12 Hilariously Wrong Tech Predictions

INC ^ | 04/28/2018 | Jessica Stillman

[SeekAndFind]

Is Bitcoin a greed-driven fad or will the blockchain technology that underlies it revolutionize the internet? Will artificial intelligence produce a world of ease and plenty or turn on us and kill us all? Is that jet pack you always wanted arriving any day now, or basically never?

There are no shortage of people who make their livings by claiming to have answers to these questions. You should probably meet their claims with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Futurists aren't all snake oil salesmen, of course, and it's sensible for both individuals and businesses to think ahead and develop contingency plans for possible future scenarios. But history also offers plenty of reasons to be skeptical of "experts" with crystal balls.

In the past, a great many of them have often been outrageously wrong.

You may have heard the infamous 1977 quote by Digital Equipment Corp. president Ken Olson -- "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home" -- but as a highly entertaining recent roundup of failed tech predictions by blog Relatively Interesting illustrates, Olson's flub was just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Here's a small sampling of the sometimes hilarious quotes that made the list. I can't guarantee the historical accuracy of all of them (many quotes have incredibly murky origins), but I can promise they'll remind you that confidence is no guarantee of actual competence when it comes to predictions of the future of tech.

1. "With over fifteen types of foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself." -- Business Week, 1968.
2. "Lee DeForest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public ... has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company ..." -- a U.S. District Attorney, prosecuting American inventor Lee DeForest for selling stock fraudulently through the mail for his Radio Telephone Company in 1913.
3. "To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances." -- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1926.
4. "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895.
5. "Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in 10 years." - Alex Lewyt, president of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp., in the New York Times in 1955.

6. "There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." -- Albert Einstein, 1932.

7. "The cinema is little more than a fad. It's canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage." -- Charlie Chaplin, actor, producer, director, and studio founder, 1916.
8. "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys." -- Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1878.
9. "The world potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most." -- IBM, to the eventual founders of Xerox, 1959.
10. "How, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you, excuse me, I have not the time to listen to such nonsense." -- Napoleon Bonaparte, when told of Robert Fulton's steamboat.
11. "[Television] won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." -- Darryl Zanuck, movie producer, 20th Century Fox, 1946.
12. "When the Paris Exhibition [of 1878] closes, electric light will close with it and no more will be heard of it." -- Oxford professor Erasmus Wilson.

[mrsmith]

“The energy from nuclear bonds are NOT being harnessed”
Then where does the heat come from?

Perhaps Al wasn’t considering such a convoluted method.

[Alas Babylon!]

First came the VT52... Then the VT100 years later.

[Teacher317]

the distinction you're making is akin to saying that we don't get electricity from coal or other fossil fuels.

You are exactly correct. Thank you for clarifying my point for me. :) We continue to only generate electricity from using steam to spin a turbine in a magnetic field. How we find/make the heat is mostly irrelevant. Boiling water to cause steam to spin turbines in a magnetic field continues to be the ONLY way that we create electricity, even on nuclear ships and in nuclear reactors. While the ways that we make the heat are increasingly fascinating, in the end, we are mostly still just using the basics from steam engines from the late 1800s to power the entire grid.

Boiling water to spin a turbine is NOT the same thing as directly harnessing the energy from U235 + neutron --> U 236 --> Ba 140 + Kr 93 + 3 neutrons

[House Atreides]

11. Jeff Sessions is about to spring his trap.
************************************************
15,000 sealed indictments unsealed; massive nation-wide arrests; dragnet and massive manhunt for Clintons, Comey, Mueller and others who have gone underground, are evading arrest and are believed to be attempting to flee the country.

[MarkL]

Again, I contend that Einstein wouldn't have cared of how electricity would have been generated when he made the statement. In general, theoretical physicists usually don't deal with implementations. Secondly, again, because of the law of conservation of energy, the mechanics of harnessing the energy wouldn't have mattered to him. And finally, in the early 1930s, the general scientific belief of many physicists was that once a nuclear chain reaction began, it would spin out of control, causing an uncontrollable release of energy, i.e. a huge nuclear explosion.

Mark

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Paul Ehrlich had nothing to do with “The Limits to Growth.”

[doorgunner69]

Amazing. My wife used to be a hairdresser, and they had that damn thing in the waiting area for clients. You expected Scientific American?

A lot of friction about the garbage she would read and want to talk about.

[Mears]

“A lot of friction about the garbage she would read and want to talk about.

—

My late aunt,God bless her,loved People Magazine and Hollywood gossip.

Before People was around she read all those old movie star mags like “Modern Screen”.

There IS a market for that type of thing,I guess.

.

[VeniVidiVici]

Paul Ehrlich had nothing to do with “The Limits to Growth.”

So explain. I'm just cutting and pasting from the interweb :)

[ProtectOurFreedom]

The Limits to Growth is a 1972 report on the computer simulation of exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources. Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation[3] and commissioned by the Club of Rome, the findings of the study were first presented at international gatherings in Moscow and Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 1971. The report’s authors are Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, representing a team of 17 researchers.

I was in my Junior year in mechanical engineering school when it came out. I was studying dynamics, control systems, and modeling when it was published and purchased a copy and read it. I was quite fascinated by their thesis and feedback model which actually did not make specific projections that certain things would happen in a given year. Instead, their models were created to provide general guidance of future trends. The authors failed to properly anticipate the accelerating rate of technology development that would address the many problems they identified (e.g., limited and declingping crop yields, accelerating pollution). They later largely recanted their thesis in LTG2. Their failure to correctly anticipate technological upheaval is the very thesis of this entire article discussion.

[doorgunner69]

There IS a market for that type of thing,I guess.

Don't remind me.

I still regret a bit getting her a laptop and now, dealing with the FaceF*ck crap she is exposed to.

"Are those rifles with scopes "Sniper rifles?"

Oh yeah, the RWS 48 is a very long range weapon. Against rats and crows............ etc.

[Toddsterpatriot]

In nuclear reactors (and all radioactive elements,) neutrons, not electrons, are released due to atomic decay.

Beta Decay

Atoms emit beta particles through a process known as beta decay. Beta decay occurs when an atom has either too many protons or too many neutrons in its nucleus. Two types of beta decay can occur.

One type (positive beta decay) releases a positively charged beta particle called a positron, and a neutrino; the other type (negative beta decay) releases a negatively charged beta particle called an electron, and an antineutrino.

The neutrino and the antineutrino are high energy elementary particles with little or no mass and are released in order to conserve energy during the decay process. Negative beta decay is far more common than positive beta decay.

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Physics/Physics7.shtml

[Slyfox]

This may or may not qualify, but I listened to an old broadcast of Art Bell and he was doing the news, (from the early 2000s), and he said, "The Clintons appeared together at a fundraiser - that is strange because they never appear together. She got about a million dollars for her presidential campaign." Then Art says, "Does anyone think she could really win?"

Here's to ya Art. You lived to see her lose bigtime.

[alexander_busek]

Yes, fission creates heat. But we aren't harnessing the electrons from the fission reaction to create electricity.

Straw Man Argument.

Electricity is merely one form of energy. Heat is another. A nuclear power plant that generates district heat to keep homes warm in the wintertime is harnessing fission to create a directy-useable form of energy (= heat).

(An aside: Electrons (usually referred to as beta particles) are only one form of radiation released during the fission of Thorium, Uranium, or Plutonium.)

Regards,

[trebb]

Interesting - I was born in '52 and knew we would land on the moon from watching The Honeymooners ....;-}

[Hardastarboard]

it was just garbage and would never last

You had half the prediction right. Unfortunately it was the wrong half.

[SunkenCiv]

Some levity, we need to lighten up for a few minutes. :^) Some of these are probably familiar. Thanks SeekAndFind.

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[snuffy smiff]

Likely due to the promises of the coming nuclear energy plants that were going to “make electricity too cheap to meter!” It was spread on so thick that builders began building “total electric” homes. Boy, did those owners take a hit when those ‘dreams’ turned into nightmares...

[ExGeeEye]

My home’s electrics are supplied at least in part “atomically”... from a nuclear power plant :)