still gets up, drives a car alone to work, does their eight, nine hours, drives home alone in that same car, eats, watches a little TV, and goes to bed.
I was born in 1963. Where's the 30 hour work week I was promised? Why am I still driving a gas vehicle by myself to work? Geopolitics? Same shit, different day. Sure, we got an unlimited flow of information, and that has most certainly revolutionized many things. But I argue that the day-to-day lives of most people doesn't look a whole lot different than when I was born, it's just better accessorized.
The numbers suggest that we could live 1950-style lives working only eleven hours per week[0]. Instead, we inflate our consumption and keep working 40 hours, living in houses more than twice as large[1], commuting ever-longer distances[2], paying daily (or more than daily) for others to prepare food we could have prepared ourselves, and just generally choosing to live many times as large. We adapt so quickly that we don't even realize that we've nearly-quadrupled our lifestyles, but that's where the 30-hour work week went.
Instead, we inflate our consumption and keep working 40 hours
"We"? I'd happily work at software rates for 20 hours/week. And, yeah, I understand the fundamental shift in a lot of things before that's a practical option. I'm not even disagreeing with you, I think you're spot on. But those that have simple, inexpensive lifestyles still don't have the option of working less. So though even I consume more than I used to, I also try to shovel as much as I can into the retirement accounts.
Housing is the main cost, and it scales with average take-home income — which is why two-income-no-kids families aren’t as well off as one might expect from looking at single-income families from the 1960s. If you can somehow disregard housing as a cost, and have health insurance anywhere except the USA, 20 hours per week is fine.
I’d manage on 10 hours per week minimum wage in the UK, but that doesn’t really count because the UK government effectively subsidies everyone earning less than (I think) £24k/year with things like NHS healthcare and a functional police, fire brigade, and army.
Housing is the main cost, and it scales with average take-home income
Shows you what happens when you're well-ensconced in your own personal bubble. It didn't occur to me until you pointed it out that the reason I could easily live on 20 hours/week is partially due to the fact that our $650K house cost us a third of that, because we bought it twelve years ago. Living on 20 hours/week and making the payment on a $650K house might be a little tight. Fine, make it 30 hours/week. :-)
"When was the last time you had to spend 15 minutes planning out where and when you would meet when because your group is splitting up when on a trip?"
I do these things all the time as many of my hobbies are outdoor activities. For example, at Arapahoe Basin, a ski area in Colorado near Denver, cell reception is non-existent. So you need to have a plan for people to meet up when we get on the mountain, where to meet for lunch, where at the end of the day. And even at ski resorts with cell coverage, it is far easier in a group to discuss how you are going to meet after the run because people will invariably get separated. E.g., if I'm at Vail, "Meet on the skier's left side of Northwoods, do not go all the way to the base."
I always bring paper maps when backpacking and hiking. Sometimes when you are going camping, you have to have this all planned ahead of time since once again cell coverage may be non-existent. And someone always knows where I am going and when I should be back in case I need a rescue. I also go caving as a hobby, and all of these things are especially important there.
There's some planning when skiing (for reference, I ski at A Basin yearly too; great place), but I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. Usually it's pretty easy to plan, esp. at A Basin to say, "meet at the midway restaurant".
And from a technological standpoint, all the maps that you can have printed are all online as well, so in the same way that Yellow Book entries are now database rows, maps are either primitive PNGs or interactive terrain maps.
Sure and the planning at A Basin depends on the situation. If everyone is leaving from the same car, its easy. But if you have 3-4 car loads of people leaving and arriving at different times, you want to make sure a plan is in place before people have started arriving.
You don't need cell coverage to look at maps on your phone. The GPS in your phone will work without coverage. Use Gaia GPS and/or Avenza Maps, they're far, far superior to paper maps. GGP is right, we live in the future.
Obviously, it doesn't hurt to bring a paper map, but you'll find that you're not going to use them at all. We live in the future.
> Obviously, it doesn't hurt to bring a paper map, but you'll find that you're not going to use them at all. We live in the future.
I disagree for multi-day or technical trips. I have done expedition style trips where I am camped in the mountains for weeks. I have been using a Garmin 60CSx GPS for years and love it. It has topo maps on it, typically at 1:24k, and they are invaluable. I have tried bringing a phone, but I don't like phones because touch screens are a royal pain with a hand that is gloved or in mittens. Phones also don't take AA batteries like a GPS or headlamp and are battery hogs. So you need to bring along more junk to keep them charged.
For within the US, the National Geographic Trails illustrated maps are awesome. They are rip proof and printed on waterproof paper. And they are large when unfolded, so it's easy to quickly scan and find things unlike trying to scroll around on a small phone screen.
For lots of hikes and climbs that are more on the technical side, your route information ("beta") is probably going to be written on paper. When you are climbing something that is very steep or in canyon country, GPS is useless. You need visual information on the route you need to take and that may be a photo or sketch. And this is easy to keep folded in your pocket and remove with a gloved hand. On a summer weekend in Colorado on the summit of a more difficult 14er (think Crestone Needle or Capitol), you will see many people with printed guides from 14ers.com. So its just not me. I don't see many people using their phones for navigation (but they do for pictures).
And in a cave, there is no substitute for a paper map. But that's a different ball of wax.
>When was the last time you used a paper map?
When was the last time you used the yellow pages?
How much money have you spent buying encyclopedias in the last 20 years?
How much time searching for someone who has a mediocre copy-of-a-copy of bootleg tapes of that one amazing concert by the band you liked?
How many hours have you spent on the phone with a company because you lost the user's manual to their product?
When was the last time you had a conversation to the effect of "what was the name of that actor in that movie" and you were unable to get the answer?
How big is your rolodex?
How many of those were our real problems and main concerns all these decades back? Who even thought those were actually problems worth fixing?
Meanwhile stuff like homelessness, unemployment, stupid media with fake news, clowns for presidents, war-mongering, pollution, daily grind, costly medical bills, and so on, are all here.
No rolodex? Don't need one, tons of people can say, I don't have a job, or just have the shitty, no prospect jobs people (including college kids) can get today that doesn't require one.
The main thing we have, that's actually futuristic, is instant global communication and/or the internet. And it's not like that's doing us many favors lately either. We had totally other dreams for it in the 90s.
Internet connected fridges, yeah, they can keep those.
This list made me realize just how much cognitive dissonance I live with being a bit of a paranoid person who likes to use old school methods for some things. I'll respond in order.
I use a paper map all the time. All gps/location features are disabled on my phone, so if I am headed somewhere I usually scout the route on my pc. Most of the time time I just write down the exits, but sometimes I'll print the map and directions out. I always have a paper atlas in my vehicles though (along with forest service topo maps, a habit from my days living in the mountains). If I am in a bind (eg lost), I use openstreetmaps or gmaps if I have to, not to look at where I am but where I am going. (remember no gps/loc features).
I use the yellow pages for kindling and coupons still quite frequently.
My family used to have a huge collection of encyclopedias, and when I have more bookshelf space I really want to get an updated one if any exist. Right now I have a passed down partial collection of the 1971 Funk & Wagnalls, and a complete 1986 Funk & Wagnalls. Pre-internet much of family time was spent arguing and using encyclopedias to support the argument.
As for bootleg recordings, for me private ftp and warez was the end of physically buying bootlegs in the 90's.
I have spent plenty of time on the phone with a company because their user manual was out of date, does that count?
Ok you got me on the rolodex.
All the time because I have a hard time remembering movie names and actor names for some reason. If you remember the movie it's easy to check imdb, but if you don't you have to spend time trying to remember one actors name and then sift through their filmography.
Also all the time, because I am a stickler for having plans in place in public. For example when I take the family to an amusement park, everyone is briefed by me on objective rally point(s), exits, comms, and time sync, among other things before being "let loose". Some military habits die hard.
I got a big scifi moment when i received a video-call from my dad while driving on the highway because he wanted to show me the vacuum robot driving around his house.
How about a "robot" beating the world's best chess player after 1/2 days worth of training or the ability to virtually cure HIV/AIDS (that certainly seemed impossible in the eighties) or music without instruments or singers and only wildly flashing lights (the value of EDM is debatable, but it would certainly feel futuristic to someone from the 60ies) or the ability to speak in real time video to someone on the other side of the world while taking a stroll through the park (star wars had holigrams, but they were pre-recorded material and not real time)
Your music example is a great one for shpwcasing how little things change. Sure the sound is different but everyones still bopping along to a 4/4 rock beat
The world of medicine and scientific research has undeniably improved. Transplants, medical imaging (MRI or CT), almost any drug you will probably take, genomic science, disease diagnosis, cancer immunotherapies, electron-microscopy, and a lot more were either non-existent or crude in 1966. You are much better off getting sick today (assuming you can afford it).
What dictates our experience, our "feelings" about the world?
One could argue our experience is primarily dictated by the physical objects surrounding us. This viewpoint wouldn't see a vast difference between 1966 and today.
Another viewpoint is that our experience is construed mostly _socially_, i.e. that we build our world based on our interactions with others. From this perspective, the world today would feel vastly different.
I'm 24. Many of my "meatspace" friends I first met online, often as a result of being in similar online communities, and then we progressed to a real-life friendship. Much of my social experience is based around circles of people living thousands of miles away from me, who I likely will never spend an extended period of physical time with.
Although our physical reality still seems similar, social reality has shifted dramatically beneath our feet.
Venkatesh Rao, a writer of one of my favorite blogs, Ribbonfarm, has a (rather complex) essay[1] explaining this idea of "feeling like the future" -- he argues that technologists, in fact, work very hard to make new technologies feeling _normal_, and that we don't _want_ to feel like we're living in the future, as it's, well, uncomfortable:
> we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak. To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea.
Rao, in another essay[2], also argues more specifically for my idea posed above: that the internet as a social technology has had novel, futuristic implications for our experience of life.
> When you first explore the online world, with your feet firmly planted offline, it can seem ephemeral and insubstantial. But once you tentatively and gingerly plant your feet online, it is the offline world that starts to seem ephemeral and insubstantial. The world of offline-first people (or worse, offline-only) seems like a world of people living lives without real views. Lives full of unacknowledged and unprocessed yearnings.
I don't know how much sense this'll make to you, given my parents are around the same age and they still struggle to understand how Twitter, chatroom technology, online dating, Yelp, etc. has changed the feeling/experience of reality.
At times, I resent the technological changes, as they seem fundamentally dehumanizing. But sitting from our present-day vantage point, these technologies seem like inevitable results of the Internet as it continues to change how we interact with our fellow human beings. The current political moment in the USA is already the sort of futuristic Thing driven by these technological changes, and I expect that, at the very least, politics will continue feeling more Weird (i.e. futuristic?) before it feels Normal again.
It is incredible, and most people didn't see it coming, but compared to the scifi stuff I read and watched as a kid, the future doesn't feel all that mind-blowing, at least so far.
Part of it is living through it and adjusting to the changes, but I was also born into a world that had TVs, telephones, microwaves, VCRs, satellites, space programs, and personal computers. Computer networks and games existed back then. Miniaturization and Moore's law was known about.
I think living through the early 20th century might have been more mind blowing.
It's because there's a difference between cool and usable.
For example - compare a Virtual Reality 3D city you can scroll around on your computer, visiting different houses, "chatting" with them, then reading what they posted on their public refrigerator door, then maybe reading some books from their shelf, watch a movie together then you "walk" to a library ... To the internet (Facebook + Wikipedia).
What's cooler? Obviously #1.
What's more usable? #2.
If you could go back in time to the 70s, what would you show on a futuristic movie?
#1, since the you want to "wow" your audience, who won't have to deal with such mundane issues as vertigo, or rapid navigability, or searchability.
But it's not that we can't do #1. We not only could do it, but there were many tries (VRML was supposed to be the "next big thing" since the 90's). It's just that our current UI is better.
Does that double life expectancy take into account infant mortality rates? It's not like people living into their 70s was that unheard of back then, it's just that it was easier to die younger.
And yeah, I'm living through it, but it still feels largely like the world I was born into with some additional advances in computing. A huge part of the world is based on incremental improvements on stuff that has existed since the earlier 20th century.
But it's not _wildley_ futuristic. I'm not taking a flying car to a space elevator to visit my relatives on Mars while my house and pets are left in the care of my android maid.
Wasn't it Buzz Aldrin who said he was promised Mars colonies but got Facebook instead? For some of us, that tradeoff doesn't seem terribly futuristic.
We carry supercomputers in our pockets for the primary purpose of broadcasting pictures of food we are about to eat. If that's not wildy futuristic (and perhaps a bit dystopian), I'm not sure what is.
I get your point, but space exploration and robots everywhere aren't the only types of "wildly different" futures. People just have latched onto those two things as facile benchmarks.
You don't get hovercars just from too-cheap-to-meter electricity. If energy cost were the main obstacle, upper-income people would already have hovercars, because spending 4x more on fuel than people driving wheeled vehicles would be fine for them.
Some 1968 futurology predictions seem like they might have come to pass had energy remained as relatively cheap as it was in 1968. Others of them were frankly ridiculous regardless of the price of energy. According to the Amazon review, disintegrator rays and anti-gravity belts were a couple of the predicted developments from "Toward the Year 2018." There was no scientific phenomenon known in 1968 by which either of these could be implemented. It's like the predictors reasoned "science fiction was prescient in predicting artificial satellites and travel to the moon, therefore its other popular tropes will eventually come to pass too."
There's a lot still to explain about the universe: dark matter, baryon asymmetry, dark energy... But I'm not convinced that new insights into these problems, if/when they arrive, will unlock significant new technological capabilities, any more than the discovery of neutron stars led to new superhard/superdense materials for human use. I think it's quite likely that humans never tame a more energetic primary energy source than nuclear fusion[1], nor send messages or vessels faster than light, nor manipulate gravity with the facility that we manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum. The engineering permitted by classical and quantum mechanics, modulo additional limits imposed by relativity, is vast. But it can't deliver everything that science fiction imagines. Inertial compensators, gravity manipulation, tractor beams, teleporters, disintegration rays, time travel, FTL: nope, probably not.
[1] Storage and use of antimatter for compact power sources seems like it may be eventually plausible, but it would function more as a super-energetic "battery" charged by other primary energy sources.
> If energy cost were the main obstacle, upper-income people would already have hovercars, because spending 4x more on fuel than people driving wheeled vehicles would be fine for them.
In 1968, the USA used helicopters in lieu of light trucks all over Vietnam, thousands upon thousands. Getting an heli ride was a mundane experience for a conscripted grunt. If anything the practice scaled down a lot since due to proliferation of MANPADs. But point is, a helicopter was not something mind blowing or novel on the scale of a flying car.
Nor would an RC model shatter anyone's imagination then, another common thing. If anything, a non-controlled, autonomous or semi autonomous drones that are appearing now would be far more impressive.
Sure, the military had lots of helicopters. Also, portable radios, intercontinental aircraft, and space rockets.
These were not a relatively affordable part of daily life, though. Now if I'm in a crunch, and the roads / subways get clogged down for some reason (not a rare event), I can theoretically quickly get from my office to JFK airport on a helicopter for $100 (more like $30 from 1968), if I share the flight with 3 other people. Also, for the same money I can get a half-decent RC quadcopter with a homing ability and a camera that spies from 1968 would kill for.
No flying cars, though. Blame air safety regulations.
Hey neat, I've had a copy of this book on my shelf for a few years now, but I'd forgotten all about it. Very interesting to read about the background behind the text. Maybe I should print out the article and store it with the book for future readers.
And this comment thread! You want your time capsule to be thorough, right? c:
Hey, nerds in 2068! Today, we think mobile devices, IoT creep, the cloud, and machine learning are the future of computing while lamenting an erosion of privacy and security; were we silly geese, or is that your guys' reality? Also, have you contacted aliens or become digital consciousnesses yet?
Yours, someone who's hopefully still alive (as a digital consciousness aware of how weird aliens are)
Nobody will understand what "IoT creep" and "cloud" mean (at least not the meaning you imply) in 50 years :D
So, for their benefit:
- IoT creep - Internet of Things is a movement towards adding tiny computers into all things (light switches, plant watering systems, fridges, toasters ...) so they can communicate and be controlled from mobile phones.
- Cloud - refers to cloud computing, which is just the way we call when you put information or code to run on a company's server instead of on your own computer.
2068 here, everyone's addicted to virtual sex. Once you had body suits that could simulate your entire environment, we no longer cared about being outside the facebook social network in a real sense.
A few of us venture outside to reminisce about the old days, but our fascismo overlords have made those opportunities less and less over the years.
That's unlikely to be a fast change. We don't hand much power to 25 year olds and we are unlikely to alter anything close to 100% of babies in year zero, or even be making significant positive changes. So, it's really going to be a very slow transition all things considered.
The predictors are usually quite wrong. However, in a few cases, they seem to hit the nail right on the head (cell phones). What I'd like to do is reverse engineer the insights or mindset the people who made accurate predictions so that they could be emulated.
At the same time, I want to identify the prejudices or logic errors of the people who are wrong (anti-gravity belts) to help avoid making the same mistakes.
Does anyone have any insight as to why some predictions turn out right? Is it just luck, or is there some greater principle that can help us find out what's ahead?