What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008? (Nov, 1968) | Hacker News Reader

What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008? (Nov, 1968)

blog.modernmechanix.com

45 pointsnreece53 comments

Basically, we got the things that depend on electronics (web, cell phones) and not the ones that depend on other technology (flying cars, domed cities, artificial organs).

I notice there's another way to partition that set: we got the things that don't require too much government involvement.

We got the cheap meat-like food, but from an innovation less benevolent than algae farms: factory-farmed meat.

Come to think of it, there turned out to be a similar workaround for the domed city problem: everyone just moved where the weather was good.

What's weirdest about this for me is that 1968 was the year we came to America. I remember 1968. It's kind of crazy to think there were a lot of people walking around then thinking we'd be travelling around in flying cars.

I think rather than government involvement, things that are largely physical are bound by stronger constraints. Also when it comes to things like intracity transportation we tend to underestimate old solutions like walking and riding.

France, some of western Europe, and Japan have already 220+ mph transportation, but in a train, and with heavy goverment subsidies, but still it is much safer, faster, and reliable then get stuck in a car in trafic. So, a goverment can actually achieve something good. The thinking back then was so car centric, that even in intercity traveling you had to had a car. Since cars would not be allowed into cities anyways (according to the prediction), wouldn't it made sense for trains?

The car szstem also enjoys huge government financing. Or who builds the streets in your country?

His description of credit cards and electronic "money" was spot on too. Once again - was mostly a technical problem.

The bottleneck seems to be energy. Electronics don't really require that much power compared to transportation and living space, and have been able to make "futuristic" advancements even with our reliance on primitive power sources (i.e. fossil fuels).

Not that this has necessarily been a bad thing; perhaps better for human evolution to have the free worldwide communication system that boosts our intelligence before we get boundless energy potential.

As far as medical advancements go, well, it's hard to hack yourself. I'll expect the flying cars well before the intelligence pills.

It is possible today to create airplanes that use less energy per mile than a good car, traveling at higher speeds. I think PG's comment about government involvement is very relevant here - the reason such airplanes aren't the norm is bureaucracy, politics and law. Intellectual inertia.

The problem regarding personal air travel is almost purely political. The only real technical hurdle I can see is the problem of getting them into and out of the air: we haven't yet created airplanes that both are energy-efficient in the air and land or take off vertically. Tilt-rotor designs are the most promising candidate I can see for this (you need wings to travel cheaply), but they would have to be under computer control unless we want reckless pilots to die in droves while landing. The efficient planes I am talking about here don't need a mile of runway - 500 meters is plenty.

In case my first sentence draws criticism off the bat, please consider that there are four-seater, canard airplane designs that cruise at 170 mph at 5 gallons/hour = 34 MPG. And this is with today's airplane engine technology, which hasn't changed since the 1960s. The problems which then remain are infrastructure, training and inertia, which are purely political. I have confidence that we will eventually have personal flying vehicles ("flying cars"), but this shows that the problems faced are anything but technological in nature. People ridiculing the old notion of a near-term "flying car" are bashing the wrong people. Why do the scientists always get the blame when it's just cultural inertia that is the problem?

I'm still holding out hope for autonomous cars within a decade. Technology-wise we're pretty much there. The hard part will be convincing the public and government regulators to accept them.

not gonna happen. People Just wont trust it. Just like mass trasport with "flying cars" are not going to happen this century. High speed rail (200+ mph), and smaller cars for city transport will prevail. Wait until gas hits 6$/gallon, and then you will see the change on american attitudes to transport.

I remind you that the population density of USA is about 31/km², while europe's is about 112/km², and appart NYC, there are no really very dense areas in this country. Even SF has about half of the density of the average European city.

So even if the population doubles in the next 50 years, current technology (or the model of life you see in Europe), will be enough. Anything else too drastic, will probably be too expensive to develop.

A coworker of mine who's been in the GIS industry for about as long as said industry has existed gave that very same assessment. The real obstacles at this point are social: people will freak out at the thought of robot trucks driving on the same highways as they do (or stealing their trucking jobs).

I give the example of trucks on highways because that would probably come first, as it's simpler to safely implement than passenger vehicles or city driving.

"(or stealing their trucking jobs)"

This was covered in a Simpsons episode. Turns out that all the trucks already drive themselves, but the truckers' union has prevented that information getting out to the general public.

(Couldn't find it on youtube.)

I'd give it 25 years. The tech is mostly there, agreed.

Too much social upheaval to happen very soon. My guess is that you will see incremental robot cars. First we'll have "smart cruise control" that will pace with the cars in front of you. Then we'll have "smart obstacle detection" to prevent you from backing over stuff you can't see. Then "auto parallel parking", then something like "interstate cruise" where the vehicle stays on an interstate from the on-ramp to the off-ramp (no pedestrians and little distractions. Then something like "last mile cruise" where the car learns how you get that last mile home, including working the garage opener and stopping for the mail.

We've already got the first few of these, albeit in different vehicles. What car makers need to do is not deploy robot trucking, but deploy incremental features that people will go "Wow! Gotta have one of those!" without doing so much that it sounds threatening. I know I'd snap up something like interstate cruise in a heartbeat.

Also don't count out the impact of the military: if DoD has auto vehicles (and that cool 4-legged robot) as part of it's daily operations, people are going to want the same at home.

Sure it's funny, but just wait until the people of 2045 dig up Ray Kurzweil's "Singularity is Near". Fourty years ago some people thought we'd have automated cars, undersea resorts and climatized, domed cities. Today some people think 40 years from now we'll be immortal, omniscient, omnipotent gods that rule the universe...

One of my CS professors is heavy into Kurzweil. He had me read "The Singularity is Near". I decided Kurzweil's arguments are the rhetorical equivalent of those algebra jokes where you "prove" 1=2 but it goes through a step that hides a divide by zero. Similarly, "The Singularity is Near" uses steps that seem logical to come to a ridiculous conclusion.

I think the four-hour workday is an interesting idea. I'm still in school but I worked at a real estate development office for a summer, and most of those jobs could've been done in four hours a day if people didn't get away with being so lazy. I bet a lot of companies could reduce the workday to four hours, and if they're quicker to fire people for not making deadlines and such, they'd get exactly the same productivity out of them as they do now (plus, lots of people would probably want to work there).

The OA5 business process ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=140712 ) is a more moderate and conventional version of this idea.

If we all had a 4hr job day, then people will be getting 2 jobs. In a consumer markets, where how much you pay for housing determines the schooling of your kids, or the "want" for plasma tvs, nicer cars, more shiny things will make people work as much as they can.

The only way to enforce a 4 hrs work day will be thru law (goverment mandate not to work more than 4hrs a day, ala EU's 37.5 normal workweek),

Or, if something like that star trek machine that can create everything (you press a button, and food just comes out from it, or any electronics/material need you need). Then people will be working only to teach, design new things, entertain, as material needs will be superflous.

> Then people will be working only to teach, design new things, entertain, as material needs will be superflous.

It's frightening to consider that IP laws would probably outlive natural scarcity...

The unfortunate thing about a 4 hour work day for traditional (read: non-technical) workers is that the advancement of technological tools allows them to accomplish the same amount of work in less time, meaning that if an individual (or entire company) wanted to get ahead, they would still use the entire 8 hours (arbitrary number. Many use even more) to accomplish much more work.

Technology hasn't shortened the amount of work we do, it has raised the standard for everyone to accomplish more.

This is mostly meant to apply to non-technical workers. People who deal with technology have a different and unique set of standards.

It's interesting to see that the 4-hour workweek was proposed as early as 1932: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

Hey, we still have 8 months to go. Maybe it'll all be true by then.

They were obviously predicting the state of the art at the end of President Gore's 2008. ;-)

"TV-telephone shopping is common. To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center. You press another combination to zero in on the department and the merchandise in which you are interested."

--> I find it fascinating that they just couldn't conceive of a massive network of computers to do things like this... some things are so out to lunch still, but things like direct deposit of funds into your bank account, I can't believe that was so far fetched?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

People overestimate things on a shorter term, and underestimate on a longer term.

That quote (or variation) if often attributed to Bill Gates? is it? or is it older wisdom of some sort.

Yes its a quote from gates' book "The Road Ahead". He uses it in may of his interviews. :)

Hell yes. That article reads like what I think my product will do in four years...

Makes me think that the things that are most likely to change are those where entrepreneurs can most easily create products without needing to get around government rules and regulations.

"The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer."

A true visionary.

Some people are so close to that futuristic 2008, yet most people in the world are so far away. We really should figure out a way to fix all that.

Why?

Inequal distribution of resources

Again: why?

Why should we strive for equality?

For now, we can strive for a bare minimum of clean water, 2000 calories a day of food energy, and governments that don't stifle economic advancement. We have plenty of resources to do this now, but it isn't happening because once wealth and capital get concentrated in individuals or groups of people it tends to just make them more wealth.

And the answer to the why is that I believe humans have a fundamental right to life. I have no real justification; it just feels right to me.

The economy is not a zero sum game.

Funny thing is: people who live in countries with higher levels of equality (think Japan, Finland) are the very same countries with high suicide rates.

Not saying that correlation implies causation, just to show that perhaps this ideal equality is not so fundamental to our overall happiness.

Also, I'd like to know how we can strive for clean water and food for 7 billion people (9 billion until 2050) while keeping civil liberties to people along the process.

Perhaps not for equality, but at least a healthy baseline. Everyone deserves to live

Great. We agree on that. But how do we achieve that? Taking from the rich and giving to the poor? Never in history this worked.

On the other hand, whenever you have an environment where those who produced wealth were allowed to keep it, you'll see general prosperity.

The problem is: who's producing wealth? In Brazil, you can argue that a factory pipeline worker is the one producing the wealth, yet he's able to keep but a very small percentage of what he produces.

Arbitrarily taking wealth from one and giving it to other's is not really good idea, I agree with you. The "how" is the whole problem. In my opinion it's the biggest open problem of human kind.

Sorry, but no. What differentiates the factory worker from Brazil or India or Malaysia or Sweden? Nothing. Why should there be any difference in what percentage of the final cut is his? Is the Brazilian factory worker able to produce more wealth without the machinery, equipment, marketing people, product designers and everything else that is part of any supply channel? No, he isn't.

The problem in Brazil is precisely this mentality that keeps us with a half century old labor code and absolutely zero incentive for entrepreneurship.

The Welfare State is dead, see http://workforall.net/ScandinavianModel.html

The rich and powerful themselves have to decide to help the poor.

There's no single motivation for this. But I think the motivation we can derive using mostly just logic is that it'll benefit all the human race, including ourselves (who are not the ones starving). After all, less people starving means more people producing, creating theories, etc.

The Harrison Bergeron school of equality? ;-)

Large areas of the sea being are indeed beds of "protein-rich" algae - fed by nitrogen in industrial and agricultural waste.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-ocean30jul30,...

Most predictions of the future tend to be exaggerated, because that's what people like to read and dream about. That does mean, however, that most of today's predictions about the future can also be taken with a pinch of salt, which is a little depressing.

"Heart disease has virtually been eliminated by drugs and diet."

Not really much excuse for the diet part of this one going so far wrong is there.

Sort of depressing - basically everything that rings true was possible in '68. Hell, even the internet was almost ready in '68.

I love their faith in the National Centralized Single-Point-of-Failure Traffic Computer. ;)

I found it ironic that they pegged the population for today (around 350 million), amongst all the other things they got wrong, and then went on to say that only domed cities could support such a large population!

Colonisation of the ocean was considered enevitable in that era. It is also covered in the 1970 book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. However, so far, it has been easier to improve utilisation of land.

Ha! I saw "one click" shopping in there. Eat your heart out amazon.

I'm frikking depressed now.

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