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Predictions of the Future...From the 1960s
kkleiner writes "Jetpacks, flying cars, death rays — the future isn't quite what the past hoped it would be. Of course, when predictions do come true it can be really shocking. Check out some of the more entertaining and eye-opening videos that show classic predictions from the 1960s. The Jet Age couldn't imagine the Age of Social Media clearly, but they got a few things right. And many more hilariously wrong."
Usually say more about the hopes and fears than about what will be. The Background of the 60s was the cold war. In the same way the background of the 90s lead to overly optimistic images of the future.
The House of the Future was funded by Monsanto who now is a scarily powerful biotech and genetically modified food conglomerate but who in the 1960s was all about plastics.
So nothing really changed.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
First published in 1962, it's predictions are amazingly accurate. It is a must for any geek bookshelf and I'm amazed so few have read it.
The (few!) things he did get wrong, he followed up in later editions of the book along with good explanations as to why that particular technology came about sooner / later than he predicted.
There is an excellent article about the book given in the Guardian Newspaper
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/mar/04/profiles-future-arthur-clarke-review
It is a fun book, much recommended.
I'd post a link to Amazon..... but I'd rather you buy a copy from your local independent bookshop :-)
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
I'd post a link to Amazon..... but I'd rather you buy a copy from your local independent bookshop :-)
I wouldn't, so here is a link to buy it on Amazon.
It shows the wife sitting at the console ordering her clothes, and then the husband paying for it at his console. Sounds about right.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Flying cars are no exeption, the technology is there, it's just that people really aren't willing to pay for it.
I can't believe how much people predict that housing will change, even now, when it is real clear that humans like what they like and we build our houses accordingly. You see things set in the future and houses are radically different, and yet I've been in houses built in 1900 and built in 2011 and there is a hell of a lot more similar than different. Style changes a bit, but things are not radically redone.
Also they never seem to take in to account that houses last a long time. I live in a house built in 1974, and that is not at all unusual. Now while some of it has been modified since its construction, there are some fundamental things that remain, and yet don't seem "weird" or "old fashion" to people who see it because a 30+ year old house is not at all a strange sight.
That one has always cracked me up and continues to do so, that somehow in a couple decades we'll furnish houses in a style totally different from now.
The Jet Age couldn't imagine the Age of Social Media clearly, but they got a few things right. And many more hilariously wrong.
Perhaps we are the ones who got it wrong.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Don't forget Google as predicted in 1964 in a children's book.
Paid Q&A/Research
FTFA:
Sounds close enough to me.
On the other hand nobody (here in the US) would have stuck his or her neck out and predicted power companies shutting off your appliances during the day to prevent brown-outs. It would have been unthinkable to predict that we'd never have enough cheap power to do everything we'd want to do, when we wanted to do it.
"Make Room, Make Room!" by Harry Harrison, 1966. Kind of butchered into the film 'Soylent Green' (which is made, funnily enough, of soya and lentils and even if it was made of people it was something that people could only afford occasionally as a special treat.
One thing that struck me last time I read it was that they had embarked on a program to build more nuclear plants, but of course only started doing this when the brown-outs started, and they weren't going to be able to have them online for another 10 years or so. They didn't have smart meters and remote deactivation, but they absolutely did not have enough power and the protagonist had to use a bicycle generator and batteries in order to keep the fridge running.
Thanks - I like Amazon. It's useful for browsing sample pages and reading reviews before buying elsewhere.
Once ebooks dominate, there may be a push to burn real books since they can't be altered remotely to fit a political climate (Tom Sawyer first).
I'd post a link to Amazon..... but I'd rather you buy a copy from your local independent bookshop
Who will, in turn merely place an order with Amazon and charge you a premium for your laziness.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The Internet has been predicted quite a few times. Off the top of my head, Mark Twain:
http://thetyee.ca/Books/2007/01/08/MarkTwain/
Also I found this article on the topic, although the comments are far more interesting than the article itself:
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/03/who-said-science-fiction-never-predicted-the-internet/
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
you mean like a local independent bookshop where you can flip through the pages?
Were they really so certain that keyboards would be done away with in order to go back to a pen based system? Computers with keyboards were out at the time, and while not consumer products, I can't imagine someone familiar with computers not understanding how useful they were/are. The computer I used in the military was designed in 1965, and while severely limited, is still recognizable as a computer. So, their glimpse into the future doesn't really seem to be that significant.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Here is a prediction from 1936
A mechanism of world inter-communication will be devised, embracing the whole planet, freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvellous swiftness and perfect regularity.
(Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha'u'llah, p. 202)
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Arthur C. Clarke, Clarke's first law
English physicist & science fiction author
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
Niels Bohr
Danish physicist (1885 - 1962)
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
You take what you got, add the human element, add realities of the market and you arrive at what's most likely to happen, barring any catastrophes like global war or a sudden change in the politics.
Well, when it comes to technology, what do we know about humans and our economy? For one, both hate revolutions and like evolution. Read: We won't get flying cars, we will get more efficient "normal" ones. We won't get quantum computers, just faster "normal" ones. We won't get the house that cleans itself, instead materials will be used that are easier to clean. Don't expect any of the fancy way out things to be implemented. Nobody is going to do the basic research needed for it. Expect a few key elements to change when something gets invented, but the general system stays the same. Today, we have computer controlled carburetors in our cars, no longer mechanic ones. But it's still the same basic technology that relies on some kind of refined oil being exploded to create movement that it was a century ago. No revolution here. We might get to use different materials as oil gets more expensive due to digging for it becoming more expensive and other technologies becoming viable, but I am pretty sure the system stays the same. No hover cars, no personal planes, no jetpacks. Normal cars, maybe with a different engine and better efficiency. The same applies to all technologies: Do not expect something revolutionary to come around, expect that whatever we have today becomes easier to use, cheaper to produce and more versatile and efficient.
Entertainment will be a big element, most likely. With more and more people having more and more spare time at their hands, it's likely that someone will try to cash in on it. We'll probably get more TV channels, since pushing more channels into cable becomes easier (and cheaper), as well as getting the necessary equipment to start your own TV show. Probably something akin to YouTube will eventually be the staple of TV entertainment. Cheap content. The start is those "reality shows" where you can fill an hour of "entertainment" by paying some redneck hick 500 bucks so he and his family become the country's laughing stock. This will expand: Free content, taken from various media sites. Also already there, at least here we have a show about the "10 best $whatever from $mediapage". I'd expect something like a "YouTube Digest" channel that collects the "best" YouTube videos and rebroadcasts them within the decade.
Media companies will shift their product towards the online world and put more focus on selling their stories online. I don't really see blogs et al as a big competition to them, even though some blogs might gain a niche importance, to the point of becoming the authority on certain topics when the "real" media pick their stories up and broadcast them. The average Joe might not even know about them, but the media outlets will. They will finally completely turn into "news aggregators", that development can be seen already. Many news stations or newspapers don't research anything anymore but simply reprint whatever blog entry or agency message they come across. And since people who read them are satisfied with this and do apparently not want them to be more than just info collectors and compressors, they will just do that. It's cheaper than researching and it gets the news sold.
Computers will continue to shrink and become more powerful. Expect that in about 20 years our handhelds will be able to do what our current desktops can do, including graphics and whatnot. Thinking about it, most likely less than 20 years. Here is actually a possibility for a social revolution, depending on how the problem of the tiny display on handhelds is solved. If HMDs become cheap enough to be mass produced and considered as much a throwaway item as cellphones are today, we might witness a big shift in how people interact with each other, and how they perceive the world. Don't expect a machine-brain interface, but having information constantly in front of your eye, especially if this c
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, just like that - except you don't have to spend 10+ minutes in travel time just to skim the pages of a single book your interested in. And Amazon is open before 11am and after 5pm. But besides that, yeah, just like a local independent bookshop.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Either that or having thousands of semi-trained pilots flying around major cities is just not a good idea. :-)
Just like me, because I kept hearing the jokes about men being lazy, I never bothered to get an education, and now all the technological progress that could have been made by men will be lost. ):
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Ubiquitous computing is a computer in every appliance, no mater how trivial (my toaster has one). And a computer in every palm or pocket. Even the Star Trek universe missed this with a giant ship "mainframe" (communicators and tricorders not withstanding).
Who would think of spending megaflops on graphical human-machine interfaces back int 60s or 70s, except when gigaflops cost dimes now and we'll have personal petaflops in a matter of decades?
Isaac Asimov anticipated both sides. One story imagines the mainframe evolving into God (The Last Question). Another where people are so dependent on their personal computers than can do arithmetic in their heads anymore.
What went wrong with "the future" was that no new source of energy was developed. Fifty years ago, we had coal, oil, natural gas, hydropower, nuclear, wind, wind, biomass, and solar. Which is what we have now. Breeder reactors didn't work. Nuclear power didn't become "too cheap to meter". Fusion didn't work. Solar cells never became really cheap. Solar power satellites were a fantasy.
In each previous 50-year period back to 1800, there was some huge development that made energy cheaper. But in the last half-century, energy costs went up. This is the primary reason the exuberant energy-intensive future envisioned in the 1950s and 1960s didn't happen.
Looking ahead, there's nothing in sight that will lead to another era of cheap energy. Over the next fifty years, energy costs will go up and up.
Your imagination isn't very good.
When two cars collide, it causes a small jam on the road, but nothing else is generally affected besides the two cars. Tow trucks carry away the cars, someone sweeps up the glass, and everyone continues as normal. Best of all, such an accident is quite survivable, as you're already on the ground, so there's no where to fall, and you just have to worry about the speed differential between the two vehicles.
When two airplanes collide, 1) the planes are already going much faster than cars, and 2) they fall to the ground, thousands of feet below. If the pilots didn't already die in the first collision, they're going to be dead when they hit the ground below. On top of that, what if there's a city below them, rather than wilderness or water? What if there's a crowded shopping area directly below? Now some people, maybe many people, are going to be injured or killed.
Finally, forget driver error, what about mechanical failure? When your car breaks down, you pull over and call a tow truck, while everyone drives around you. When your airplane breaks down, you crash. If you're lucky, you can find a landing strip or road and glide to a safe landing. If you're not lucky, there's either mountainous terrain below, or a dense city with no safe landing spot, so you're going to wipe out a lot of people when you crash. Worse, proposed "flying cars" aren't like airplanes or helicopters, and don't seem to have any capability of gliding (or autorotating) to a safe landing in an emergency. They generally only have active lift and no passive lift devices, meaning when the engine dies, you fall like a rock.
There's a reason why the FAA is so strict about who's allowed to fly airplanes.
I'm happy to chuck in an extra couple of bucks so that some local kid keeps their job.
Sorry, that was no whoosh. Your post wasn't funny at all, it read like a predictable response to concerns over large numbers of poorly-trained pilots by comparing them to today's poorly-trained drivers. There simply wasn't a hint of humor or sarcasm there at all. No, you don't need a smiley-face to indicate sarcasm with intelligent readers, but you do need something written in an intelligent way that can be seen as sarcasm by literate, native readers. Your simple one-liner was not. Re-reading it now, even trying to see the sarcasm there, I do not.
Bah, for good predictions of the future, it's the Ladies' Home Journal or nothing.
http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2007/4/17/what-may-happen-in-the-next-hundred-years-ladies-home-journa.html