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.
Here's something I've noticed about looking back at predictions of the future: They're all wrong, but some people are bound and determined to claim some of them are more-or-less accurate even if it means twisting the author's words beyond all reason. Therefore, someone who predicted a home news service based around everyone having a Telex terminal in their home will be hailed as predicting the Internet.
It's something that always happens. I don't know why.
This is why Nostradamus was one of the best at prediction, all of his predictions were incredibly vague when you look at them objectively and can be twisted to foretold almost any major world event.
Hence, modern day adherents of astrology. There is something in the human mind that wants to conform vague patterns to experienced instance, for whatever reason.
I think you know that nothing is easier than diagnosing the world's ills, and nothing harder than inventing a realistic remedy.
Certainly, but I'm also trying to point out that anyone who thinks they fully understand the world, well enough to predict it ahead of time without imposing their predictions on reality themselves, is almost definitely wrong.
The optimist is wrong. The pessimist is wrong. The world will get worse and better, in ways we don't expect. The things we expect for the future are mostly extrapolations of the present anyway, and mostly won't happen.
And most of the world's problems are either self-imposed or get solved by the long, unacknowledged efforts of hundreds of thousands of people slowly chipping away at them...
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.
No, I felt that they path of America in _Sheep_ is what they folks protesting for #occupy see, and I see breakdowns of basic services like water Sanitation in California cities where a combination of budget cuts and corrupt operators combine to put the public in danger.
But I totally concede the point that looking at past predictions is at least as interpretive as the predictions looking forward are. I saw some things in Brunner that really resonated with the future, I saw few things in the LA Times piece, but those were my interpretations of them.
It makes me think about the "thing" that will be obvious in 25 years that isn't even on our radar now. Candidates might be unlimited fusion power, or space travel, or infinite bandwidth, or global transportation, or a completely different climate or lunar colonies. Clearly you can't know what you can't know.
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.
The other day, my daughter brought me a CD off the shelf and asked me to play it. Well, the CD player was all the way over there, terribly inconvenient, while my phone with Spotify was in my pocket. CD went back on the shelf, music played from the cloud.
"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).
I don't think it tweets anything automatically. It just has an interface to twitter (for when you need to tweet something but you phone is all the way upstairs). No one in that house has a twitter account so it's never been tested.
Slightly more useful is the screen that can be used as an electronic whiteboard to leave notes. In practice that got used a lot in the first month and then never again (the interface is just too clunky).
I think it's interesting to note that the technology for a refrigerator that can automatically take inventory has been available for years. We don't actually have them because it would require a lot of cooperation among vendors (e.g. putting RFID tags in everything) that most have no incentive for.
"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:
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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.
The difference is that projects like the internet were incremental. At no single point did it require "Billions in infrastructure"; to start it basically required just a couple of modems (which aren't fundamentally complex) and it ran off the existing POTS lines. It could grow organically, unlike major construction works.
This also seems true of most successful "startups" which rarely blow up overnight but build incrementally over years (e.g. Skype, Pinterest, Google, Facebook, GitHub, FeedBurner.. vs Cuil, Color, and other "next big thing" flash in a pans)
> The difference is that projects like the internet were incremental.
That's the funny part -- one could argue that, because it was incremental, someone ought to have seen what was coming. But instead it was much like the early days of television -- the experts thought it was a gimmick, a fad that people would get tired of, then return to radio and printed matter.
Or mobile phones (and network of 1000s of towers) for everyone up to and including a goat herder in botswana. When the mass market gets a hold of something, we can move mountains.
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.
It's also interesting that we finally got (reasonably large and reasonably affordable) displays that display text with true print quality less than a year ago.
Really? I remember that luggable computers became laptop computers around then, and people were predicting even smaller laptops with touchscreens because Alan Kay described such a thing called the Dynabook. The Radio Shack Tandy TRS-80 model 100 came out in 1984, and it dominated the tiny-laptop market for some years.
Star trek missed somethings with thus tablet/pads. Each one seemed to only store 1 books worth of content. You can sometimes see people in the show using or handling a dozen tablets/pads. They seemed to miss that storage size would increase a lot.
You're pressuming the only cost is the price of the iPad. What about the luggage space each one takes up? What about the extra weight you have to carry? What about the mental processing of trying to remember what book/film/app/etc. is on which iPad? Why take 10 iPads on holidays when you can just take one?
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.
I beg to differ. We already have walking and object handling robots and their agility is rapidly increasing. In the future we will have to deal with the aging population. As the quality of life increases and more people get university education, the rate of birth declines. Then who will take care of all those old men and women? We need household robots and they will be invented in Japan if not in some other place. They will be a good expensive item to mass produce and sell.
Japanese are incredibly xenophobic, it makes more financial sense just to import housekeepers from the Philippines or Indonesia, but many don't like the idea of that so they'll develop household robots instead (lucky for us!). Also, the rise of China set manufacturing robots back by about 10 or 15 years; we are just now beginning to recover.
Japanese are incredibly xenophobic, it makes more financial sense just to import housekeepers from the Philippines or Indonesia, but many don't like the idea of that so they'll develop household robots instead
With the housing so limited in places like Tokyo, wouldn't it make more financial sense to get a robot you can store in a closet than hire a live-in housekeeper?
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.
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.
The iPhone * was the device to end all pub arguments. Important Things (i.e. pointless trivia) were suddenly all available in your pocket, whenever you wanted
Incidentally, this has also led to much much harder pub quiz questions - previously "who won the world cup in 1956" or whatever became University Challenge-style "Which team, whose mascot's species rhymes with the month of their founding, became embroiled in scandal in 1967 when their manager at the time was caught with a prostitute on Dartmoor..." -- i.e. questions designed to be ungoogleable (a verb people would never have predicted in 1988.)
Fun fact: Settling pub arguments was why the Guinness Book of Records was written. The idea being that publicans can buy a copy of this book to keep in the bar. When patrons are getting into an argument, the publican can look it up in the book and settle it.
That query is interesting. I wonder if IBM's Watson would outperform google on those types of detailed questions, without human intervention. Just take the top-ranked google response against Watson.
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.
Re: high-tech schools. I read that and was disappointed. Learning isn't about flash and glamour. I don't think our schools are any worse off because they lack immersive visual displays. The more interesting applications of technology for learning are availability of knowledge (encyclopedias and libraries at your fingertips) and personalized interactive education (like the Primer from Diamond Age). Right now most educational software is primitive but the potential is huge, but nobody's invested much in it yet.
I thought the smart classroom description was pretty spot-on. The elementary school classrooms that I am familiar with do have large computer displays with interactive capabilities, where students can participate individually from their seat.
> 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.
If it wasn't for the Green Revolution in the 70's, then global famine would have been a very real possibility. Shows to tell you that one can't use past trends to predict the future.
"The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself."
- Club of Rome, premier environmental think-tank, consultants to the United Nations, (a statement from the 1970s, if I'm not mistaken)
In a sense, the past can be used to predict the future, via movements and policies (usually backed by the same entities, IMO). If someone's fist, for example, is coming at you, the best thing is not to let it hit you (and therefore stop the motion) but to use its momentum to guide it where you want it to go. Meaning movements and policies may often start out small but when they grow they often become guided.
It's a great thing to take care of the planet we live on but one must be weary of the initiatives piggybacking on such an idea. Incremental change is pretty much a perfect weapon.
The Green Revolution consisted of getting the best known farming techniques into wide use, and massive adoption of irrigation and artificial fertilizer. We don't have huge reserves of fresh water or petroleum or untested ag science that will let us further increase any of those reliably. I don't see us avoiding famine other than a rapid buildup in nuclear energy which we haven't started.
If we manage to get a better supply of energy we can desalinate sea water. Fusion is always 30 years in the future, but I think solar+wind+storage(hydrogen?) could do it. This is being worked on. Also, a great part of the current production is wasted, which could give us some more time.
There is also the option of building farm skyscrapers [1]; I've seen an acticle about a test run recently. However, these also need a lot of energy.
I think it can be done. The greatest problem I see is the upcoming climate change which will force us to change a lot of the traditional agricultural patterns and which could be very unforgiving.
The problem is not the increase of temperature or the rise in sea level (except for Asia), but the change in precipitation patterns. What we need is more information and the ability to share and get the information from/to everyone involved, especially the small farmers in remote communities.
Academics were looking at the global population growth curve and extrapolating. They rightly predicted that exponential growth couldn't go on forever, so they predicted disaster. But they weren't willing or able to predict the degree to which the 1st world would be able to insulate itself from the population and food dynamics of the 3rd.
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.
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.