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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.'"
Almost true...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg27ckAgEiw&feature=related
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
Goddammit, I want my flying cars!
Even forty years ago, he wasn't naive enough to suggest Duke Nukem Forever being available.
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
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
Speak for yourself...
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?
...in his prediction of intelligence pills.
Either that, or a lot of people I encountered today need to adjust their dosage.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
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.
Hmmm... just when I read that article on people trusting their car GPS systems even if they'd go down a cliff....
"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.
People have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours. But the extra time isn't totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder's spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments--on the average, about two hours of home study a day.
They got it almost spot on: 4 hours actual work; 2 hours slashdot; 2 hours talking; 2 hours walking around the office; 1 hour making coffee's; 3 hours replying to emails; 3 hours answering telephones; 1 hour break time; 2 hours travel time; 2 hours home study time; 2 hours sleep. Rinse-and-repeat.
Reminds me of the skit by Harry Enfield about Life in 1990
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdYDREry3do
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
By 2048 the concept of a national currency will have devolved back into a token based economy founded on barter. Those few that survive will focus on securing the necessities of life. Whole regions will be uninhabited as global warming turns them progressively to desert.
Personal transportation will be a thing of the past. What movement occurs will either be human powered or the preserve of the feudal lords. The only areas where an energy rich economy continues to exist will be those of the Middle East, at least those parts not a radioactive wasteland. Most oil will be vegetable oil, and with the collapse of intensive agriculture there won't be much of that.
Many of the major cities will be going underwater as sea levels rise following the accelerating collapse of the Greenland glaciers and the lack of funding to support management measures. Diseases come in waves across the globe, each wave wiping out more than are born. There is a general malaise, a depression of opportunities lost. Most do not want to bring children into this world.
You should've remembered to take your memory pill. But then, that's the trick, isn't it?
In 2008, people will travel in levitating, hypersonic personal aircraft called mePods.
He describes a world where the entire infrastructure has essentially been rebuilt in 40 years. I can't see how that would have seemed plausible even back then. That said, portions of it are impressively accurate.
> two-passenger air-cushion car /flat TV screen / Tapping a button changes the page. ... feeds/receives signals to and from all cars / keeps vehicles /apart. /from 15 to 50 mi. outside all major urban centers.
Didn't happen sadly
> national traffic computer
Read "GPS system"
> morning paper
Your basic ebook
> smooth plastic road
Still concrete, altho progress has been made in using polymers in road construction
> cities... covered by the new domes
This one didn't happen
> The traffic computer
GM has prototypes that do just this. It's creepy to see them on the road.
> attache case / draw the diagram with / infrared flashlight on what looks like a TV screen
You basic tablet
> The diagram is relayed to a similar screen in your associate's office, 200 mi. away.
Have this
> He jabs a button and a fixed copy of the sketch rolls out of the device.
The printer
> vehicle parks itself / municipal garage
Again, GM has made leaps and bounds for this
> Private cars are banned inside most city / Moving sidewalks and electrams carry the public
Your basic Arcology idea, but not yet in practice.
> With the U.S. population having soared to 350 million
Close, only 270 million
> transportation is among the most important factors keeping the economy running smoothly.
Quite true, and also where we are starting to break apart
> Giant transportation hubs / located
Some cities have done this, but not in the US to date
> Tube trains, pushed through bores by compressed air
This is ancient, but not in use
> launching pad from which 200-passenger rockets
Commercial rocketry is currently for the super-rich, and only a gimmick for now.
> SST and hypersonic planes
Concorde was retired a few years back
> jumbo jets.
The mainstay of transportation
>Electrostatic precipitators clean the air
Ionic Breeze anyone?
>climatizers maintain the temperature and humidity at optimum levels.
We have this in spades
> Robots are available to do housework and other simple chores.
Vacuuming is about all we have here with the Roomba
> New materials for siding and interiors are self-cleaning and never peel, chip or crack.
He got this one right
> Dwellings / prefabricated modules / attached speedily
Dead on here, most home construction now involves at least some prefabrication.
> job that doesn't take more than a day.
Didn't wind up this fast save for Extreme Home Makeover
> Such modular homes easily can be expanded to accommodate a growing family.
This sadly did not wind up the case.
> A typical wedding present / a fully equipped bedroom, kitchen or living room module.
Man, and all I got was 4 waffle irons....
> determines in advance her menus / prepackaged meals / automatic food utility
Didn't happen
> microwave oven and is cooked or thawed.
Did happen
> disposable plastic plates / knives, forks and spoons / so inexpensive they can be discarded
This very much happened.
> The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer.
100% bingo!
> These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance. Sensors in kitchen appliances, climatizing units, communicators, power supply and other household utilities warn the computer when the item is likely to fail. A repairman will show up even before any obvious breakdown occurs.
We have not gotten to this point yet, however, it is appearing piecemail
> Computers also handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other utilities.
This is now almost a decade old
> Not every family has its private computer.
Now he called it short.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
...the article maintains a phallocentric society, where men go to the office to work, and women stay home and coo-- I mean, oversee the cooking. While some of the technological advancements have certainly come to pass (and some pretty close if we look at them analogously), the social attitude of the article is firmly entrenched in the 1960s. Consider:
The housewife simply determines in advance her menus for the week, then slips prepackaged meals into the freezer and lets the automatic food utility do the rest.The second group that some people imagine may know the future are specialists of various kinds. They don't either. As a limiting case, I remind you there is a new kind of specialist occupation-I refuse to call it a discipline, or a field of study-called futurism. The notion here is that there is a way to study trends and know what the future holds. That would indeed be valuable, if it were possible. But it isn't possible. Futurists don't know any more about the future than you or I. Read their magazines from a couple of years ago and you'll see an endless parade of error.
From http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-whyspeculate.html
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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we could invest in public transportation and abrogate people's stupid, life-risking civil liberties by takin' way their cars.
SERIOUSLY. If we invested the amount of money people spend on Cars, Car Insurance and Gasoline into public transportation, we'd have some sort of awesome, pneumatic tube public transportation system a la Futurama. The reason there's so much congestion is because people have decided they each need to get to work INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED in LARGE CHUNKS OF CARBON-BURNING METAL.
Actually, the Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure programs at many of the leading auto industry R&D programs, are working on exactly this approach.
Certain portions of CA infrastructure have been equipped with the first generation of this equipment (DSRC 1000m range radio equipment) and there's even a traffic light in Palo Alto (Page Mill Rd & El Camino Real) where you can receive broadcast status and phase information as you approach.
You make the cars aware of each other, and aware of the road, at first for safety and driver-assistance purposes--and the you gradually phase in the AI portion as it matures.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_infrastructure_integration
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
"Video game...? THIS... IS... SWEDEN!"
What I found most interesting about this article is how shopping in 2008 is actually BETTER than was imagined in 1968. The author thought items for sale would be displayed on a television, and people would order items through a different interface -- the telephone -- by pressing on a telephone keypad.
Instead, today we can interactively view an item for sale on the Internet, get competing prices, read reviews from real people around the world, and order the item through the same interface using buttons with descriptive labels. It seems so obvious now, and as a developer I still think we have a ways to go, but look how far we've come! This wasn't even fathomable 40 years ago.
my blog
One-click ordering described! Over 25 years before Amazon...
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. Much of the family shopping is done this way. Instead of being jostled by crowds, shoppers electronically browse through the merchandise of any number of stores.
We'd probably have more of that cool stuff if people could learn to get along a little better. But as it stands, they failed to mention that people today still lock their doors, have automatic car alarms, and that nine tenths of the world's population not only don't have flying cars, but live in mud huts while working for some cruddy manufacturing company for pennies a day. --With unexploded cluster bomb ordinance scattered outdoors.
Neal Stephenson, were he born in the Forties, could have put a more realistic spin on this article. Too bad.
I predict that by 2015 or thereabouts, and probably a bit sooner, the earth will be a meteor pock-marked hell dealing with super-fast glacial rebound where there really is no more paper money, and the only domed cities will have George W. Bush and/or Vladimir Putin living inside them.
-FL
:q!
The pace of change is slowing down. Look at four 50 year periods in history.
Progress is flatlining.
Neither, both car owners have to sue the local government. It's the next step in American Evolution!
I hate printers.
* Life expectancy measured from birth for US males is up 10 years. For some other nations the gain has been more dramatic (typically the ones who got to the development party late).
* You know those radios, TVs, electronics, and computers? Yeah, you don't have to be a middle-class white American to own them any more.
* There are plenty of quality of life drugs (one of the reasons for constantly increasing health care costs is that our standard of care is constantly increasing). Acne, allergies, and decline in virility as a function of age are now essentially optional. Give us another decade or three and we'll add senility to the list.
* No major new form of transportation, but passenger air travel has been greatly democratized. Most Slashdotters can get a roundtrip ticket to Japan for a week's wages. It used to cost more than a month's. Domestic air travel is now price competitive with *bus fares* in many instances. It now strictly dominates passenger rail service in the US.
* Improvements in efficiency in banking, of all things, means that many, many more Americans have access to credit. No need to know the loan officer, no need to pass the "Is this man a responsible Christian gentleman?" test, no direct restriction based on income, even. This would have been a fairly radical notion in 1958. This has increased home ownership (*mostly* a good thing even with the current debacle which, it bears noting, is affecting less than a 10th of homes), made life much easier for many entrepeneurs, and greatly increased access to higher education. There are some downsides (folks going into debt to get plasma TVs), but the economist in me says "Well, they have a plasma TV now, and its clear they wanted it".
* I talk 2 hours on the phone every week to my family, across the Pacific Ocean, and pay about $10 a month for the privilege. Adjusting for inflation, that would buy less than an hour of call time to the house next door. A person from 1958 would be shocked, shocked that many phone calls are free. (I predict that a person from 2018 will be shocked, shocked that many weren't back in the dark ages of 2008! Imagine, you still pay for something as prosaic as speaking to someone in Japan! Why, its just bits?!)
* I can send a letter to anyone in the world, instantaneously, for free. If I actually want that letter to involve paper, I can send it now (2 PM) and have it arrive at 8 AM *just about anywhere on earth, without fail, tomorrow morning* for about two hours wages.
* In 1958, cheap prepared food was not a reality for most people. It now is. (I almost can't remember the last time I cooked, which is a little weird at the moment but I don't think this will remain weird forever. My mother remembers people sewing.)
* Most consumer products are so cheap that replacement is cheaper than repair. (TV shorts? Pants rip? Telephone on the fritz? Buy a new one.)
* Your main health problems are caused by an overabundance of cheap food and a dearth of manual labor taxing you every day. These are, in terms of human history, "high class problems".
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
moi
You might want to have yourself tested.
You can't take the sky from me...
We only do that to annoy the Europeans. We would have switched long ago if we weren't so amused by the confusion of international visitors.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The original author, back in 1968, can be forgiven for not knowing about distributed computing networks. You might consider reading up on them.
Not trivial at all. Doing 250MPH, if you have a vehicle a mile ahead of you doing 225MPH in the adjoining lane, it's not beside you or ahead of you - but change lanes and end up behind it... There's all manner of such edge cases.
Of course, that nobody has ever really specified that such things must be controlled tightly is proof positive that such things can never be controlled tightly.
As far as getting cash, my banks ATMs are everywhere. I also use my debit card for any larger purchases and most places offer cash back nowadays. I personally hate the idea of walking around without some paper currency... for things like lunch with friends.
Somewhat related, I hate using my debit card for small transactions at local businesses (like the $5.00 burrito down the street from my work); otherwise they get screwed out of their profit margin with transaction fees, and it makes tipping a pain.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
If you take the vehicle off of the regular roads and put it on a track out of the way of most of the complexity we have around us. The algorithms they're using at the moment are synchronous rather than asynchronous, it guarantees that you get a routing slot all the way to your destination without delays. You can get higher capacity using async algorithms but you run into queues and delays within the network then rather than having them outwith the system.
Deleted
~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
If only we could invent some sort of thinking machine to rapidly process more information than the human mind could ever handle!?
Most people can't drive in 2 Dimensions so I fail to see how adding a 3rd is going to help.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.
~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
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
Reminds me of an article I once read in which the author recalled a time, back in the early 80s, where he had been giving a speech at an electronics convention at a hotel about how it was quite reasonable to consider that the price of simple computer chips would drop to levels trivial enough that you could put them in virtually anything. During the Q&A session, one member of the audience complained that, what were people expected to do with these computer chips? It's not like you need a computer in every doorknob.
The same speaker came back to a conference at the same hotel in the late 90s. All of the doors had been switched over to cardkeys.
There was a computer in every doorknob.
Anyways, I wouldn't rule out road improvements. It's just one of those things that hasn't advanced because, currently, it's "cheap" and it's "good enough". I've seen some wild ideas for road improvements, some of which are already in practice in test strips. Like embedded LEDs that let lanes change and shoulders open or close, as well as automatically and alert drivers to the best routes to take to avoid traffic; self-heating roads that contain a combination of thin-film solar cells and ultracapacitors, printed as a single bulk unit, that feed power to the grid (translucent traction surface avoids damage to the cells); solar thermal roads that pipe away solar heat and store it in underground tanks for civilian heating applications and for road de-icing; and all sorts of other things. How well they'll hold up to regular use, who knows at this point, but I think it's silly to believe that our current road system is somehow the most damage resistant design possible.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.