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These 19th Century Postcards Predicted Our Future
kkleiner writes "Starting in 1899, a commercial artist named Jean-Marc Côté and other artists were hired to create a series of picture cards to depict how life in France would look in a century's time. Sadly, they were never actually distributed. However, the only known set of cards to exist was discovered by Isaac Asimov, who wrote a book in 1986 called 'Futuredays' in which he presented the illustrations with commentary. What's amazing about this collection is how close their predictions were in a lot of cases, and how others are close at hand."
The problem with predictions is that if you make enough of them, whether vague or detailed, you'll find some of them came true. That is not surprising in and of itself, but some people take this as proof of something. But it's not proof, because they aren't looking at all the predictions that didn't come true, or weren't close. It's all about coincidence and the laws of probability -- things that are highly improbable by themselves can become highly probable with repetition or over time. So even if one of the greatest minds of the time predicted all these things for the future that came true, we cannot consider them in isolation -- we also have to consider all the things predicted that didn't come true.
Mr. Newton would have understood that as a scientist, and if he could be conjured up from the dead to utter a few words on this, he'd likely agree.
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They missed the 3 inventions that have done the most to promote health and prolong human life expectancy: toilets, refrigerators, and water treatment plants.
A fool-proof containment unit for radium wouldn't heat the house...
They're far too whimsical to be predictions of OUR present. They're best suited as material for a steampunk movie or anime, what people thought was possible using souped-up versions of the technology of the day. I doubt whether it's possible to predict what the future will look, although it should be possible to describe vaguely what type of technologies people will use. For example, it should be possible to describe a tablet computer in terms that a 19th century geek would understand, a portable magic lantern that can also serve as a camera, telephone, phonograph, etc. In a non-dystopian future, we're sure to have micro-versions of today's supercomputers, but whether it'll look like a smart phone, AR glasses, or something implanted inside our skulls is something for the next Steve Jobs to market to the gadget sheep of the future.
Worse.
The 1880s were still deely gripped by puritanism, social stratification as being a good thing, institutionalized racism, and a very narrow and rigid view of what was considered "acceptable", and "proper".
We aren't talking a comical spin on modern problems with aliens and silly technologies.
Think about what *we* consider unspeakable. THAT, times 9000.
I doubt that a 19th century time traveler would have a sufficiently powerful adjective to describe what he would see, and how he would percieve it.
I agree. And I doubt these were even "predictions", more like fun cliches and what-ifs. It's the same as how many movies think that everyone in the future will wear vinyl clothing.
It is painful trying to watch the writer compare the postcard to something either Google or Apple have made (rather than saying the generic term), then explaining that the prediction was "not far off".
Then to top it off, he states some of the postcards as bad ideas. Such as rapidly turning eggs into baby chicks. This idea could revolutionise the poultry industry! But it's bad! Then there's the heater with the glow: the author interprets it as radium, but it might just be electricity and be quite correct. Or it might be contained nuclear fusion, and the illustrator just got the timing wrong by 1000 years.
A pathetic, lame, cliched, "lol at predictions from the past" story. I find it interesting to see the pictures, but the commentary makes me cringe more than Cringely.
I agree. Explaining the extreme difficulty involved with machines even approaching that level of autonomous function would be hard to do indeed.
Even today, few people realize how excrutiatingly difficult AI really is. Something as intelligent as a mouse would be a radical accomplishment. (And we routinely make science fiction where AIs with superhuman intellect are commonplace...)
Like everything, the devil's in the details. Sadly, this is something that routinely goes unnoticed or unappreciated, even today, where the reality stares us brazenly in the face and mocks us openly. (How many times have you had to deal with the starry-eyed executive, who has "a great idea"?)
Many of the things we have today came from trying to solve the frustratingly difficult, but seemingly simple things people have imagined for ages. Like going to the moon. I would be hard pressed to make an all-inclusive list of things around me at this very moment that exist exclusively because we dared to tackle that seemingly simple problem, [which it turns out wasn't so simple.]
I just think it prudent for people daydreaming about the future to rationalize that the future world where your romantic idea becomes real, is one that you simply cannot understand, because of all the knowledge and social changes it brought in the intervening time.
When I think about a future with strong ai in it, I imagine a future where goatse-esque things are commonplace, and even appearing on things like gameshows. Essentially phillip k dick on an ecstacy and crack smoothie. (With barbituates and chocolate chips blended in.)
Looking at a lot of predictions of 'the future', a lot of them were right on, and a lot of them were "WTF".
I wonder what a prediction today, of 200 years in the future, would be. Life in 2212. We've been tainted by Star Trek, etc All that stuff should be possible, NOW! But what will it really be like?
My predictions:
1. We will have landed men on the Moon again.
2. We will have landed men on Mars (why? I don't know...)
3. There will have been another nuclear weapon used in anger (this leads to a major restructuring of global politics)
4. We still won't have anything like a warp drive
5. We will have actually come up with a better power source. Cold fusion or similar.
6. There will still be religious nutcases (See #3)
The issue is not the lack of logic, or having weaker minds. (The exact counter argument could be made, in fact. The greeks had an entire profession built around training people to remember huge volumes of information, for instance.)
The issue is the distance on cultural norms, and radical changes that disruptive technologies produce. (Compare the culture of the 80s, with that of 2012. What changed? What stayed the same? Why?)
As for the 1880s mathematitian being daunted by factoring a 4096 bit integer, on paper... approach this rationally.
A 4096 bit integer has more possible factors in an exhaustive search than there were human beings on the planet at the time. Assuming 100% utilization of 100% of the world population, factoring a single crypto block would take more time than the human race had previously existed up until that point. Even with technological devices of the time, running at a few hundred operations per second (per babbage), the absurdity of doing this so uncle sam wouldn't spy on your private correspondence would be dumbfounding.
(People used cryptograms back then, sure. But nothing approaching the "overkill" of modern cryptography. When we measure "time to factor complete space" in terms of "time before universe dies of heat death", using modern, multi-gigahertz machines with billions of FLOPS each, *and* ubiquity of such horsepower, doing it on PAPER would be laughable, and a good mathematician would point out how impractical that is. Its like inventing superliminal processing, only to get porno from the future.)
As for victorian era porno.. with exception to houses of ill repute, and dog and pony shows, the "pornography" of the era is easily trumped with a victoria's secret catalog. Goatse, tubgirl, and "2 girls, one cup" and their ilk would send victorians rushing for the door. Remember, "dog and pony" were the "extreme" of that era. The shit on the internet, both real and fake alike-- puts even the raciest stuff from that era to shame in terms of being scandalous.
While wells might be willing to have an open mind about the future, I think he would draw the line at child porn snuff films, and people using the greatest accomplishment since the library of alexandria to wipe their asses with. (Intellectually speaking.)