15.5.1 Visions of future past
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra[15]
Predicting the future is both difficult and in many ways thankless. In general, one often doesn’t get much credit for successful predictions since they frequently appear ‘obvious’ in hindsight. A really accurate prediction sometimes isn’t even recognized as a prediction – as can happen in television, movies, and commercials when you aren’t really sure when the video was produced. If the prediction of present day technology is ‘spot on’ you just assume the movie was made at a later date than it actually was.
On the other hand one tends to get banged really hard for the predictions that do not come to pass. Incorrect predictions often appear so ‘obviously’ wrong in hindsight that our natural tendency is to laugh.
Despite these limitations, people tend to spend a considerable amount of time envisioning the future – be it something mundane like what they are planning to eat for dinner tonight or something more bold like designing a humans-to-Mars exploration strategy or a HyperLoop passenger transport system. Even when our predictions turn out to be wrong, I believe the act of prediction itself is valuable – envisioning the future often provides us with goals to work towards and the inspiration to carry on in the face of failures and disappointments.
In the chapter on artificial intelligence we talked extensively about the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” which attempted to realistically depict advances in space travel and computing. Though most of the predictions depicted in the movie proved wildly optimistic, “2001” served as a catalyst for numerous individuals, such as this author, to pursue careers in science and technology. Many of these individuals went on to actually advance the state of the art in computing and robotics.
In 1967 (nearly 50 years ago) the Philco-Ford Company produced a short film entitled “1999 A.D.” that attempted to predict what life would be like for the typical family at the turn of the century. One of the most interesting sequences in the film describes what computing will be like (Fig. 15.13). While the hairstyles, clothing, and background music, along with the somewhat offensive depiction of the roles of men and women, clearly date this video as being from the 1960’s, if one looks beyond these shortcomings the video is really quite insightful. It predicts home computers and printers, Internet connections, email, online shopping, online banking, flat screen monitors, and web cams. The accuracy of these predictions is amazing when one considers that in 1967 computers of the day filled large rooms, took a small army of people to manage, and cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars - and there was, of course, no Internet, nor email, nor online banking and shopping. One interesting feature of the video that turned out to be wrong was the idea that home computer systems would need automated backup components that would kick in if a primary unit failed. While this idea seems antiquated today, back in the 1960s electronic components were unreliable and failed rather frequently, so this idea probably seemed quite reasonable at the time.
Figure 15.13 A portion of the film “1999 A.D.” that depicts computing at the turn of the century as envisioned in 1967
Twenty years later, in 1988 – just four years after the original version of the Mac was introduced – Apple produced a short film called “Knowledge Navigator” that aimed to show what computing would be like at the start of the second decade of the 21stcentury (Fig. 15.14).
Figure 15.14 Apple’s “Knowledge Navigator” video from 1988
The video got a surprising number of things right, including: the emergence of flat screen, high resolution, color displays; a portable, tablet-like form factor computer (though one that opened up like a thin book); support for touch and gesture-based input; wireless networking; built-in video camera, microphone, and speakers; video conferencing; a kind of Internet (though one seemingly focused on research and scholarly pursuits); and small high capacity external storage devices (similar to today’s USB drives, though shown in the video as something more like the size and shape of a business card). This litany of successes is rather amazing – especially since some of the innovations, such as gesture-based interfaces have only become commonly available in the last 5 years or so.
The Knowledge Navigator video is, in fact, so accurate on so many fronts that it suffers from the “not enough credit” phenomenon mentioned above. It’s too easy to forget – or be unaware of – how truly primitive by today’s standards computers were when this video was made. We take flat screen, high resolution, color displays and wireless networks for granted now, but these things were essentially science fiction when Apple produced this video.
Despite its successes, the Knowledge Navigator video suffered from one major misstep. Apple envisioned that artificial intelligence would have progressed by now to the point where one would be able to converse with computers using human language and that operating systems would support an avatar-based interface – the Knowledge Navigator, a kind of ‘butler in a box’. While it is true that Siri and Google Now enable people to have limited ‘conversations’ with their smart phones, the level of artificial intelligence needed to construct a Knowledge Navigator simply doesn’t exist – at least not yet.
In 1993 AT&T produced a series of advertisements that attempted to envision life 15 to 20 years in the future (Fig. 15.15). These ads were known as the “You will” ads as they opened with a question of the form: “Have you ever …. ” followed by some seemingly futuristic action, such as “crossed the country without stopping for directions”, and then ended with the tag line “You will. And the company that will bring it to you: AT&T.”
While there are some misses in these ads, there are some surprising hits, including: in car GPS navigation with real time traffic updates and spoken directions, online education, books available online in electronic form, automated toll booths, online purchases of things like concert tickets, Skype-like video calls and video conferencing, NetFlix-like movies on demand (shown on large, rectangular, flat screen displays), wireless mobile computing, electronic medical records (which are just now becoming common). Misses include the idea that public phone booths would still exist, the expectation that voice recognition would be a common way of unlocking doors, and that AT&T would be a driving force in bringing many of the depicted innovations to market.
Figure 15.15 AT&T’s “You Will” ad campaign which originally broadcast in 1993 and 1994
The author of this text has himself dabbled in making predictions concerning the future for quite some time. The text you are reading has existed in various forms and editions since it was first drafted in the late 1990’s, and each edition has included predictions that were expected to come to true within 15 to 20 years. Thus, the earliest editions of the text included predictions that should have come to pass by now. So, before I make new predictions about the future, it is fair to ask how my past prognostications for today turned out.
One interesting prediction I made was the rise of e-books and “book readers” that sound a lot like today’s tablets and smart phones. Here is the quote from the May 1997 edition of the text:
… computers also have many advantages over paper. Within a decade these advantages, such as multimedia, hypertext, and ease of information retrieval, will begin to overtake paper. … These books will be viewed with a relatively inexpensive and portable “book reader.” These “book readers” will really be more like a combination TV, telephone, and Web browser. Many publications, especially periodicals, will not be distributed in any physical form. Instead, your reader will be able to automatically download Time (or just the articles you are likely to find of interest) directly off the Net.
Five years later, in the 2002 edition of the book I gave a more complete description of a smart phone. Here are some selected quotes from that edition:
With mobile devices, a mouse can be replaced with a touch sensitive display screen… The line between cell phones and PDAs is already starting to blur and this trend will accelerate…. In addition to calendar, address book, and scheduling applications, most phones will include web access capabilities over relatively high bandwidth data links…. Phones will also begin to include GPS (Global Positioning System) receivers. Incorporating GPS into a PDA Phone will allow the phone to always know where it is. That knowledge, combined with access to the Net, will enable all sorts of applications. Such a phone could give you turn-by-turn directions to the nearest In’N’Out Burger, determine when you have missed a turn and modify its instructions on how to get there based on this new information.
It is important to remember that I wrote these words five years before the first iPhone was announced (2007) and six years before the Android (2008).
Another prediction, probably the one I’m most proud of because it deals with a social implication of then-future technology, was my suggestion that access to (what we now call) the Internet would forever change the nature of human conversation so that long drawn out arguments over a trivial questions of fact would come to an end. Here is the quote from the May 1997 edition when the Internet was in its infancy and people connected to it by low speed dial up modem:
… this technology will affect most aspects of our daily lives in ways both profound and mundane. Most questions of fact should be answerable anywhere and anytime by affordable access to the GII (Global Information Infrastructure). If nothing else this will be great for settling friendly disagreements quickly. Arguments of the type: “Star Trek originally premiered in September of 1967.” “No, it premiered in September of 1968!” will be settled quickly and effortlessly by accessing the GII.
Note that in 2013 simply asking Siri “When did the original Star Trek series premier?” brings up a results page that tells me it premiered on Thursday, September 8, 1966.
Of course, I’m picking and choosing quotes to highlight those predictions I got right. But it should be clear from the various examples presented in this section that by carefully observing existing and emerging trends it is sometimes possible to predict, at least in ‘outline’ form, certain future technological innovations.
Footnotes
[15] While this quote is generally attributed to Berra, a similar quote “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” is attributed to physicist Niels Bohr. Some have suggested the joke first originated with Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens).