1966 children about the future [video] | Hacker News Reader

1966 children about the future [video]

youtube.com

76 pointsscottlocklin61 comments

The more optimistic children seem to have been more correct. We are more integrated, have more cures for diseases, etc.

The most pessimistic ones (who, understandably for children, have a caricatured view of the threats) echo a lot of the concerns we have today (including automation, which might be the most over-blown fear) except for the notable presence of fears of nuclear war. Merely 2 decades after the first (limited) nuclear war, that wasn't completely unfounded. However, those fears were not realized because humanity, somehow, was able to restrain themselves from using these terrible weapons again. And over-population also seems to have largely been solved as well.

That's a ray of hope. Problems which seem too intractable now or seem inevitable, like anthropogenic climate change, CAN be addressed, just like we avoided nuclear war. Just like overpopulation was addressed (through education and development and access to healthcare). Just like we were able to stop the ozone hole by banning ozone-depleting refrigerants.

These big, nasty collective-action problems CAN be solved.

Boomers frequently like to talk about how nuclear war was "solved" in the '80s and '90s and isn't a concern anymore. But the reality is that it was only avoided for a while, and will never be solved so long as nuclear stockpiles are maintained. Our present moment is more dangerous than any point in history, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the only thing you can even compare it to. Yet so many today insist upon seeing this as a non-issue, and largely ignore the problem.

Nuclear war never stopped being a possibility, but it became much less likely in the 90s with the end of Cold War and the USSR. I don't think it ever disappeared from public consciousness, it just fell down on the list of worries. Nowadays, with the US/China stories, I personally am getting worried about it again - but still less than about the climate.

Pakistan/India probably is the greater threat and whatever ensues after that.

In overall numbers, nuclear stockpiles have shrunk significantly since the peak in the Cold War. In spite of rhetoric, they have not grown significantly in recent years, either. The long-term trend in number of deployed nuclear weapons is downward and (if efforts continue) will likely remain so.

Stockpiles peaked at the end of the Cold War in mid-late 1980s with over 60,000 warheads. 40,000 when these children were being filmed. About 10,000 today and falling (although falling slower than it should). https://ourworldindata.org/exports/number-of-nuclear-warhead...

I must be missing some serious nuclear brinkmanship going on somewhere. Russia is kind of stirring up trouble, but mainly in a desperate attempt to even get noticed. The tensions between India and Pakistan don’t really seem to have an imminent nuclear dimension.

> Our present moment is more dangerous than any point in history

Rubbish. We have fewer missiles, and the world is no longer engaging in proxy wars to achieve Soviet or US influence whilst those two are nose to nose in hostile and absurd posturing. There are no longer two or three Nato-Soviet incidents a week. There are no longer weekly scrambles of aircraft to intercept the bomber or spy plane.

The little local difficulty between India and Pakistan doesn't really compare. The decline of Western military spending and sale of former government nuclear bunkers rather gives that away.

The Russians seem to have solved their Cold War problem by buying influence inside the US and UK - which was much cheaper than all-out nuclear destruction.

But they've also been upgrading their civil defence systems and nuclear stock while Nato has been distracted.

IMO the current situation in Europe is very much still a proxy war, but it's a proxy war promoting hard-right regime change within the member countries of the EU and the US rather than a proxy shooting war in another continent.

That's progress of a sort, and it definitely shows signs of more intelligent strategic thinking than the USSR managed. But it's still a political war against the EU's liberal democracies, and a culture war against liberalism in general.

You're right there - it's a proxy war in the sense the old Anglo-Russia Great Game was. Though that style of strategic thinking goes long back in Tsarist Russian history.

> But the reality is that it was only avoided for a while, and will never be solved so long as nuclear stockpiles are maintained.

That doesn't solve anything either, countries could just start building nuclear weapons "in secret" at any time. What are you going to do about it? You can have sanctions, but those didn't stop NK or Iran.

Let's say that nuclear weapons didn't exist, what about biological and chemical weapons? What about endless trench warfare?

The real problem is war, not the means to it. It's conceivable that nuclear weapons prevented many wars, in a "high risk, high reward" type of situation.

Hum. As always, things are relative. Growing up in the 1970s and early '80s I gave myself zero chance of ever reaching 30 (or even 25). Near miss scenarios were just too frequent. (E.g., compare the "Able Archer" crisis of 1983. The GDR had actually mid-range nuclear strike bombers on the runway with turbines running, ready to retaliate, and the USSR had forces moved into mobilization zones, ready for the worst.) Compared to this, things have become much better. However, the idea of the potential for any nuclear crisis scenarios being "solved" is as accurate as, say, the current idea of natural language recognition being "solved".

> just like we avoided nuclear war

That's reporting bias. If nukes had been used we'd quite likely not be having this discussion.

> These big, nasty collective-action problems CAN be solved.

I used to think so too. Now I don't believe it. We muddle though, but one day we won't be able to any more. I fear climate change will be that think.

I think it’s survivorship bias not reporting bias.

That is so absurdly true :) Thanks for catching it.

You shouldn't be downvoted. I understand your point: we may only be the 1 success to avoid global thermonuclear war out of 10 universes where such weapons were developed. And same may be true in other situations, as well.

However, this is a sort of fatalistic view that denies human agency (I guess I am fated believe in the fantasy that human agency exists as those who believe in that fantasy are more likely to take the actions necessary to survive in seemingly hopeless situations and I am descended from such people?).

We are the timeline that muddled through these collective action problems in the past. We have experience with doing so and were selected (in the evolutionary sense) out of all those possible human society timelines to have the ability to solve these collective action problems.

So let us choose act to solve these problems as if we were, indeed, capable of solving them. Even if part of us might think we can't.

I've been very critical of people here who are fatalistic, it didn't occur to me I was doing the same thing. You're right to pick me up on that.

My sad point is I've been trying to get stuff done on climate change for 20 years, and nothing got done because nobody cared. They didn't care because humans mainly don't care for anything beyond their local environment. The reasons for that are often down to lack of feeling of ability to change anything, which fatalism feeds into, but also down to, quite frankly, indifference. Mainly indifference. "Climate change? Whatever. Look, cheap flights!!"

I no longer care because that wore me down and made me ill. I accept that it's too late to avert climate catastrophe and, barring some miracle, I don't expect to live out my full life. I've come to terms with that.

> If nukes had been used we'd quite likely not be having this discussion.

Exactly. No matter how that bias is named. There's no system where the accidents never happen. We were just lucky up to now, but it doesn't prove anything.

Instead of naming it, I prefer to quote Nassim Taleb:

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/nassim-talebs-black-swan-...

"“A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher, every day is a confirmation to his team of analysts that butchers love turkeys” with statistical confidence increasing daily. “The butcher will continue to feed the turkey until a few days before Thanksgiving Day. And then comes the time when it’s not really a good idea to be a turkey. Being surprised by the butcher, the turkey reviews his beliefs when his confidence in the assertion that the butcher loves Turkeys is at its peak and the Turkey’s life is “very serene” and mildly predictable. This example is based on the adaptation of a metaphor created by Bertrand Russell. From the Turkey’s story, we can also identify the source of all prejudicial errors: confusing the absence of evidence (damages) with the evidence of its absence“"

That's why I really don't understand those who claim that the nuclear doomsday can't happen because it didn't happen up to now.

Errors happen in any complex system, and any probability of the total annihilation of the whole civilization is simply to high to be tolerated.

There are many people who can trigger it at any moment, it's definitely not "the president only" and it never was. Who doesn't believe that should read the books that cover that subject. I've already referred to one, written by a former nuclear war planner. Search for it (that former job of his is a part of the book's title), read it and act. Before it's too late.

To nitpick, a thousand-day old turkey is going to be pretty tough.

> And over-population also seems to have largely been solved as well.

Huh? I always thought over-population as the leading cause for global warming.

Pretty much every demographer agrees that the world is on track to top out at 11 billion people due to rising standards of living, access to health care and reductions in infant mortality, electricity, specialization in agriculture, and access to financial instruments. Basically, everyone reaching the same conclusion that Westerners reached in the 80's: having a bunch of children doesn't really make sense any more.

The problem being that the world, by a pretty long shot, can not withstand 11 billion people leading a Western lifestyle unless there are giant leaps in green tech.

Emissions can be expanded to Emissions = (Emissions per capita) * Population

Over the last 200 years the population has went up by a factor of 8. It's hard to nail down exactly what factor emissions/capita has went up since the number used to be so insignificant but you can compare countries right now and see the US has more than 10x emissions/capita than India and higher overall emissions output which is the opposite of what you'd expect if population was the problem.

We could cut population by 99% and say "no more problem" but that's an indirect fix to the main cause: increase in emissions/capita.

It's strange to just dismiss the significance population after saying it increased our emissions 8x. An 8x decrease is far more than what the Paris Agreements call for to keep global warming under 1.5°C. We wouldn't even be talking about climate change if we had 8x less emissions.

Let's further breakdown (Emissions per capita) into (Emissions per GDP) * (GDP per capita). We can see here[1] that emissions per GDP have been decreasing as far back as that data set goes (the past 25 years).

So it looks like the two main factors currently driving emissions higher are increased wealth and more population. No surprise that the US has more emissions per capita than India - the standard of living is much higher.

[1]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD.KD

Edit: linked the wrong chart.

China has higher emissions per capita than places like (nuclear-powered) France even though France has much higher standard of living. (And before you say it's because of China's exports, it's not... only about 20% of China's emissions are export-related.)

It's not wealth and population, it's the use of fossil fuels (primarily) and, to a lesser extent, ruminants (cows, sheep, etc... both methane emissions from gut bacteria and land-use for grazing). We can have ~10 billion people at US standards of living if we solve the technopolitical problems that keep us on fossil fuels.

> It's not wealth and population, it's the use of fossil fuels

It's all three. Our formula was emissions = (GDP/capita)(emissions/GDP)(pop). Reduce any of the three factors and emissions drop.

Your phrasing is off. You can't say "it's not factors 1 and 3, it's factor 2" as that implies factors 1 and 3 don't affect emissions. We could choose to focus our efforts on (emissions/GDP). That doesn't mean the other two factors don't affect it. Reducing human population 10x would have the same effect on emissions as improving our (emissions/GDP) 10x. Spending $10k/year instead of $100k/year will almost certainly reduce your carbon footprint.

France and China are a good example of why the other two factors might be important. Looking at their wealth (GDP/capita (PPP)) and emissions, we find that France is about 4x more efficient in emissions/GDP. But France is one of the top countries in emissions/GDP and China is one of the worst. If we assume the whole world becomes as efficient as France in emissions/GDP and the population increases to 10 billion and the world average GDP/capita increases to match the US (~3.6x increase), we end up with about 1.2x our current emissions.

So you could focus all your efforts on trying to make the whole world much more efficient than France in emissions/GDP, or you could look at the trade offs between all 3 factors and try to reason about how we'd like to balance those factors.

Automation is or was an overblown fear? Consider that when these children were making their astute predictions, a company would have entire rooms filled with secretaries and typists handling mail. Each individual could read, compose a response, and mail out a few dozen letters a day to communicate with suppliers, vendors, customers, etc. Today, a companies communications department might be a couple people. And they can handle a few hundred emails before lunch. And they don't get paid any more (adjusted for inflation and all that jazz) than the individual working as a typist in 1980 would have been.

One of the ladies in the video shared a concern that there would only be jobs for high-IQ people who could use a computer. That certainly didn't take into account that computers would become tremendously easier to use, but I do think it hints at a problem. It's easily seen that our societies have been eliminating the middle class and splitting into a much more widely disparate lower and upper classes... but I think it might more be moving such that the 'middle class' is only knowledge workers, particularly those working in software. This movement likely would have been quite abrupt if not for the establishment early on of wage fixing by the largest companies (which they were convicted for), but it seems to have been accelerating the past 10 years. It makes some sense economically (not its magnitude, it should be much larger, but its existence) because software is a productivity multiplier unlike anything in world history, but doesn't it bear out her concerns?

Sure when factories came around, craftspeople could transition to working in restaurants, or as cashiers, or working in the distribution chain, etc, because those were things that could be picked up on the job. While using computers has gotten simpler, building systems fundamentally cannot beyond a certain point. If you're building a system which must track 100 things, you must be capable of dealing with those 100 things. If that's something which is beyond your capacities, then its not just a matter of getting trained.

I don't expect automation to be a large-scale problem as quickly as some do (how long have we been hearing about automated factories and how many do we actually have? A long time and not many. They are hard problems.) but I do think concerns are warranted. Concerns were warranted when factories were developed, and we probably would have benefited from some forethought there too. We still carry many of the social changes that occurred to handle the densely packed urban centers that grew up around factories despite none of their original motivating factors still existing. We will most likely see changes on that scale, and strife to match if we just let things happen.

Well the nuclear problem is arguably easier to solve it just requires no side to start getting into a fight they won't survive.. climate change actually will require significant cooperation and action across borders. Also are you sure automation is as overblown now as back then.

"I think people will be regarded more as statistics than as actual people."

There's probably a fair bit of nostalgia in there (and for a time way before mine, too) but boy did that boy nail it.

This is apparently a segment from the long running futurist BBC programme Tomorrow's World.

https://www.twitter.com/bbcarchive/status/946365140642889728

How many others were reminded of the wonderful Up series which started a couple of years earlier?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_(film_series)

I'd been wondering if this was from 7 Up, before I saw this comment. And now just seeing that 63 Up aired in June 2019. Wow!

Weird you mention Up, as I was thinking of that throughout the whole video, and wondering when the next one is.

In 1966, it was nuclear winter; today it's climate change. It's interesting how children's views of what can go wrong in the future change based on what seems to be the most relevant disaster of the time. I wonder what children from 1900 would say to the same question…war, maybe?

Disease maybe? The Spanish flu wiped out more people than WW1.

Dying of the flu isn't visceral enough to grab the imagination. It would be scarier if we were living in medieval Europe and we personally know friend and families that were killed off by the Plague, but in modern society it's too removed of a threat to really strike fear in children's hearts.

I’d say disease is a lot more visceral than something like climate change. The former can affect you, personally, on a time scale you can perceive while the latter doesn’t, for the most part.

Of my grandfather's family, of his nine siblings, two survived. All of them where strong and healthy, late-twenties to early thirties, and died within three days. We elide over the impact of that event to rather focus on the notion that such concept are safely 'in the past'.

“…every, nearly every porch, every porch that I’d look at had–would have a casket box a sittin’ on it. And men a diggin’ graves just as hard as they could and the mines had to shut down there wasn’t a nary a man, there wasn’t a, there wasn’t a mine arunnin’ a lump of coal or runnin’ no work. Stayed that away for about six weeks.”[1]

On another note, the Spanish flu is responsible for Americans' shift from 'parlor' to 'living room'[2]

[1] https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2017/10/great-pandemic-of...

[2]https://blogsurabhi.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/what-is-the-ori...

Your grandfather's family isn't the modern world that children today know. Incidents from a century ago are hard to relate to someone who knows only modern medicine and sanitation.

Ah, but now you prove my point.

In the comment section about an article on how children perceive the world?

Did the people from a century ago feel like they were in a low-tech time where medical solutions hadn't been invented yet? I suspect they felt like they were at the very front of modern life and were reaping the benefits of modern knowledge and technology. Then, suddenly something new and unexpected came along and revealed how fragile they really were.

Today we might also feel that we're at the very front of modern life and reaping the benefits of modern knowledge and tech. However, even our great county of Los Angeles has been taken over by a new mosquito that is hurting our quality of life:

https://www.glacvcd.org/vector-information/mosquitoes/invasi...

https://abc7.com/health/ankle-biter-mosquitoes-more-common-i...

As far as I'm aware, we have no practical solution for this new problem.

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that people were generally pretty optimistic in the early 1900s (before WW1 obviously). Everyday applications for electricity were rapidly changing daily life for people.

There is a good chance the optimism was related to economic opportunity from the die-off of humans from the war. Similar trends in societal change (not the contents themselves, but the trends of the changes) can be seen in post-plague Europe.

Suddenly human capital was more valuable.

You had then (as now) several major trends. The progressivists were modernists promoting modernism -- technology and rationality (along with a whole host of jingoistic thinking).

A principle response was the fundamentalist movement, back to fundamentals, especially of religion, and against science and technology, most especially evolution. See the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist–Modernist_contr...

> seems to be the most relevant disaster of the time

Of course they were. Would the alternative be to worry about something else that is less of a threat or they don't know about?

Some imagined 'futuristic' threat perhaps, more along the lines of the first boy's answer (which doesn't really carry any judgement, but could) about the robot court and computer funeral.

He didn't really explain why or much about it, but another was concerned about large ugly areas of the country sectioned off for recreation.

> It's interesting how children's views of what can go wrong in the future change based on what seems to be the most relevant disaster of the time.

"People are most afraid of the greatest perceived danger" seems entirely expected. It would be interesting if it weren't so.

> In 1966, it was nuclear winter;

Actually, in 1966 it was just the perspective of being killed by blasts or poisoned by radioactive fallout.

The popularization of the idea of nuclear winter came later, late 70s / early 80s I believe.

Ahh, 1983, here we go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter

Quite, I was going to make the same comment.

Google Ngram for "nuclear winter" shows awareness exploding in the 1980s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nuclear+winter...

The landmark paper was Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack, and Sagan ("TTAPS"), "Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions" (1983):

https://doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.222.4630.1283

While there was some prior work, dating to the 1950s, there was effectively no public awareness.

In 1900, the existential threats were the same they'd long been throughout (and before) human history: famine, pestilence, disease, war. The Four Horsemen.

There were risks of which people would not have been aware, or would have been only loosely aware: asteroid impacts, gamma ray bursts, supervolcanoes.

The main difference today is that our major existential threats are now endogenous rather than exogenous. We've made them ourselves.

This more so than even epidemic disease, a consequence of dense urbanisation, poor hygiene, lack of a theory of disease, and widespread and distant commerce. Ancient civilisations, from Rome onward (and before) co-evolved with their major epidemics. I cannot recommend Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome highly enough in this regard.

This young child's prediction in the video is completely spot on:

"livestock...they will be kept in batteries. They won't be able to graze on pastures. They'll be kept in buildings...artificially reared...be bigger, give more food."

Link to segment: https://youtu.be/cwHib5wYEj8?t=244

I found that the most remarkable accurate prediction myself (OP fwiiw). The rest of it was funny for being wrong in the same ways modern people are wrong about just about everything.

It was so spot on, including terminology, that I felt compelled to look up the history - and indeed it was an extant but I young and growing industry - so I think really it was just something else being talked about in the press and schools in the same way as robots, computers, automation, and atomic bombs. It just turns out to be more accurate in 2019, fundamentally simpler, I suppose - we overestimated our abilities on the flying car front anyway!

It seems like all the most accurate predictions were predictions of things that were already happening becoming more prevalent. The factory farms were one example. Increased automation and and use of computers proved correct, as did viewing people as statistics. One child said it'll be more crowded and more people will live in flats, which is completely correct (although I suspect the child was imagining it being worse).

While their predictions of "more of the same" were often correct, their predictions about fundamental changes to the way we live were all off-base. Nuclear annihilation, cabbage pills for breakfast, human-like robots, no one having jobs, people living under the sea or in domes on the Sahara... none of these have happened. Instead, many of the biggest changes to our lifestyles revolve around home PCs, the internet, and cell phones.

Maybe the lesson is it's easier to be right when predicting that a current trend will continue.

anyone who has any experience with film knows that the chosen order of these interviews, and which interviews, utterly manipulates the viewers' impressions... how many children were alive in 1966 and how many voices do we hear here? What did the interviewer ask ? ugh

From the very first answer that had a fuller half-repeating-the-question reply, I assumed thay the question to each of them (subsequently edited shorter) was 'What will it be like in the year 2000?'.

This is from a long-running bbc tv programme - and from the looks of the uniform and the accent, I'd say that all the children interviewed here were from a private school - they even reference computers, which while existing at the time, weren't exactly common outside of large corporations - there were only about 20000 across the entire world at the time.

“Some asshole will be avoiding doing actual work by watching this video on his handheld telephonic device and trying to decide between Beef O’ Brady’s for lunch or that shitty Chinese place around the corner again. He’s probably gonna get the Crab Rangoon.”

Damn, girl nailed it.

Seven up 1964 — Michael Apted https://youtu.be/1LQZpiSfESE

What's funny is listening to these teenagers in 1966 is just like listening to old folks today - who are indeed the same people!

It is really disturbing how huge the fear of a atomic war was back then. It shows how bad the cold war was in these years. Today, our children fear different things like the fact, that we are destroying our environment. Interestingly, it would be quite the same (but sure not really), if the bomb would be dropped.

Interesting is also that many kids predict the future in the year 2000 kind of correctly. For example the ideas about computers are quite correct.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com