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This 1981 BYTE Magazine Cover Explains Why We're So Bad At Tech Predictions
harrymcc (1641347) writes "If you remember the golden age of BYTE magazine, you remember Robert Tinney's wonderful cover paintings. BYTE's April 1981 cover featured an amazing Tinney image of a smartwatch with a tiny text-oriented interface, QWERTY keyboard, and floppy drive. It's hilarious — but 33 years later, it's also a smart visual explanation of why the future of technology so often bears so little resemblance to anyone's predictions. I wrote about this over at TIME.com. 'Back then, a pundit who started talking about gigabytes of storage or high-resolution color screens or instant access to computers around the world or built-in cameras and music players would have been accused of indulging in science fiction.'"
Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has
a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk
storage, a screen resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, relies entirely on
voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300.
What's the first question that the computer community asks?
"Is it PC compatible?"
(Source unknown...)
No sig today...
...isn't too far removed from a micro-SD card.
C'mon, it's entirely obvious that that "PC on a watch" painting is a rather clever piece of irony or even satire, not a meaningful prediction of an actual future piece of technology.
That doesn't mean I disagree with the point of the discussion, namely that we're not that great at predicting the directions of future tech, but using this magazine cover as a direct illustration of that is, IMHO, rather disingenuous.
Looking at the image it's totally clear to me that it's just visual metaphor. Clearly the artist was not suggesting that this was a workable idea, simply that watches would soon be like computers. This rather makes the rest of your analysis seems fragile.
FTFA:
No, it's not an explanation at all. It was intended as a metaphor for miniaturization of electronics. Noone in their right mind would take a full QWERTY keyboard with keys the size of pin heads literally.
If you're tempted to assume that the image was actually a serious depiction of what a future wrist computer might look like-well, no. Inside the magazine, which only had a brief editiorial about future computers, the editors pointed out that it wasn't a coincidence that it happened to be the April issue of Byte.
Anyone with half a brain could realize that watches would never have keyboards so tiny that the only button you could press using your fingers (more-so your nails) would be the space-bar. The rest of the image is plausible and not far removed from what we have now.
Ugh. Every once in a while I'm reminded of just how much we've lost (and continue to lose) with the death of print media. Byte was shut down before its time, but there used to be so many good zines like it.
I guess 2600 is still around, maybe I should get a subscription before I forget. Are there any other decent zines still in print? I should do an Ask Slashdot instead of just posting a comment...
The prediction fail with that watch is the idea that you need any form of input. These days, phones, tablets, and smartwatches are purely consumption devices, designed to pump content into your brain, force you to watch ads, and take money from your pocket. At least, that's what the big corporations want. How many futurists saw that coming?
We genuinely are bad at predicting the future of tech, but it's usually not because we're too fanciful. It's usually the opposite. Tech predictions usually fail because we're way too conservative. That's partly the reason behind this joke drawing in 1981. Now predictions about almost everything else - society, politics, and social adoption of tech - are usually way too optimistic. But tech predictions are way too pessimistic. Here's my effort at a perhaps better future prediction: We'll have much better AI than we do today and it will know everything about everyone. Yet it will not be google, or anything like google, but a service catering to intelligence agencies. Poverty and destruction of the ecosystem will continue at a worse pace than it is going now. We will have the capability to cheaply explore other planets, but we won't actually have a colony on any planets. We'll have the capability to feed everyone in the world yet global hunger will still exist and maybe even be worse than it is today. Rich nations will be richer and poor nations will be poorer. Strong AI will eventually come about then promptly proceed to kill everyone. Not because it hates us, just for liebensraum. Have a nice day.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
instant access to computers around the world
Actually, in 1981 the internet existed, you could FTP and use email, as long as you knew the bang path routing.
It wasn't for 2 more years after 1981 that I learned of it, but I knew people that were using it in the late 70's even. Contrary to what seems to be the popular public belief, the internet didn't start in the 1990's. That's just when the masses became aware of it, largely due to the influx of AOLers.
Granted it was much smaller then as far as number of connected machines.
I find this statement very ironic:
"I wrote about this over at TIME.com. 'Back then, a pundit who started talking about gigabytes of storage or high-resolution color screens or instant access to computers around the world or built-in cameras and music players would have been accused of indulging in science fiction.'"
Especially when you consider, science has a hard time predicting future trends and technologies, yet Science Fiction seems to have been fairly accurate in predicting, if not outright influencing, future technological trends.
For example: the waterbed, the waldo (as in glove, not Where's Waldo), cell phones, data pads (also called tablets). Even Kubrik's protrayal of space flight was more accurate than any other sci-fi of it's age, and certainly more realistic than what little was being released by the professional scientists.
If you want to see what is going to be trending in ten or twenty years, check out today's science fiction.
The cover art was delivering the message of the "wrist-worn/hand-held computer". It was neither joke nor prediction; it was symbolism.
Does anybody else want a mini-sd card form factored to look like a mini-floppy disk? I sure do. And now since I've mentioned it, you do too.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
My judgement is probably biased, because I loath my phone and its interruptions; but 'smart watches' appear to be devices that you attach to your wrist because your phone is configured to bother you so often that you need a second, more easily accessible, device to provide a summary of the incoming demand on your time and attention in order to see if you should follow through with taking your phone out of your pocket.
Maybe I'm just getting bitter in my old age and shouting at those damn smartphones to get off my lawn; but if something isn't important enough to take my phone out of my pocket for, the fact that I'm being alerted to it is a software configuration defect that should be solved by my phone shutting the hell up, not by it phoning my watch to demand attention.
"This 1981 BYTE Magazine Cover Explains Why We're So Bad At Tech Predictions"
No it doesn't. Even if the image was a depiction of a serious prediction (which it was/is not); it "explains" nothing. There is no "why" inherent in the image.
I always thought the most unlikely technological development in my lifetime was the handheld GPS device. It would be "most unlikely" because it required tremendous, simultaneous, and largely unforeseen advances in several different technologies, each of which was hard to predict in 1981. The list is at least:
1. Low power, low voltage, low noise L-band receivers, sensitive enough to be compatible with the weak signal coming from the internal antenna of a handheld device;
2. Stupendous amounts of digital signal processing, also at low power and low voltage;
3. Digital map databases of (substantially) every road in the world, accurate to a few meters;
4. A substantially world-wide, wideband wireless data link to get the digital map into the handheld device in the first place;
5. Low power, low voltage, high resolution, multicolor flat panel displays;
6. Gigabytes of low power, low voltage data storage memory; and
7. High energy density, high power density batteries capable of supplying the whole thing.
And, perhaps most impressive of all, the manufacturing technology to make all of the above small enough to fit in a handheld device, at a price low enough to sell by the zillions.
Of the list above, probably only #2 could have been predicted, and then only if one were willing to extrapolate the then-relatively-new Moore's Law by a very large amount. (Recall that Mead and Conway had only written their Introduction to VLSI systems the previous year; until then it was not clear that such complex chips could even be designed on human time scales, let alone built for a profit.)
The fact that a handheld GPS device is now an anachronism, since the technology is now small enough and low-power enough to be integrated into other handheld devices, like smart phones, pleases me no end.
From the article:
We tend to think that new products will be a lot like the ones we know. We shoehorn existing concepts where they don’t belong. Oftentimes, we don’t dream big enough.
I have found this to be a serious problem for system designers. When gathering requirements we often ask users what they want, or what they need. They then give us narrow response like "a button that does X" or "a screen that shows me Y". This can be valuable input, however these requests are based on their knowledge of what can be designed with "yesterday's" technology. A better question to ask is "what do you do?". I have found that responses to this question (purposefully open ended) give the system designers the freedom to streamline the users job, and tools that will actually make them more productive.
Paging through that magazine reminded me of why I got into computer engineering to begin with... I remember looking forward to each magazine, for the various programming quickies... I remember waiting for my first PCB etching kit so that I could design my own circuit boards...
Sigh.
When men were real men and computer engineers were real engineers.
1. Introduction of the Osborne I portable.
2. Introduction of the Sony 3.5" floppy disk (875K!).
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
I remember reading one of Robert Heinlein's novels in which a character (Slipstick Libby, perhaps) was on a rocket ship and dealing with a computer. Via punch cards.
" why the future of technology so often bears so little resemblance to anyone's predictions"
It seems to me that most predictions were dead on accurate. I have a freaking Star Trek tablet that the captain used for data and logging, Giant display screen with the world on it in every home, communicate around the globe over light or via magical robots in the sky( satellites) , freaking dick tracy watches have existed for 3 years now (search ebay for "gsm watch") etc... Cars are about to drive themselves, Airplanes have flown themselves for decades. etc....
I'm thinking the author has zero clue as to what he is talking about in tech let alone predictions that were made in the past and how dead on accurate they were.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.