Posted on 03/16/2013 5:47:02 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
More reference ...
L.A. 2013 - On April 3, 1988, the Los Angeles Times Magazine published a 25-year look ahead to 2013. This year, USC professor Jerry Lockenour is using the series of articles in a graduate engineering class he teaches.
http://documents.latimes.com/la-2013/
It’s so quaint to look back and remember how optimistic things were at the end of the Reagan years...
Demolition Man got liberalism right. I watched it again the other night and noticed that when John asked someone to pass him the salt, he was informed that it was bad for him and thus, illegal.
In 1988, the muslims hadn’t yet invaded full force.
has your sonar shield been checked recently?
Except without the Spinners, most likely.
‘Adaptive cruise control’ has been around for awhile.
Volvo already has a ‘pedestrian detection system’ with other automakers following suit.
And some ‘parking assist systems’ use sonar too.
Most Utopian futurists make the same mistake. They assume that all society(ies) progress more or less uniformly together.
The truth is that the more technologically advanced, the more stratified they become. An elite emerges who master the technology and the systems, leaving the other 90-95% in the dust.
Then they become extremely specialized, spoiled and decadent. They forget what it was that made them great and the whole thing falls down and gets swallowed in barbarism. Another dark age, and then another great civilization emerges. How many times has this pattern repeated itself in the brief 35,000 or so years since the rise of Homo sapiens?
Won’t be long and LA will look like a cross between Detroit and Tiujuana.
“John Spartan, you are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.”
Highly underrated movie.
“They’ll be Spandex Jackets one for everyone.”
The bigger mistake is that futurists can’t imagine the future except from their own perspective. Like on the original Star Trek where you’re supposed to suspend belief long enough to assume that women are sporting 1960s haircuts in the 24th century.
Or to cite another period TV show, The Jetsons where the writers seem to have envisioned huge advances in transportation that never did materialize yet were completely unable to foresee similar development in computers (which in The Jetsons are depicted as being huge room-sized dealies with tape reels)
One guy who had an uncanny ability to predict future society and technology was Jules Verne.
Amazing, actually.
Edgar Rice Burroughs made some pretty good predictions about mars.
So, none of the 30 futurists gave a prediction that the LA Times would no longer be around?
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