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What Will Life Be Like In 2008?
tblake writes "Back in 1968, Modern Mechanix mused what life would be like in 40 years. Some things they came pretty close on: 'Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees' accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card's number is fed into the store's computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.' Some things are way off: 'The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city's suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whiz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round.' And some things are sorta right: 'TV screens cover an entire wall in most homes and show most subjects other than straight text matter in color and three dimensions. In addition to programmed TV and the multiplicity of commercial fare, you can see top Broadway shows, hit movies and current nightclub acts for a nominal charge.'"
I'm actually impressed with how dead on a lot of the predictions are. Most predictions from the 60s and 70s were outrageous. One thing I think we've gotten much better at is figuring out the technological limitations of the near future so as to not make such outrageous predictions ... sort of. Supposedly we're all going to be in flying and/or driverless cars by 2015.
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
This is a little offtopic (feel free to moderate me appropriately), but I can think of no better /. and its grammar-nazis!
place to ask this than here at
From the summary:
"Money has all but disappeared."
What does this sentence mean, please?
Whenever I read it, I read it as: "Everything imaginable happenned to money, except disappear."
Or even: "Money has changed color, has lost its value, has been globally unified... but disappear? No way!"
But by the context of the summary, it seems I am getting exactly the opposite of it.
Although I consider myself quite good at English, it is not my main language.
Can someone clear this up for me?
Thank you.
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
The notion of centralized control is way off. Each car (as it is now with human drivers) needs to be aware of its surroundings and behave properly in an orderly swarm fashion. Any sort of centralized system should analyze traffic and offer broadcast hints back to the vehicles for upcoming road conditions and preferred alternate routes, instead of micromanaging everything from a single point of failure.
"When you see what you want, you press a number that signifies "buy," and the household computer takes over, places the order, notifies the store of the home address and subtracts the purchase price from your bank balance."
"One click", I have you now!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If this thing going 150 MPH and there is a hiccup on the network, or even let say some hacking/DDoS is going on, tons of crashes will surely happen.
The thing is, assuming that you can produce reliable sensors, there's only two rules you have to follow when dealing with other cars for freeway travel, neither of which require any kind of communication with an external controller:
1) Do not drive faster than the vehicle in front of you
2) Do not change lanes if there is a vehicle beside you
Both of those are trivial to handle, even at 250MPH. The real problem isn't ramming another car, it's finding the damn lane on the road, especially when you've got places where the government doesn't bother repainting the stripes more than once every 50 years. Or places where the road is assembled from strips of concrete where the joints between the strips aren't quite lined up with the lanes (I've seen humans who can't figure those out, hell, the first time I ever saw that type of road construction was as a kid when I was in a merge lane on an overpass where the actual lane stripes had long since worn off, and I thought I was supposed to be following the black lines diagonally across the bridge until I nearly rammed someone). Or places where the lanes are repainted every 3 months... in completely different places.
Now, surface street travel with various stop signs, intersections, lights, etc... that's a long, long, long way away, even at 20 MPH with some central command center telling every car what it's supposed to be doing in realtime.
It's interesting to note how this piece reflects the then-prevalent belief that technology would bring a Utopian age. No one stopped to think about the consequences of using thousands of ICBMs as transportation devices, or the industrial waste generated by wall-sized televisions and domed cities. Plastic was magical - we hadn't yet realized how toxic it could be, or how addicted we would become to it. Domed cities and millions of cars that travel 300 mph are the stuff of science fiction novels, but they'd be awful in practice - Just imagine how unbearably warn and clammy a dome would be under bright summer sun (or how quickly it would be discolored by dust storms and acid rain), or how poorly wildlife would coexist with a stream of automated bullet cars zipping along plastic roads. Somehow, we need to figure out how to do with less - much less - while figuring out how to tread less heavily on the earth. It might be an impossible task.
Transportation really needs to move into 3 dimensions, it's the only way to resolve congestion. Being stuck in 2 dimensions is just causing a lot of congestion and is too dangerous.
That said, my fanciful wish is for digging tunnels all over the place so we don't have to look up at a sky clogged with millions of aircraft. Having a mechanical failure in a tunnel is safer than in the sky, too.
Ah, but you didn't finish the paragraph! A closer look reveals startling truths:
Closer than you would guess! The average person works 4 hours, and spends at least 2 hours reading Slashdot (though admittedly not at home. You can't fault the guy too much for that error). The other 2 hours are split between Wikipedia bingeing, blog reading, and Fark.
Ah, a depiction of the epitome of 21st century living: The modern trailer park!
Just plain scary how close this is. If I had a nickel for every time dinner was a Kid's Cuisine or Hungry Man I'd have a lot of nickels.
Again, a vision of the future! I probably go to class once or twice a week and my end grade is indeed determined by the Scantron sheets I fill with Rorschach inkblots.
Al Gore couldn't have said it better himself. Maybe vague, but it does fit the Internets and associated tubes pretty well.
True enough. I'm sure I don't need to elaborate the "other matter". Or so I've heard anyway.
Ah ha, Kraft Foods! This amazing fellow was able to predict the rise of "processed cheese food" and "mechanically separated meat products". Brillant!
Nobody bats a thousand I guess.
He couldn't have been closer if he'd just given us the name of the wonder drug Ritalin!
Anyway, he was spot on. Finally a reviewer who didn't have flying cars in their list.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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I'm not saying he was a saint, but Heinlein was pretty consistent at asserting the intellectual equality of women in his writing.
The original author, back in 1968, can be forgiven for not knowing about distributed computing networks. You might consider reading up on them.
An automated traffic system would drastically cut down on fuel consumption. If everyone was moving at the same speed, there would be no traffic to speak of, it would be like a giant sheet of ice floating across the water. Without constant deceleration and acceleration, the amount of fuel a car would consume would basically bottom out.
Also, I tend to believe that when there aren't any more car accidents, a lot less cars are going to be sold. And when cars maintain constant speeds with minimal acceleration, the engine and other components of a car would last a lot longer, thus increasing the lifetime of every car.
It's not that far fetched of an idea. Both industries have a vested interest in preventing it from happening.
I got a chuckle out of the "smooth plastic roads". First, if roads were smooth it would take a LONG time to get the car stopped. And accelleration wouldn't be easy either; didn't the author ever hear of friction and its uses? Maybe he was an engineer, the one who designed the round nylon shoelaces I bitched about in that K5 article a few years ago that seem to have gone the way of the dodo (thank God). I guess eventually the short-bus engineers run over themselves with their short busses and the more intelligent ones take over.
Secondly, the streets here in Springfield are so full of potholes it's like driving on the moon. Apparently the auto manufacturers have noticed this, because I heard a car ad that extolled "suspension for today's roads". The ad didn't say whether it's California's good, ice-free roads or the midwest's roads that are crater filled from the freeze-thaw cycle and harsh chemicals and salt used to thaw and evaporate the ice and snow.
Don't people do any reasoning at all when they write thes articles?
OTOH some time in high school (late 1960s) my schitzophrenic friend Tom prognosticated that some day we'd be playing records in our cars. I told him that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard; how would you keep them from getting scratched up? How would you keep them from skipping? He had no answers and didn't know why he thought so but was certain it would happen. But he turned out to be right, we now have CDs and afaik they don't make car stereos without CD players any more.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest