Posted on 01/01/2015 5:48:02 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Everyone will probably divide up into Morlock’s and Eloi.
Most of them came true, insofar as the author(s) had means to express the prediction, or the prediction was correct in our ability to do it but waylaid by our lack of interest in actually doing so (living on the Moon is, ya gotta admit, boring - it's a dead rock).
Just bought a new car with navigation. The route changes automatically based on traffic. I'm learning a lot of shortcuts! Also, I like the feature where if you put the left or right blinker on, an alarm will sound if somebody is in your blind spot. That's going to save a lot of accidents right there.
My predictions are somewhat different.
1) The effort to create a universal language, Esperanto, was a bust, because they didn’t have the technology they needed to make it practical. A more modern version would be tremendously complicated, but be less a written or spoken language, as such, than an effective computer interpreter based on the individual.
Bottom line, a Star Trek style, anybody to anybody, “universal translator”.
2) The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein wrote a short story called “The Roads Must Roll”, about a future society where vehicles only went short distances to highways that were giant conveyor belts. And while having an entire highway doing that is technologically unfeasible, having a short segment of the highway doing that is not only possible, but could alleviate one of the banes of the modern world, the traffic jam.
As anyone who has used the conveyor belt sidewalks in a long airport concourse knows, they are a very fast and efficient means to transport a lot of people a medium distance quickly, without jams or hassle.
Just an eighth of a mile or highway engineered to do that, which would only work when there was a traffic jam, not when traffic was flowing smoothly, could speed things up enormously. Instead of stop-and-go, a consistent speed of only 10 or 20mph would feel like racing to drivers.
Bottom line: an end to many freeway traffic jams.
3) A shift in the military balance of quality and quantity, to favor quantity. Which is more likely to win an air battle: an extremely expensive high tech aircraft, or a thousand cheap and expendable drone aircraft?
The same applies to ships at sea. Who is more likely to win a sea battle: a single super carrier, or a thousand disposable, modular PT boats, with a torpedo or two on each?
The entire concept of “work” might change. As recently as 150 years ago, for 90% of us, work meant growing your own food and maintaining the land you grew it on and the animals that lived with you. People did not even dream of professions like “airline pilot”, “auto mechanic” or “software engineer”.
With automated farms and 3D printers, I suspect that a lot of people will be free to choose to follow their joy, whether that is creating books and art, research, athletic competition and coaching, entertainment, etc. There will also be a lot of people needed to keep nanos and robots working, supervising automated activities, pushing medical and science technology further, and designing the next “toy”. I’m sort of bummed that I will not be around to see it, unless the medical researchers step up their game a little quicker.
Also, they really seemed excited at the prospect of the average American living to be 50 years old! My mother in law is 80 and I'm not that excited about that. She's probably going to outlive me!
Too bad we never exterminated the mosquito and housefly. That's one prediction I'm really bummed that it didn't come true.
Strawberries as big as apples? No thanks. I'll take them just the size they are, so they can fit on my spoon when I put them in yogurt or ice cream.
Peak coal!
Certain scientists are right now hard at work, trying to figure out how to ‘download an individual’s brain’ into a software program that can later be uploaded into a ‘fresh and barely used’ cloned body. Johnny Depp just had a movie that imagine the first part, of the dead man’s mind and temperment being downloaded and ‘contained’ in certain computer systems.
As always happens in fantasy, the first miracle was not enough, Johnny’s ‘contained’ character became greedy, wanted to absorb more and more energy from around him. Even if that meant electric grids people needed to stay alive. It was just a story, but an intriquing concept, whose time may come far sooner than we are ready to manage it.
I, for one, have no desire to ‘live forever’, no thank you!
Wow, that is a facinating read.
I am glad peas are not the size of beets though.
The workforce will evolve with the tech. Got to have people who maintain the machine somewhere in the process, and develop, and coordinate all matter of detail until they can program a machine to do that, and then there is still progress to be made that is inconceivable from today. Or can we all stop progress at the Amish point of technology?
That’s Hollywood Blvd today, and for the last 30 years actually.
btt
The “telephoned opera” is an example of something where the author just didn’t have the words/concepts to describe it. Opera was a big enough deal that it may have seemed important enough to telephone ... what they didn’t anticipate was ANY music/audio would be streamed, _on_demand_, to POCKET telephones! wireless at that! End-of-year news includes observations that the paid music download market is facing collapse under the growth of paid no-limit streaming.
Those bitching about expensive health care indeed forget that wasn’t long ago that average lifespan was 50. Yeah, if you want to live to 100, it’s probably going to cost you (or whoever you can con into paying for it).
We _could_ exterminate pests a la species genocide. Problem is, it would screw up the ecosystem so bad we’d risk traumatic collapse. It’s a prediction we could fulfill, but we know better than to try.
Don’t underestimate how large our fruit is. Natural strawberries are MUCH smaller than the golf-ball sized ones we buy in common grocery stores. Big as apples is possible, but the bigger fruit grows the poorer the taste. Like you say, there is a size preferable to what we _could_ grow them as.
That’s a VERY cool post! Some of them are spot on; e.g. Man Will See Around The World, and Store Purchases By Tube. The language was still “of the times” but the meaning/intent was completely correct!
Apparently we are not too far away.
Considering that malaria may be the all time leading killer of humans, this could be one of the greatest achievements ever.
interesting post
B4L8tr!
damn, everybody already beat me to the punch with all the PopSci and PopMech “flying car of the future” magazine covers.
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