It’s easier to think about the fate of specific gizmos, especially ones that are well woven into the fabric of modern life, such as the automobile. This one sounds like you could plug it into your iPad:
Car of the Future
The car of the future won’t leave anything to be done by man power. In two or three years foot brakes will be things of the past except on cheap cars. Why should a man exert muscle to stop a car any more than to start it? What’s that great brute of an engine idling under the hood for? Now, jump three jumps more. If the engine starts and lights and pumps and stops itself, why shouldn’t it steer the car? Revolutionary? Nonsense!...The car of the future will have no such thing as a “driver’s seat.” All the seats in the car save the rear one will be moveable. Driving will be done from a small control board, which can be held in the lap. It will be connected to the mechanism by a flexible electric cable. A small finger lever, not a wheel, will guide the car.
[Scientific American, January 5, 1918]
Predictions can be quite bizarre. Perhaps that’s a value judgment. In this case, it starts out fine then really does get bizarre:
The next 75 Years
The construction of the North River Bridge, now assured, will be followed ultimately by the building of a few other long-span bridges of equal or greater magnitude, such, for instance as a 4,000-5,000-foot span across the waters of the Golden Gate at San Francisco.... Where bridging is impossible, resort will be had to tunnelling, and it is probable that the next decade will see the completion of the 21-mile Channel tunnel, to be followed by one between Scotland and Ireland....
Okay, we get it. Bigger bridges, longer tunnels, faster airplanes, all standard stuff. Any twit can figure that out. But here’s where this particular prediction goes off the rails:
....But the fact can hardly be escaped that there is a growing fund of well authenticated phenomena which are explained by no natural law yet formulated, and which seem to require that we postulate the existence of some force operated, consciously or unconsciously, by the human brain. Nobody, for instance, can deny the phenomenon of hypnosis. No careful person is going to deny categorically the accumulating evidence that there really is some sort of communication between individuals widely separated in space, to which the general name of mindreading or thought-transferance or telepathy has been provisionally applied.
We think we may, without being accused of having fallen victim to the post-war hysteria, suggest that when all cases of fraud and hypnosis have been ruled out, there is a residuum of material demonstrations of an as yet intangible force--things to which the hateful names of spirit-rapping, table-tipping, levitation, etc., must be applied until we get a more respectable term to take their collective place.
On all these grounds we are inclined to predict that there exists a force, operated through action of the human brain, that is capable of producing sensible effects and effects upon another brain. The science of tomorrow will tell us what this force is and will give us a control over it which may turn out to be as complete as our control over the electric impulses which today we shoot through the ether in utter defiance of all the experiment and all the knowledge and all the common sense of a generation ago.
[Scientific American, October 2, 1920]
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Add CommentAs a wise man once said "Making predictions is really hard especially if they are about the future."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy prediction, based uon my research, is that educators in the future will pay more attention to "wrong"answers than to "right" answers. Tests do not measure "knowledge" but question interpretation skills.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey can tell teachers their students' thinking skills, once the optional answers are included into the interpretation of test result.
No longer using invalid feedback procedures, teacher will have their students think their way into knowledge and the speed of learning will more than double.
The depth of understanding will increase to the point where we will begin to solve our socioeconomic disparities. The imbalances in our political scene, that is currently skewed towards people with money enough to buy decisions from people in positions of political power, will be rectified to the point where our elected representative will represent us instead of representing the money interests that paid for their campaigns.
Predicting the future of technology is very tricky. Arthur C. Clark in 1963 very accurately predicted the IPad (He called it the "News Pad") in "2001" but thought we would have lunar colonies by the late 1990's. We have voice writers and video telephones but no flying cars. We have household robots to vacuum our rugs and wax our floors but they look nothing like those depicted in the 50's. We have a world government (sort of) in the UN but it is doing a terrible job of unifying humanity. We have pocket telephones that can contact the entire world but our spacecraft are still powered by chemical propulsion and not atomic energy. We have explored the entire solar system with the exception of Pluto (and a probe is on the way there now) but only by smart machines not people. We landed on the moon years before most SciFi writers predicted it and then gave up and never returned.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo predicting the future of technology is a mixed bag of both over and under estimating the rate of progress. But right or wrong or somewhere in between it remains a lot of fun.
One of the difficulties of predicting future technology is knowing what will be profitable rather than knowing what is possible. That is what determines which technologies succeed and which fail. For example. the problem with the idea of multitasking robots taking care of our homes for us was that in the near term it was cheaper to make robots that specialized in simple tasks, e.g. washing machines, dish washers, vacuum cleaners. Even if we could build a machine that was able to multitask it would likely still use other specialized machines to accomplish each task. When you consider that marketing companies can't tell you how well a new technology will perform tomorrow let alone a dozen or so years from now it seems doubtful that we will ever be able to predict the future.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact, in talking about the future, so many actual facets seem rarely, if not never, to be discussed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe role of self seeking forces controlling the money which, currently, seems the engine of the "progress" that most if not all "futurists" talked about. Monopolizing development so only what benefits them, what they manufacture, gets manufactured. Arranging that alternative forms of propulsion, construction, dealing with ailments, and so on, are denied to exist or their existence withheld from the public, so only the powerful can benefit, and the public end up paying huge amounts for bargain basement.
The gullibility of a plurality if not the majority, to believe what self seeking criminals tell them to believe. The viciousness of a group of individuals who used to be called "contrary", then "difficult", then "clinical" toward belief in things they are instructed by "science" not to believe exist.
Compare today with the view of today from, say, 1960.
People, incidentally respectably dressed, traveling to the local rocket field by airborne conveyance or streamlined car. There, getting tickets to shuttles to the other side of the planet, one of the space stations or the moon. Once airborne, possibly settling down to a game of chess with the ship computer or reading a science article on prospects for time travel or travel to the stars. Intermittently listening to broadcasts from the One World Government about, say, successes in converting parts of the Sahara into lush farmland.
As opposed to today, people in t-shirts and sweatpants driving squashed bug shaped cars, deliberately non aerodynamically designed to increase gas consumption with rear windows too small to see through, forcing purchase of expensive closed circuit rear view television. When they get to their location, stumbling forward, thumbing message after message into their iPads, or playing interminable video games, anything to avoid the horror of "being alone with their thoughts". Their exposure to "science" consisting of insistent articles that everything that can be discovered already has been discovered, that there is no such thing as faster than light or time travel, and, from now on, it's just a matter of making smaller and smaller versions of what we have, with the "news" consisting only of commercials disguised as "articles" promoting the newest petrochemical waste masquerading as "medicine".
Cinder Earth
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