Internet predictions from 1982
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
- The home will double as a place of employment, with men and women conducting much of their work at the computer terminal. This will affect both the architecture and location of the home. It will also blur the distinction between places of residence and places of business, with uncertain effects on zoning, travel patterns and neighborhoods.
(This basically describes my life ;)
- Home-based shopping will permit consumers to control manufacturing directly, ordering exactly what they need for "production on demand."
(Kickstarter is a nice example.)
- There will be a shift away from conventional workplace and school socialization. Friends, peer groups and alliances will be determined electronically, creating classes of people based on interests and skills rather than age and social class.
(You're participating in one such peer group right now...)
- A new profession of information "brokers" and "managers" will emerge, serving as "gatekeepers," monitoring politicians and corporations and selectively releasing information to interested parties.
(Bloggers, obviously, but more interestingly, Wikileaks, Lulzsec, Anonymous...)
-The home does double as a place of employment, but this has had no discernible effect on the architecture and location of the home, or led to significant changes in zoning or travel patterns.
-Home-based shopping has indeed taken off, but manufacturing has not switched to a production-on-demand model (and Kickstarter has nothing to do with this whatsoever-- that's about seed funding.)
-Friends, peer groups and alliances are indeed determined electronically, but this has not (yet) led to "classes of people" akin to social class.
-Information brokers do serve as gatekeepers, but this has not become professionalized; bloggers (and groups like Wikileaks, Lulzsec, etc.) are amateurs, and have not developed professional standards or codes of ethics, etc.
In other words, Yogi Berra was right: prediction is hard, especially about the future.
Houses are built with home-office space, with network wiring throughout, with attention to where light will interfere with screens. TV/monitors in every room, phone wiring all but obsolete.
SO houses are not a totally different shape or anything, but they are different. And who would buy an old house with a parlor, a sleeping porch and summer kitchen?
Amazon started with a drop-ship model where books were ordered/printed on demand. Their volume outgrew this. So its been transformed twice.
And you don't think young people divide the world into 'those who text/twitter/facebook' and 'old people'? Maybe you don't select friends based on class, but its happening anyway.
I think bloggers are maturing right now. Traditional media is in decline yet we have hardly any way to select quality blog sources, there are few 'big names' that last long enough to become entrenched in society like WSJ or the Times.
I'm astonished by the article for an entirely different reason: how was it so easy to predict all this so well?
A company like Dell has very tight supply lines made possible by online orders. They couldn't do what they do efficiently if they had to predict demand and stuff a retail sales channel with product six months to a year in advance. That's how you did it in 1982.
But yeah, I'm with you that the extent of future changes is almost always either over- or underestimated.
But:
* there's a discernable trend in my social circles to locate well away from cities (and the first world) - but I can't find good statistics to back this up as more than just anecdote
* companies such as IBM claimed that due to the expansion of teleworking, they're able to save USD700m per year (but I keep finding secondary sources for this claim, and anyway they probably sell telecommuting solutions, so decreasing the trustworthiness of the numbers)
* growth in creatives filling my local cafe as their office makes it almost impossible to get a table to drink an espresso and have a slice of cake - again hopelessly anecdotal
It's actually maddening that there don't appear to be any good statistics (or even academic papers with theoretical models) on this.
Anyone with any national or urban statistics that correlate things like economic growth, percentage days worked from home, average growth in peak commute time traffic-kilometers in urban and suburban traffic systems versus actual? Extra points for urban transit ridership growth or shrinkage during peak commute time.
I think we're still in the early stages of the "virtualisation" of the world, and those predictions will work out eventually.
On a more general note…
Saying X does Y does not imply X only does Y.
However saying X was wrong in their prediction of Y doing Z can be disproven by one present example of Y doing Z.
We can argue how much the internet has been a cause of some companies adopting build-on-demand or the relative slow uptake of build-on-demand as a strategy (and whether the adoption of China as the de-facto mass-manufacturer for all modern goods and the subsequent need to bulk order in advance is a major factor in its uptake) .
However we cannot argue about whether some businesses do it. This is proven.
Typical New York Times. No URL.
These services tended to be centralized and look nothing like the current Internet (although France's Minitel network did use packet switching and some service providers ran their own data nodes).
I remember really well playing with Prestel and Minitel in the early 1980s using acoustic couplers and dedicated terminals. The feeling associated with the sudden access to unlimited information at incredible speeds (1200/75 baud) was really amazing (even just being able to look people's phone numbers up on white pages). Wikipedia has a nice example of French Minitel terminal from the year this report was written: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minitel1.jpg
What's most interesting is that there wasn't much 'future' in this report given that France already had a functioning viewdata system at that time and it was clear from the services that were being offered that the things mentioned in this report were actually available or easy extrapolations.
Also notable was that viewtex services used a subscriber pays model where access was metered by the minute and added to the phone bill. On Minitel some services were free (except for the per minute charge), e.g. white pages, other were premium (access to special databases, for example) and some were very expensive (access to Le Minitel Rose where pornographic chat etc. was available).
As William Gibson might have said: the future was already here, it just wasn't evenly distributed yet.
The study also predicted a much greater diversity in the American political power structure. ''Videotex might mean the end of the two party system, as networks of voters band together to support a variety of slates - maybe hundreds of them,'' it said.
Am I alone in thinking that it we're more polarized and entrenched in our two party system than ever, with internet aided confirmation bias being one of the primary causes? (I.e., political "filter bubbles.")
Obama gained the democratic nomination due in huge part to networks of voters band[ing] together
Am I alone in thinking that it we're more polarized and entrenched in our two party system than ever, with internet aided confirmation bias being one of the primary causes? (I.e., political "filter bubbles.")
Confirmation bias is a problem, but the two-party system isn't the same as it used to be.
Some would argue that the Tea Party is almost a third party, that the Republican party has attempted to swallow.
The projection made wasn't about resulting presidential elections, it was about a permeating balkanization of political lines.
Ross Perot @ 19%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot_presidential_campaig...
Ralph Nader @ 3%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader_presidential_campai...
George Wallace, 14% and 46 electoral votes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace_presidential_cam...
Eugene V. Debs, 3% three times and 6% once: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs
If it makes you feel any better, I don't really agree with you. :-)
SO CLOSE. (OK, I paraphrased the above).
In this case, this article represents some pretty awesome ideating. I bet that not many of the article authors invested in Google, Dejanews, Yahoo, or AOL, though.
I had a brilliant moment of ideating in 1993 when I realized "Domain Names are going to be huge. There will be a landrush."
I pooled my dollars with some friends, and we bought ... foo.net. Cha-ching! Shopping.com, tv.com, etc. didn't really cross my mind.
What's really super hard in my opinion is setting oneself up to benefit from these tectonic trends; at least, it's hard for me!
Oh, ouch. I cluelessed my way through life during the late nineties Internet boom, and it's often in the back of my mind that I might be doing the same now and not know until hindsight kicks in in 5-10 years.
On this last point, is there any documentation of the role of the Internet in the development of the tea party movement?
"The home will double as a place of employment" - We easily have the technology to do this and I'd guess 80% or more of jobs could be done from home yet the established pre-information technology culture keeps us driving into the office every day.
"Home-based shopping will permit consumers to control manufacturing directly" - Services like Amazon have made a lot more available but the products are largely the same. The technology exists for far greater customization but the profit margin would be lower so no one has done it.
"A new profession of information ''brokers'' and ''managers'' will emerge" - This has happened but rather than "monitor" politicians and corporations these brokers tend to work for them more often than not.
"The ''extended family'' might be recreated if the elderly can support themselves through electronic homework" - I'd concede e-mail has made it easier to keep in touch with my grandparents but beyond that technology hasn't done that much for me. Heck, one of my grandparents has an iPhone now and we don't even do the weepy video chats like you see in the Apple commercials.
I guess you could say it has created some diversity in politics by giving voice to the minority but the two biggest Political Internet phenomenons of the last decade (Howard Dean and Ron Paul) didn't get anywhere near being in actual power.
You missed the words "White-Collar" in there. Or perhaps you added an extra 0 by mistake.
The technology to do that is 3D printing, but it's at a very early stage right now. I think they got this right in 1982 but underestimated how long it would take -- maybe because they didn't understand how much competitive manufacturing depends on scale and offshoring.
CafePress, Zazzle, Shapeways, etc. I'll agree that it isn't as wide-spread as you might have expected from the prediction, but per-order production does exist.
Also, Howard Dean and Ron Paul HAVE actual power. Sure, they aren't the president, but to imply that governors, senators and congresspersons don't have any "REAL" power undersells both the positions and the work involved.
Right now, there are probably hundreds of such predictions about the future. Look at them again in 20 years, most of them will probably be incorrect. Yet there is always this one report (like this one from 1982) that will be shockingly accurate. The problem is that by then, it won't provide any useful information. We need is to know this is correct in 1982, not 2011.
Great video.
I wish to be introduced like this.
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/30/us/robert-reinhold-ex-repo...
That surely came about in ways they could not have imagined.
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2011/03/hbr_predicts_the...