In 1901, a 14-year-old published article in a newspaper describing the world of 2001 | Hacker News Reader

In 1901, a 14-year-old published article in a newspaper describing the world of 2001

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24 pointsnickb22 comments

I didn't think it was that impressive to be honest.

Skyscrapers were around at the end of the 19th century, we haven't reached 200 livable floors yet (as one of the commenters on that article said), and you certainly don't see "air-ships and carriages fastened to balloons for the transportation of the people through the air, and you will often see collisions in the clouds."

It just seems like a linear prediction based on what was seen during that era.

Also this could have been cherry-picked from a universe of predictions of the future by 14-year-olds. So it's even less impressive.

I think it's impressive. If you read some other predictions and if you're a fan of Sci-Fi, you'll see that this one is actually pretty close for a change.

Try making a linear prediction for 2100 and see how hard it is.

The Law(?) of Accelerating Returns implies it will be enormously much harder to predict from now to 2100 than it was from 1900 to 2000. (Or that a linear prediction will be enormously much less accurate).

"we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate)" - http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

I wonder how much that law applies.

The 20th century will be hard to beat. For one thing, we'll need to find new resources to exploit.

"find new resources to exploit"

instead

make use of resources we already have found, but remain unused for the most part (solar etc).

similar

Queue space travel.

But according to that same law, shouldn't your skill at predictions be much greater than that of a future-predictor living in the year 1900?

You can't just map the whole world onto a linear scale and expect resulting metrics to be consistent.

My skill at predictions is better. He tried to predict, I didn't. ;)

Meat brains aren't subject to the law (yet). We don't change ourselves so we don't get a growing return on our own improvements.

I ought to have the same skill at predictions (environment, nutrition, education, age, culture, upbringing, effort, normal human variations in ability and the quirk of ever increasing IQ levels notwithstanding).

I used to believe that when I first read it, but now it's 2008 and nothing seems much different than 2000, right?

Compare a recent car with one from 10 years ago, they seem nicer for the same money.

Computers are, obviously, better - more transistors in CPUs, much more cache, much bigger harddrives, cheaper memory.

Digital cameras are way better, not only higher megapixel sensors and larger, cheaper storage cards, larger LCDs but also more realtime processing than before with face-detection, Sony's smile-detection, and they're around the same price.

Broadband in the UK has gone from being a new choice for the leading edge, to being commonplace, to flattening out the choices so 8Mb is the standard, to ADSL2+ being available at the larger exchanges outside London.

Popular screen technology for computers and TVs has almost entirely switched to LCDs when it was CRTs for everybody 10 years ago.

The first iPod I bought was a 3rd generation 40Gb model. It would have been in 2003 or so, now I have one that's cheaper, lighter, smaller, faster, nicer screen, longer battery life, which is also a video player, phone, emailer and has 3d acceleration hardware.

What about the new Macbook's unibody construction? They couldn't mill cases out of solid aluminium in large quantities without CNC machines. They have been around for years, but presumably it's only a small number of years that it's been precise/cheap/available enough for Apple to use it profitably. I took a few laptops apart around 2000, there were lots of parts, widely spread out. Check the disassembly of the new Macbook - the mainboard is tiny. It's almost certainly largely built by very precise robots and designed with the help of a lot of computing power.

USB has gone from being a bit of a joke (in 2000 I had a USB Zip 100 drive) to being the file transfer and peripheral connection medium of choice with multi-Gb sticks for sale anywhere and everywhere.

Could you have bought a roomba in 2000 to sweep your floors for you? Or a friendly robotics Robomow? Or a games console with built in, low hassle, online ability? Or a BluRay player and a HD TV?

OK, my life as a day-to-day event is different because I work with and on computers using the internet, and that's where I can see the changes, but on a day to day basis it's much the same, the same sort of transport, food, books, consumables, etc.

Although I could now (had I the money) buy a car which would pre-arm the brakes if I was too close to the car in front so they will apply quicker, parallel park for me, alert me if there's someone in the blind spots, silence the carphone incoming calls when cornering hard as it would be too distracting to ring then. None of these things were around 10 years ago.

Nothing seems much different, but then most of my life is spent wearing woven thread, sitting on wood or plasticfoamy chairs, eating plants and being around brick buildings. At that level, how much change do you expect?

Yes but... With the exception of games, there's really not much you can do on a 2008 PC that you can't on the 2000 PC that I am typing this on now. Email, web browsing, word processing/spreadsheets, IM, music/movies, etc, the bread-and-butter stuff that most people do most of the time hasn't changed over that period.

Things are the-same-but-better now. HDs are bigger, broadband is, err, broader, screens have more pixels. There have been no major shifts of the magnitude of "the web being invented". You could have linearly projected 2008 from 2000, I reckon, even in the tech sector which is the fastest moving of all. It would have been much harder to forecast 1998 from 1990.

That's kind of true - yet you could with a powerful PC of today leave Vista's voice recognition running all the time, almost dedicating a core to it, if you will. You couldn't previously as it was too demanding. I can leave many browser windows open because the overhead of many windows of interpreted javascript is minimal. You can use expose and similar as if they were free because the OS can offload to a beefy video processor. I run a Windows Server on my Mac laptop in a virtual machine barely thinking twice at what a marvel it is, at work we run 8 virtual servers on a physical box that takes up a quarter of the space of our 6 year old server.

People in general might do the same things, but that's not because the hardware can only do the same things.

An important change that you left out is the plunge in the cost of web startups, which has been enabled by the plunge in cost of computer hardware and network services and the availability of free web application frameworks and infrastructure software. The activities of most of the people that use this service could not have existed in 2000.

Funnily enough, the article is a good description of the 1997 movie The Fifth Element (which is supposed to take place in the 2200's).

Looks pretty good for something written by a 14 year old. If I had to take a guess when I was 14 at what the world would look a hundred years later I wouldn't even know where to start (I still don't).

Things like air-ships fastened to balloons you have to translate to their modern equivalent -- for example in NY you can take a helicopter shuttle to the airport (to avoid being stuck in horrible traffic).

At least this 14-year-old writes better than the 17-year-olds of today.

'Old People Restored to Youth by Electricity, While You Wait.' Were still working on that one.

actually, someone in the comments said this is already being done in japan. (Results may vary)

I think he had a better idea of 2001 than those old looney tunes cartoons.

It's quite interesting to look at this from a cultural point of view. Most interesting to me is the assumption that the transportation of today would be just like the centralized system of then, only bigger and better. There's been such a massive movement toward individualization over the past century over the past century that it seems completely natural. We've gone from semaphore towers transmitting a few messages over a single line for the central government, to a few telegraph operators sending and receiving scores of messages for corporations and individuals, to citizens renting standard-model telephones from AT&T, to owning one of a bajillion landline phone models and having cellphones with customized ringtones as a personality item. While anyone who's seen a horse -- heck, anyone who's ever walked -- is familiar the concept of a transportation device that moves according to your whims, it would have taken a great deal of insight to see these racing curiosities called "automobiles" as a potential return to that model in an age where increasing progress in transport was synonymous with expensive machines incorporating more and more advances the only conceivable way to make their use efficient was to make it centralized. (I've heard the first subway line in New York changed a three-hour trip into a 10-minute one.)

It's just like how most '50s and '60s sci-fi ('70s, even!) foresaw computers as becoming ever-bigger, ever larger undertakings. I know Isaac Asimov, in his 1958 (?) short story "The Last Question," had computers initially growing to hundreds of square miles for a few centuries before taking a sudden leap down to the size of a family-owned ship, before transitioning again to the centralized-model of having galactic and universal computers, even though miniaturization happened along the way. If he made the connection during that time period that miniaturization would happen continuously rather than discretely and might cause individual-owned computers to be present for a larger chunk of history, he made it in one of his hundreds of short-stories I haven't read.

Of course, it is expected that we will, not too long from now, reach a fundamental limit on component miniaturization and revert to building larger, centralized computers, which highlights that we should not conceive of the old model of centralization as wrong, just wrong for the present time period.

Naturally, people back then conceived of advances solving the aging problem, but it's interesting electricity was conceived as the vehicle that would deliver it. They foresaw miracle inventions, and assumed it would come from electricity, just as we assume future advancements will come from nanotech, or biotech, or Ajax. It was their buzzword of the day. While it's much more reasonable that de-aging will come from nanotech or biotech since it's easily conceivable how those would create a relatively straightforward mechanism for achieving that, I think we'd do well to remember this example if we start to point to anything well-known today as the solver of more diverse problems.

Like pointed out elsewhere, I think the interesting thing about this story is not the prediction of the future but the fact that description looks like some kind of crazy Nostradamus quatrain predicting 911.

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