I think the real test of a futurist's predictions, in order to determine if we have in fact arrived in the future, is not to see what came true and what did not come true.
No, the real test is to see how many predicting things make you stop and say, "wait, they didn't already have that back then?"
I stopped several times at the 6AM section and realized I thought something predicted had always worked that way. I would think this only works when the predictions are from before you were born, but I was certainly alive in 1988 and I can't for the life of me remember a time without smart thermostats that run on a schedule or coffee makers with simple timers. When you're astonished that something basic now wasn't already common when the prediction was made (within reason), that's when you're definitely living in the future, even if you're still waiting for your flying car.
I often think of things the opposite way. As I grew up I always thought everything had only worked the way it did since the time I was born, and then I'm surprised to find out that it was working that way for 10+ years before that.
Actually, they did have a lot of that back then, I'm not sure why the author thought it was so fantastically futuristic. Coffee makers with timers are old as dirt, and the heating system is not terribly more advanced than lots of systems in existence back then.
the real test is to see how many [predictions] make you stop and say, "wait, they didn't already have that back then?"
This is a better test because puts the onus on the original author writing honestly about what exists at the time of writing, rather than on making really good predictions.
Wow, that is great. When people extrapolate out the bad things in their life to predict a dystopian future, they should read something like this. It totally reinforces the axiom that you can't know what you can't know. Or more simply you can't predict innovation. The only person who came even remotely close was John Brunner [1] whose novel "The Sheep Look Up" might seem obvious now but was written in 1972.
I don't know what 25 years from now the world will look like but I am pretty sure that 99% of us trying to guess will get it wrong.
From the Wikipedia description, I think "The Sheep Look Up" also didn't come remotely close.
"By the end of the book rioting and civil unrest sweep the United States, due to a combination of poor health, poor sanitation, lack of food, lack of services, ineffectiveness of services (medical, policing), disillusionment with government/companies, oppressive government, civil unrest, high incidence of birth defects (pollution-induced), and other factors; all services (military, government, private, infrastructure) break down."
The economy outside the valley sucks, but I think we're a long way from that description.
If we're going to plump for prescient John Brunner books Shockwave Rider was a better book; and may have been closer to the mark in some respects. And I think the protagonist of that book would be someone most HN readers could identify with, the super smart genius trying hard to outrace disaster and remain human at the same time.
Are you kidding? America in _Sheep_ is decaying so badly that at the very end of the book a guy in Ireland sees a freaking dust cloud on the Western horizon because that's all that's left of the United States.
They seemed to do a lot of inserting of laser discs and paying money for 200 year old music.
Ito likes one symphony so much that Bill records the whole piece on a laser disc, telling the cable company to bill his bank account for the recording, and gives it to Ito as a gift.
In today's 2013, Bill's cable company is unlikely to allow the burning of discs, even at a price. If it does, it will be against the license agreement to give one as a gift. When Ito takes the disc back to Tokyo, it won't work due to region locking DRM.
Or maybe I'm too cynical. Ito can just pull up the info on the recording and torrent it himself from TPB.
Bill hands Ito a cd with a symphony and mp3s for 20 other albums burned on it and Ito shows him the Spotify play list on his iPhone that already has all of them on it.
"For instance, Schinella predicts, we may one day be able to drive around Los Angeles in a "sports-utility" vehicle that can go from being a two-seat sports car to a beach buggy--thanks to a plug-in module."
Amazing that they can be so right and so wrong at the same time.
Along the same lines, I liked the part about the husband trying to phone his wife and not reaching her (she wasn't at work or at home) but hooks up to his networked fridge and gets an inventory remotely.
Totally underestimates telecommunications, but grossly overestimates standard fridge technology. :-) (though my parents do have a Samsung fridge that can tweet for some reason).
"Population is the primary consideration. Currently 12.6 million, it's expected to reach 18.3 million in the Los Angeles area by 2010."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles
"The city is the focal point of the larger Los Angeles–Long Beach–Santa Ana metropolitan statistical area and Greater Los Angeles Area region, which contain 12,828,837 and nearly 18 million people respectively as of 2010, making it one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world[6] and the second largest in the United States."
Reading through the sci-fi tropes of this article, they could have just gone with "2013 is the same as 1988 but with networked computers", and saved a great deal of paper.
25 years is not remotely long enough for a city in the developed world to have more than a smattering of new buildings, and yet the future LA they came up with is utterly transfigured into a Syd Mead utopia. I love a bit of Mead, but Blade Runner was set in 2019, and I'm not sure that our attack ships have even reached the Shoulder of Orion yet, much less caught fire!
So what will 2038 look like? Pretty much like 2013, but most of the cars will be electric. But they'll still look like cars, not space-cruisers, and they won't fly (often).
Right. The only technology that has over-delivered in the last 25 years is computer hardware (MIPS, networking, and storage). Of course, this has had incredible nth order effects on society, but the rest of tech (cancer research, energy, transportation) is not ridiculously beyond 25 years ago.
I guess I should also mention what's at the end too:
<!--Good with data?-->
<!--Tired of grinding on the same old apps?-->
<!--Want to use your skills in defense of truth, justice and the American way?-->
<!--Email [email protected] and let me know you're out there.-->
It seems the least accurate parts of predictions like these are always the parts that would require billions in infrastructure changes or new construction. We simply don't build stuff that fast anymore or have the drive to pay for it. Metro Rail is the only large scale, new infrastructure project I can think of in LA over that time, but it's still based on old technologies used in other cities for decades.
> It seems the least accurate parts of predictions like these are always the parts that would require billions in infrastructure changes or new construction.
There are also the predictions that are never made because they would require "billions in infrastructure changes or new construction", like the Internet, which no one predicted.
Wow. That smart car piece almost describes the Tesla. Especially the whole part about there being more storage space. It made me think of front cargo area on the Tesla since there is no engine.
However, they failed to predict that half of America still believes bigger, louder, and burn more fuel is the way to go... Not to mention actively work to suppress progress in this area.
I don't understand. Pick up any sci-fi movie, article or a book describing 25 years from now and it will come to life. Doesn't our curiosity about future work like a catalyst for the mechanism of self-fulfilling prophecy?
25 years seem hardly news worthy. Had it been 100 years ago, well yes, that could probably be a startling one.
I find it interesting that as recent as 25 years ago they were still suggesting that we would used advanced technology to print off a newspaper instead of read it off a screen.
A lot of even older future predictions contained the same thing. It must not have been until the web come along and got widespread adoption that people got it.
"In 1938 Buckminster Fuller coined the term ephemeralization to describe the increasing tendency of physical machinery to be replaced by what we would now call software. The reason tablets are going to take over the world is not (just) that Steve Jobs and Co are industrial design wizards, but because they have this force behind them. The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas. No one who has studied the history of technology would want to underestimate the power of that force."
>>>I find it interesting that as recent as 25 years ago they were still suggesting that we would used advanced technology to print off a newspaper instead of read it off a screen.
Twenty-five years ago, most screens were crap. And we're talking about reading here, which is done in a lean back manner.
It comes of people stopping too soon when asking "why?" From the perspective of 1988 it would seem relatively unreasonable to read an entire newspaper on a monitor. And one might easily imagine a future where the contents of a newspaper could be available digitally without re-examining that conclusion. A monitor then was low-resolution, had poor color reproduction, was stationary and heavy (being CRT based), and was an expensive shared family resource. Of course today displays can be cheap, lightweight, thin, portable, and high resolution, so some of the advantages of print fade away.
It's funny, in 1988 Star Trek: The Next Generation was running, and they had handheld and tablet computers, but few people in 1988 thought we would have such things in a mere 25 years instead of in the far future.
I guess they were too optimistic on the home robot. Hopefully, they will start to become useful in the next few years. I personally would like to see Microsoft, Google and the other big tech brands launch home robots.
I think home robots are a non-starter. They're seductive ideas because they duplicate things we already know (servants). But robots and automation don't work the way humans do, and there's no reason to assume that there will be a point where that stops being true. It used to be that if you were wealthy you had servants, or a service, who would clean your clothing by hand, wash your dishes, cook your meals, etc. Today automation has changed much of that. You have specialized devices which make washing clothes and dishes far less of a chore. You also have innovations in the kitchen which make cooking far less of a chore (everything from electric ovens to stand mixers to refrigeration to a wide variety of prepared or partially prepared foods and so forth) and you have a significant increase in the ability to acquire pre-made foods (at restaurants, fast food places, delivery, frozen foods, etc.)
By the same token I don't imagine that further automation in the home will necessarily take an anthropomorphic shape. It'll be things we haven't even thought of yet, tasks we don't appreciate are time sinks or perhaps don't consider to be automate-able. Look at the roomba, for example.
Moderately entertaining. It's interesting how many things they got "right" but missed the point entirely. For example, somehow the kid has a hand-held computer but the authors fail to grok the implications. Also, I find it amusing that the authors imagined live-in robots and yet can think of little better use to put them to than pouring a bowl of cereal in the morning. I can fairly confidently say that if there is one chore that doesn't need automating it is pouring cereal.
It's also interesting how pessimistic the authors were about things like pollution (smog, ozone layer), traffic, and water supply.
It's also interesting the things we take for granted now that were missed completely. One I noticed everywhere was wireless communication. (Plugging your key card in to the wall and the car rather than near field communication, plugging the iphone into the desk rather than just using bluetooth (or forget about the desk comp entirely and connect to the cloud), etc.)
Edit: Actually, at the end he uses a remote control to turn off the lights and lock the doors... so I guess that's another example of failing to grok the implications! Still, interesting in general. Some of the things we don't have yet - like the high-tech schools - look like pretty clear areas for improvement.
People don't even understand the implications after the tech arrives.
I have a fond memory of walking around San Francisco at a conference with a bunch of friends, perhaps a year after the original iPhone was released, and most of them had one. We all decided to go to a particular restaurant or bar, and there was a long discussion about where it was. Finally I pointed out that at least half the people trying to figure out where it was had a device in their pocket that could simply tell them in a few seconds. They just hadn't thought of it.
I still see people today, techies too, doing the same basic thing. It's getting less common, but it's still pretty common.
> It's also interesting how pessimistic the authors were about things like pollution (smog, ozone layer), traffic, and water supply.
I'm always amused at how many people in the 1970s were predicting global famine to hit the far-future world of a decade ago. Food lines and meat rationing and everything else in NYC, 2001.
Instead, we got an epidemic of Type II diabetes. So it goes.
Not so much on how Sports Utility vehicles work, but about a sonar shield (proximity braking) and computer system optimizations, as well as the diverse range of car types to fit niche needs. Pretty awesome. Obviously this makes some sense since the people they interviewed were working on the bleeding edge of car development at the time, but still, most of this stuff didn't manifest heavily even in the 90s.
I don't think it's as prescient as it seems. Imagine someone making the same claim that there would be a diverse range of car types to fit niche needs from the perspective of 1963 to 1988. They'd be just as right. In 1988 people drove sedans, and compact cars, and 2 door sport-coupes, and luxury cars, and pick-up trucks, and vans, and mini-vans, and 4-wheel drive vehicles, and muscle cars, and station wagons, and so forth. The diversity of cars today is hardly greater than it was in 1988.
Also, things like automatic braking and computer optimization of cars were old hat by 1988. Electronic fuel injection was introduced in mass market cars in the '70s and commonplace by the late '80s. And radar based automatic collision avoidance systems were patented back in the mid '70s.
[+] [-] ghc|13 years ago|reply
No, the real test is to see how many predicting things make you stop and say, "wait, they didn't already have that back then?"
I stopped several times at the 6AM section and realized I thought something predicted had always worked that way. I would think this only works when the predictions are from before you were born, but I was certainly alive in 1988 and I can't for the life of me remember a time without smart thermostats that run on a schedule or coffee makers with simple timers. When you're astonished that something basic now wasn't already common when the prediction was made (within reason), that's when you're definitely living in the future, even if you're still waiting for your flying car.
[+] [-] blakestein|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opminion|13 years ago|reply
This is a better test because puts the onus on the original author writing honestly about what exists at the time of writing, rather than on making really good predictions.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
I don't know what 25 years from now the world will look like but I am pretty sure that 99% of us trying to guess will get it wrong.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up
[+] [-] epicureanideal|13 years ago|reply
"By the end of the book rioting and civil unrest sweep the United States, due to a combination of poor health, poor sanitation, lack of food, lack of services, ineffectiveness of services (medical, policing), disillusionment with government/companies, oppressive government, civil unrest, high incidence of birth defects (pollution-induced), and other factors; all services (military, government, private, infrastructure) break down."
The economy outside the valley sucks, but I think we're a long way from that description.
[+] [-] olefoo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vivtek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marshray|13 years ago|reply
Ito likes one symphony so much that Bill records the whole piece on a laser disc, telling the cable company to bill his bank account for the recording, and gives it to Ito as a gift.
In today's 2013, Bill's cable company is unlikely to allow the burning of discs, even at a price. If it does, it will be against the license agreement to give one as a gift. When Ito takes the disc back to Tokyo, it won't work due to region locking DRM.
Or maybe I'm too cynical. Ito can just pull up the info on the recording and torrent it himself from TPB.
[+] [-] davidroberts|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haberman|13 years ago|reply
Amazing that they can be so right and so wrong at the same time.
[+] [-] __david__|13 years ago|reply
Totally underestimates telecommunications, but grossly overestimates standard fridge technology. :-) (though my parents do have a Samsung fridge that can tweet for some reason).
[+] [-] kingkawn|13 years ago|reply
"Population is the primary consideration. Currently 12.6 million, it's expected to reach 18.3 million in the Los Angeles area by 2010."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles "The city is the focal point of the larger Los Angeles–Long Beach–Santa Ana metropolitan statistical area and Greater Los Angeles Area region, which contain 12,828,837 and nearly 18 million people respectively as of 2010, making it one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world[6] and the second largest in the United States."
[+] [-] rvkennedy|13 years ago|reply
25 years is not remotely long enough for a city in the developed world to have more than a smattering of new buildings, and yet the future LA they came up with is utterly transfigured into a Syd Mead utopia. I love a bit of Mead, but Blade Runner was set in 2019, and I'm not sure that our attack ships have even reached the Shoulder of Orion yet, much less caught fire!
So what will 2038 look like? Pretty much like 2013, but most of the cars will be electric. But they'll still look like cars, not space-cruisers, and they won't fly (often).
[+] [-] aswanson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikecane|13 years ago|reply
I guess I should also mention what's at the end too:
[+] [-] petercooper|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lutusp|13 years ago|reply
There are also the predictions that are never made because they would require "billions in infrastructure changes or new construction", like the Internet, which no one predicted.
[+] [-] vinhboy|13 years ago|reply
However, they failed to predict that half of America still believes bigger, louder, and burn more fuel is the way to go... Not to mention actively work to suppress progress in this area.
[+] [-] monsterix|13 years ago|reply
25 years seem hardly news worthy. Had it been 100 years ago, well yes, that could probably be a startling one.
[+] [-] tempestn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robryan|13 years ago|reply
A lot of even older future predictions contained the same thing. It must not have been until the web come along and got widespread adoption that people got it.
[+] [-] patrickk|13 years ago|reply
"In 1938 Buckminster Fuller coined the term ephemeralization to describe the increasing tendency of physical machinery to be replaced by what we would now call software. The reason tablets are going to take over the world is not (just) that Steve Jobs and Co are industrial design wizards, but because they have this force behind them. The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas. No one who has studied the history of technology would want to underestimate the power of that force."
http://www.paulgraham.com/tablets.html
[+] [-] tolmasky|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikecane|13 years ago|reply
Twenty-five years ago, most screens were crap. And we're talking about reading here, which is done in a lean back manner.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|13 years ago|reply
It's funny, in 1988 Star Trek: The Next Generation was running, and they had handheld and tablet computers, but few people in 1988 thought we would have such things in a mere 25 years instead of in the far future.
[+] [-] zobzu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johncarpinelli|13 years ago|reply
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/stories/study-c...
I guess they were too optimistic on the home robot. Hopefully, they will start to become useful in the next few years. I personally would like to see Microsoft, Google and the other big tech brands launch home robots.
[+] [-] tempestn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|13 years ago|reply
By the same token I don't imagine that further automation in the home will necessarily take an anthropomorphic shape. It'll be things we haven't even thought of yet, tasks we don't appreciate are time sinks or perhaps don't consider to be automate-able. Look at the roomba, for example.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|13 years ago|reply
It's also interesting how pessimistic the authors were about things like pollution (smog, ozone layer), traffic, and water supply.
[+] [-] tempestn|13 years ago|reply
Edit: Actually, at the end he uses a remote control to turn off the lights and lock the doors... so I guess that's another example of failing to grok the implications! Still, interesting in general. Some of the things we don't have yet - like the high-tech schools - look like pretty clear areas for improvement.
[+] [-] mikeash|13 years ago|reply
I have a fond memory of walking around San Francisco at a conference with a bunch of friends, perhaps a year after the original iPhone was released, and most of them had one. We all decided to go to a particular restaurant or bar, and there was a long discussion about where it was. Finally I pointed out that at least half the people trying to figure out where it was had a device in their pocket that could simply tell them in a few seconds. They just hadn't thought of it.
I still see people today, techies too, doing the same basic thing. It's getting less common, but it's still pretty common.
[+] [-] derleth|13 years ago|reply
I'm always amused at how many people in the 1970s were predicting global famine to hit the far-future world of a decade ago. Food lines and meat rationing and everything else in NYC, 2001.
Instead, we got an epidemic of Type II diabetes. So it goes.
[+] [-] danjones|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codezero|13 years ago|reply
Not so much on how Sports Utility vehicles work, but about a sonar shield (proximity braking) and computer system optimizations, as well as the diverse range of car types to fit niche needs. Pretty awesome. Obviously this makes some sense since the people they interviewed were working on the bleeding edge of car development at the time, but still, most of this stuff didn't manifest heavily even in the 90s.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|13 years ago|reply
Also, things like automatic braking and computer optimization of cars were old hat by 1988. Electronic fuel injection was introduced in mass market cars in the '70s and commonplace by the late '80s. And radar based automatic collision avoidance systems were patented back in the mid '70s.
[+] [-] mikecane|13 years ago|reply
Yes. Now Bill can marvel at the Corporate Playpen it's become, just like New York's Times Square.
Really, is that a future real people want?
[+] [-] randallsquared|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mynameishere|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bornonmars|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikecane|13 years ago|reply
Hackers Get Cat Of Their Own http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-08-14/entertainment/...
There's not even a Wikipedia entry for it. Shame.
[+] [-] tragomaskhalos|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delinka|13 years ago|reply