BT's Predictions for the Future

Saluton_Mondo writes "BT describes the future as looking "ever more exciting each year"... you won't be surprised if you read their white paper on a timeline of technological development in various aspects of human culture, running up to about 2100. It's a bit out of date, but still pretty funny. Some are reasonable predictions, like the introduction of ID cards in the UK by 2010, or the rise of an American dictator in 2000. Others are just funny, like an orgasm via e-mail in 2010, or a security Barbie which searches for lost offspring. I'll not even mention the emergence of the Borg in 2040... see what you think."

Comments

WRT the U.K. ID cards

[The One KEA]

You can read about them here, at the Privacy International Web Site.

The obvious prediction

[unfortunateson]

BTExact website Slashdotted in early December, 2003

google has it in html

[lydon]

In case of (already occured) slashdotting look here (try the 'View as HTML' link).

Re:maglevs and flying cars

[Anonymous Coward]

maglevs are moving people commercially in china, australia, germany, spain and the UK. Feasibility projects are underway in the US and much of europe.

Re:Googled

[CaptainBaz]

and HTMLified.

Re:Question

[The One KEA]

Disclaimer: I am not a U.K. citizen.

As for their complaining, I think that network you describe has been successfully explained away as a method to protect people from crime. I.D. cards on the other hand can't be explained away so easily, which is way people are complaining about them.

The link I gave talks about it in greater detail.

Rise of an American Dictator...

[mdemeny]

I thought this was a joke by the moderator, but if you look at the Addendum they republish 'Wildcards' based on an original idea by John Petersen, The Arlington Institute. This includes Rise of an American Dictator in 2000 (where 2000 is the earliest possible occurence).

The same way we do now.

[glrotate]

coal

Re:obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, that was 2000, before I started reading, the one I read was from 2002, where they started pushing it...

-Dave

Who, why?

[leandrod]

So who's BT and why should I pay attention to them?

Re:Question

[perly-king-69]

No. My local council even provides a form (google cache of pdf) for you to apply to receive a copy of the footage.

Re:(Hello?)^2

[McWilde]

No, actually it's called paralepsis.

Re:power? food?

[Alomex]

given that a signficant fraction of the population (including a disquietingly large number of American children) are malnourished.

Actually we are making great progress on that regard:

The number of severely malnourished people has dropped from 1970 to today. In 1970, 1.7 billion people were struggling to survive on under 2100 calories a day. Today, that number has been cut to 411 million. The total percentage of the Earth's population that is underfed has dropped to 20 per cent from 35 per cent over the same decades.

Re:Or more curiously

[Ben Hutchings]

That's Transport for London, not the "London Council" (I think you mean Greater London Authority). The mayor of London was involved in the protests, so I don't see any conspiracy here.

Re:(Hello?)^2

[angst_ridden_hipster]

I won't mention the fact that there are two perfectly good words for this rhetorical device.

Not only paralepsis, but also apophasis.

Re:Decline of socialism

[Allen Varney]

The most famous famine in recent history, in Ethiopia, was engineered when it was a colony of the USSR. The USSR is gone, and so is socialism in Ethiopia. The famine there is long over as well.

Wow, the number of errors in these short sentences is astounding. Ethiopia has never been colonized. It is currently suffering another terrible famine that began in 2000. This calamity has less to do with government than with drought, like the famines currently gripping Zambia and Malawi.

Ethiopia did flirt with Marxist-Leninist ideas in the 1980s under the "Workers' Party of Ethiopia," but as I understand it, it was still just the same kind of top-down authoritarian big-man system as it was under Haile Selassie, as it still is today.

There are many better explanations for any African famine than politics: bad land use, bad weather, tribal rivalries, extortionate taxation, short-sighted local planning, and devouring corruption independent of political affiliation. To attribute any African country's troubles to socialism is to miss a really large forest by concentrating on one outlying tree.