Past Predictions of the Future

 
Jo just pointed me to a remarkably prescient article from a 1961 magazine that predicted Life in 2000. Since I have work to procrastinate, let me go through this point by point... and apologies in advance for the 1960s-style sexism present in the original essay. Thanks also to the Aussies who got the whole thing online!


What sort of life will you be living 39 years from now? Scientists have looked into the future and they can tell you.


So far so good, no definite predictions. No right, no wrong.

It looks as if everything will be so easy that people will probably die from sheer boredom.

True. For spoilt rich kids, the way to go is: Boredom -> drugs -> overdose.
For jocks: Boredom -> need adrenalin rush -> extreme sports (e.g. rock climbing sans carabiner).
For the rest of us: Boredom -> junk-food binging -> 'nuff said.

You will be whisked around in monorail vehicles at 200 miles an hour



Well done! This is true if you're Japanese or French or live in a country with high-speed rail service. Note how well the prediction avoids saying where you are whisked around. It could have suggested 200mph travel within cities, for instance.

...and you will think nothing of taking a fortnight's holiday in outer space.


Hmmm... pity they hadn't said 2020 instead (think Branson, not Shuttleworth). So let's play Fair & Balanced, and say "Absolutely true! People think of nothing involving taking a fortnight's holiday in outer space."

Your house will probably have air walls,

Wtf is an air wall? A wall with lots of air in it? Okay, score another correct. They don't say how much air, and lots of building materials, even bricks, store air as it helps with insulation. Several high-rise buildings have glass-air-glass walls. Budding prediction scam artists should note the fancy technique of using compound words with ambiguous interpretations.

... a floating roof,...

Obviously a referral to changing ceilings on mortgage payments. Or if you live in Florida, to the aftermath of hurricane damage.

,... adjustable to the angle of the sun,...

True. Everyone has roofs with daily adjustments to the sun's position. (Of course, it's the sun doing the moving, not the roofs, but as the earth is moving around the sun, so are the roofs, so this counts.)


Doors will be opened automatically...

True in shops. The prediction doesnt say it has to be true in people's homes. (Btw, the pic is from This is Broken by Mark Hurst. It was taken by Victor Stanwick.)

Clothing will be put away by remote control

True for those who can afford maid service.

The heating and cooling systems will be built into the furniture and rugs.

Fans are furniture, as are radiators and air-conditioners.

You'll have a home control room - an electronics centre,

Spot on.

...where messages will be recorded when you're away from home. This will play back when you return,...

Not just correct, but conservative, since answering machines turned up way before 2000. (Funny how cellphones arent predicted.)

,...and also give you up-to-the minute world news,

True, radios are part of the electronic center. But didn't they have radios in 1961? Sure they did. So perhaps they were anticipating the fact that local radio stations rarely have real news, but that there would be an internet with lots of news. Impressive!

...and transcribe your latest mail

Transcribe? As in write out what's already written? Did they mean 'read out'? Shelve this under inunderstandable.

You'll have wall-to-wall global TV.

Sure, cable service in different rooms.

an indoor swimming pool

Sure, I have a jacuzzi. (You won't see it if you visit me though, I've lent it to the neighbors. For an undisclosed fee.)

TV-telephones

Webcams, chat rooms, netphoning, etc.

room-to-room TV

Two people in adjacent rooms can run Netmeeting if they really want to.

Press a button and you can change the decor of a room.

Press the emergency 'FIRE' button in a theater and you'll change a lot of decor. Using TV-B-Gone in the dying seconds of a ball game in a crowded sports bar also works.

The status symbol of the year 2000 will be the home computer help, which will help mother tend the children...

"Go to your room and play with your Xbox. Mummy has to teach Daddy how to use a belt."

cook the meals

TV dinners are still with us.

and issue reminders of appointments

My computer beeps whenever it's time for me to go and look at the post-it notes on the fridge for an upcoming appointment.

Cooking will be in solar ovens with microwave controls

Any campfire ignited using a magnifying glass counts as a solar oven. Microwave controls refer to any on-off mechanism, and campfires are either lit or, if I'm responsible for the lighting, not.


Garbage will be refrigerated, and pressed into fertiliser pellets.

No shit.

Food won't be very different from 1961,

Finally, a wrong prediction. We have far greater choice of junk food today.

but there will be a few new dishes - instant bread, sugar made from sawdust, foodless foods (minus nutritional properties), juice powders and synthetic tea and cocoa.

Other than the sawdust, true. Bread is now edible the moment it leaves the oven. Foodless foods are a clear reference to junk food (and celery) so I'll take back that 'wrong prediction' judgement of a few words ago. Juice powders are common, as are synthetic foods. Synthetic doesn't have to mean 'all-synthetic', so tea can be called synthetic even if it has tea leaves, as long as it has fancy chemicals too.


At work, Dad will operate on a 24 hour week.

Typo. They must have meant 'day', not 'week'. PBS Story on Working Family Values, 1998


The office will be air-conditioned with stimulating scents and extra oxygen - to give a physical and psychological lift.

True for those who work in emergency rooms.

Mail and newspapers will be reproduced instantly anywhere in the world by facsimile.

Fax = internet + printer.

There will be machines doing the work of clerks, shorthand writers and translators

Recording equipment has made shorthand writers redundant. And speech recognition and automatic translation tools are commonly used. Note that the prediction didn't say that the machines would actually work well.

Machines will "talk" to each other.

Networks.

It will be the age of press-button transportation.

Elevators.

Rocket belts will increase a man's stride to 30 feet,

True for astronauts doing space walks. (They didn't say that the human doing the striding had to be on earth.)

...and bus-type helicopters will travel along crowded air skyways.

True if you're really rich. And helicopters & planes keep killing birds, indicating that the skies are getting crowded.

There will be moving plastic-covered pavements,

'Plastic-covered' refers to litter. 'Moving' refers to San Francisco, 1989.


..individual hoppicopters

These are personal helicopter packs, which sadly haven't seen much development since their use in the 1940s. Which is a good thing - a drunk hoppicopter pilot is a scary thing to contemplate.

and 200 m.p.h. monorail trains operating in all large cities.

Darn. They had to be more specific. Morons. Anyway, true if you live in Japan.

The family car will be soundless, vibrationless

I recall reading a story in 1995 about BMW having to put vibrating sounds back in cars after tests showed that people driving truly soundless cars were unnerved by the experience... and once hydrogen and/or electric cars are common, cyclists will have to watch out...

and self-propelled thermostatically

Wtf?


The engine will be smaller than a typewriter

Probably true. There have been some pretty large typewriters.

Cars will travel overland on an 18 inch air cushion.

No, hovercars aint here yet.

Railways will have one central dispatcher, who will control a whole nation's traffic.

True in Luxembourg.

Jet trains will be guided by electronic brains.

Ja.

In commercial transportation, there will be travel at 1000 m.p.h. at a penny a mile.

When my company pays, it's even cheaper than that.

Hypersonic passenger planes, using solid fuels, will reach any part of the world in an hour.

Nowhere near here yet. Scramjets will make it possible in 2080.

By the year 2020, five per cent of the world's population will have emigrated into space.

True. These spaces around cities are called slums.

Many will have visited the moon and beyond.

I think a dozen people counts as 'many'. Sure they were Apollo astronauts, but that doesnt make them not people, right?

Our children will learn from TV, recorders and teaching machines.

Ja. Good thing there's no prediction on what they learn from TV.

They will get pills to make them learn faster.

Adderall.

We shall be healthier, too.

Big misprediction.





There will be no common colds, cancer, tooth decay or mental illness.

Ditto.

Medically induced growth of amputated limbs will be possible.

Damn the word 'medically induced', otherwise we'd just say 'lizards' and give them a point.

Rejuvenation will be in the middle stages of research, and people will live, healthily, to 85 or 100.

There exist geriatric marathoners.

There's a lot more besides to make H.G. Wells and George Orwell sound like they're getting left behind....

Think iPods, cellphones, Google.

And this isn't science fiction. It's science fact - futuristic ideas, conceived by imaginative young men, whose crazy-sounding schemes have got the nod from the scientists. It's the way they think the world will live in the next century - if there's any world left!

Well, we should congratulate the world for getting past the 'if'. That probably means thanking Nikita Kruschev for not being overly macho during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Not JFK, he would have pressed the red button, destroying the world to save it.)

Final score: 43 right, 8 wrong, 2 inunderstandable. Not bad.

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