Los Angeles in 2013 as Predicted in 1988
documents.latimes.com
documents.latimes.com
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.
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.
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.
"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.
It's something that always happens. I don't know why.
The optimist says, "We live in the best of all possible worlds!"
The pessimist says, "Yeah!"
Both declare victory.
"Hitherto, philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it."
Also, I don't think philosophers understand the world -- they only understand other philosophers.
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...
A vague, unfailable prediction is terrible.
http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/...
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.
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.
The future is weird.
Now she's learned the lesson. Instead of buying you a CD next time, she'll just give you a list of music you might enjoy to stream.
Wow, the future gets even weirder.
Amazing that they can be so right and so wrong at the same time.
Totally underestimates telecommunications, but grossly overestimates standard fridge technology. :-) (though my parents do have a Samsung fridge that can tweet for some reason).
"@oven you're lookin hot today"
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).
"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."
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).
I guess I should also mention what's at the end too:
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<!--Email ben.welsh@latimes.com and let me know you're out there.-->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.
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.
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.
25 years seem hardly news worthy. Had it been 100 years ago, well yes, that could probably be a startling one.
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.
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.
"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."
Twenty-five years ago, most screens were crap. And we're talking about reading here, which is done in a lean back manner.
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/stories/study-c...
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.
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.
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?
The solution to the healthcare and aging issue is already happening: immigration.
-robot to stack and unstack the dishwasher
-robot wheels to put the garbage bin out for weekly collection
-robot mower to cut the lawn
-robot laundry hamper to take clothes to washing machine when full
-robot to clean kitchen benches and stove-top nightly
It's also interesting how pessimistic the authors were about things like pollution (smog, ozone layer), traffic, and water supply.
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.
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.
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.
Asimov coined it Psychohistory[0]. Reminds me that I never finished the Foundation series. (In my defense, it is quite a long series.)
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.
[1] like so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming
Things change, including change.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-globa...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_c...
Haber process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
>>>Fertilizer generated from ammonia produced by the Haber process is estimated to be responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth's population
I think I first read about that here at HN and it still sticks in my mind.
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.
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.)
* now all smartphones, I guess.
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.
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.
Yes. Now Bill can marvel at the Corporate Playpen it's become, just like New York's Times Square.
Really, is that a future real people want?
Hackers Get Cat Of Their Own http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-08-14/entertainment/...
There's not even a Wikipedia entry for it. Shame.