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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."
hopefully there will at least be some snide references to 'french postcards'
-I'm just sayin'
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I have been trying to get my local postal carrier to deliver my mail to my balcony via Ultra Light, but she keeps pointing out that that would expensive, dangerous and I only live on the 2nd floor. Some people just can't see the future.
Linux O Muerte!
They missed the 3 inventions that have done the most to promote health and prolong human life expectancy: toilets, refrigerators, and water treatment plants.
Many of the things we know today, and even take for granted, would be seen as pure magic to a person from the 19th century.
Take for instance something we are all on (precariously) friendly terms with, like the integrated circuit.
The finer points of how an IC work (such as the quantum nature of the bandgap, especially at nanoscopic scales) would be nearly incomprehensible to such a person.
Fiberoptic communication, with such strange things as helical polarization would bake their noodles, not to mention such curious things as the GPS network. (Einstein didn't come along until much later. GPS wouldn't work without SR, due to earth's frame dragging.)
Or even just the workings inside a cellphone, or just a microwave oven.
They might have been able to imagin the basic concept of the device, (eg, "portable wireless telephone"), but the signal encoding stratagems used to get the most from limited commodities of wireless band? In an age without computers, the math involved would be frightening! Something like 4096bit RSA ecryption would induce nightmares. (Just the mere notion that somebody might be willing to *try* factoring a number like that would cause dumbstruck expressions of incredulity. Let alone people routinely attempting to attack the problem from a myriad of different theoretical angles, and the impetus to do so.)
Others that would floor people from the 19th century, would be ENGINEERING microbes. They often felt that complete eradication of germs was desirable. (Just read the last part of "the time machine") As such, the very idea of creating new ones would be cognitatively jarring. Using engineered viruses for gene therapy and the like would seem backward and regressive to their views.
Wells' time traveler would be astounded, and confounded simultaneously by our modern world.
Here's a clever thought experiment for you: imagine H.G. Wells dropping in for a sunset view from his time machine at a nude beach, asking politely for a newspaper and being laughed at, going to a delapidated paper book library, and told by a 10 year old that he could have all the books in the entire world litterally in the palm of his hand. Expose him to the radical idea of the internet, then expose him to 4chan (or worse, a site dedicated to 'rule 34'), and reveal the shocking truth that most people use the internet for pornographic entertainment instead of personal improvement. (Remember, 19th century sexual repressedness)
My money would be on the time traveler being convinced we are all incurably insane, rushing back to his time machine, and wondering how it all went so terribly wrong.
Really, our world more strongly resembles the various "decadent decline" models of the fiction of their time, where people are depicted as being unacceptably vulgar, evil, and jaded. (Take for instance, the descriptions of the decadent residents of k'n-yan, from lovecraft's novels) A short, 10 minute exposure to witnessing an online FPS shooter, with 8 year olds "teabagging" people, with the conception that "this routinely happens" would surely sinch it.
Our world would traumatize people from the 19th century.
What's wrong with a Radium Fireplace? Keeps the place nice and warm.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
A fool-proof containment unit for radium wouldn't heat the house...
I think our predictions of the future (regarding the singularity, robots, biogenetics, wealth, energy, and space exploration) will be as off based as these were.
This is interesting in its own right as it shows just how myopic these visions were.
I always laugh when I see our future depicted in movies and TV shows. Looking at Star Trek, we see how much the architecture is so 1960's. The knobs and lights look right out of 1967. Even something like the CRT-TVs in UFO and Space 1999 are dated.
I probably should mod your great post up, but I'll post instead.
This reminds me more of the Douglas Adams Hitchhikers series science fiction, where Authur Dent gets stuck in an alien spaceship and alien people and it's all just weird and incomprehensible to him. That's what 100 years in the future would be to us without understanding the inbetween 99 years. Alien.
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.
But what's interesting, too, are the many things people from the 19th century could and did imagine, and thought relatively simple, which still elude us today.
Take dictation devices, for example. It's an incredible challenge for us to do a good enough job with speech recognition to use them for actually transcribing documents. Google Now and Siri are jokes by comparison with what many futurists in the 19th century thought wouldn't be that hard: how many of them would be able to fathom, being told about something like the Internet, that courts still have to use court reporters, and the majority of the magical systems of the future use substantially similar keyboards to what they were using then?
Or take robotics and automation: again, look at the predictions from these postcards, or from anything between 1880 and 1970 or so. How would your time traveller comprehend that we can engineer viruses and nanometer-scale computing devices, but can't build a reasonable device to cut someone's hair or do someone's makeup? In fact, we tend to be impressed by things like robot arms barely managing to flip a pancake, or humanoid robots slowly climbing stairs. For that matter, we're just now starting to manage automated cars, something that is everywhere in science fiction over the last century.
What tends to be impressive about these sorts of predictions is that there are so many things we take for granted that people from past eras couldn't begin to imagine, and so many things they could easily imagine that are nowhere near being possible.
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.)
I think you're way off the mark! I remember reading St Augustine's "City of God Against The Pagans" written in the early 400s. I was struck that my thought processes as a computer scientist were much closer to him than to my peers. He had the pedantic logical mind of a computer scientist. My favorite example is his version of the Cogito - "I know I exist. The skeptics say I am mistaken in this, but by the same token they say I am".
I think people from older eras were every bit as mentally adept and flexible as we are now, and more than we generally credit.
Let's look through your list...
The finer points of how an IC work (such as the quantum nature of the bandgap, especially at nanoscopic scales) would be nearly incomprehensible to such a person.
Incomprehensible to someone today also. I tried explaining N and P gaps to my wife without any success.
"Fiberoptic communication, with such strange things as helical polarization would bake their noodles, not to mention such curious things as the GPS network. (Einstein didn't come along until much later. GPS wouldn't work without SR, due to earth's frame dragging.)"
It wouldn't work without SR, true, but sextants and celestial navigation have been around for thousands of years, and by the 19th century they had damned fine instruments to measure celestial bodies including the moon. The idea of basing it off other more nearby celestial bodies would be easily understood. As for calculating exact position due to the differences in signals -- well, not much different from interferometry and "Newton's Fringes" (named after Newton of course).
"In an age without computers, the math involved would be frightening! Something like 4096bit RSA ecryption would induce nightmares."
They had many computers for celestial-navigation tables in the 18th century. Computer at this stage meant "person who performs computation", and they'd have entire halls full of them. And they had computers for artillery tables going back to the middle ages, where it was the bright mathematician hired by the local nobleman. The idea of upping the scale was already widespread. Charles Babbage (died 1871) was far more ambitious about what could be computed. He wouldn't have been frightened, not one bit. Say what you will about the 18th century, but they weren't unambitious about what they could achieve (at least not in the British Empire).
imagine H.G. Wells dropping in for a sunset view from his time machine at a nude beach, asking politely for a newspaper and being laughed at, going to a delapidated paper book library, and told by a 10 year old that he could have all the books in the entire world litterally in the palm of his hand. Expose him to the radical idea of the internet, then expose him to 4chan (or worse, a site dedicated to 'rule 34'), and reveal the shocking truth that most people use the internet for pornographic entertainment instead of personal improvement. (Remember, 19th century sexual repressedness)"
Whatever reason do you have to think that? Nothing of H.G.Well's writing suggests he'd be shocked. I reckon from his book "A Modern Utopia" that he's far more progressive than our own society today.
The Victorians were actually quite fond of pornography. So I don't think Mr. Wells would be shocked to learn that we are, too.
In other respects, though, I think your post is dead on.
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.)
We still don't have flying cars. It's clear that massive numbers of flying cars wouldn't work out well. But nobody has produced even a prototype of a useful thrust-type VTOL big enough to carry humans. One would have expected a military version by now. The stability and control problem is solved; little quadrotors under computer control are now incredibly maneuverable in tight spaces. Jet engines have enough power. The F-35 VTOL variant, like the Harrier, works, but the price tag is insane.
The problem is probably related to jet engine cost. Jet engines good enough for manned aircraft don't get significantly cheaper below 6-passenger bizjet size. That's why general aviation is still using pistons.
(Moller is part of the problem, not part of the solution.)
Looks like consumerism, a new luxury is created by media/culture and a few years later the market has it ready for you, you've been waiting for it, so it becomes a need you cannot live without.
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.)
Maybe you should read de Sade sometime. The days of Sodom contain stuff that would make even internet hardened people sick. We aren't talking about Goatse or 1cup anymore with this fellow, we are talking about stuff even hardcore bondage and fetish sites would not dare to show for real.
Airships (Zeppelins) are actually quite efficient and safe. Just don't use hydrogen: use helium and electric motors, powered by solar-charged batteries, and the whole thing is both cheap, safe and environmentally friendly. They offer the ability to fly into the center of a metropolis without polution and noise. I predict that they'll return soon, and we might still see a metropolis skyline filled with airships.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --