Entertainment and television. A cynic might say that “adequate programs” are as far off as they ever were, but entertainment has changed with the spread of video games and Internet distractions such as YouTube:

The Future of Television

Ralph R. Beal, Research Director for the Radio Corporation of America, has recently stated that television will be ready for every family's use "immediately after the war." The difference between "technically ready" television and satisfactory television programs day in and day out is a factor in the whole television situation which must not be overlooked. Science and industry will be ready to produce receivers as soon as they are permitted to do so when peace comes. However, the time when adequate programs will be available seems still to be far off on the horizon.

[Scientific American, October 1943]

It’s unthinkable to claim to know what people ten years or a thousand years from now will be doing. But I suspect they’ll still think and fear and hope and communicate with other people. And make predictions.

6 Comments

1. 1. profchuck 07:58 PM 12/19/12

   As a wise man once said "Making predictions is really hard especially if they are about the future."

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2. 2. Jay Powell 05:19 PM 12/20/12

   My 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.
   They 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.

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3. 3. profchuck 06:09 PM 12/20/12

   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.
   So 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.

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4. 4. RSchmidt 04:37 PM 1/14/13

   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.

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5. 5. julianpenrod 02:18 AM 1/15/13

   In fact, in talking about the future, so many actual facets seem rarely, if not never, to be discussed.
   The 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".

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6. 6. Quinn the Eskimo 08:40 PM 1/16/13

   Cinder Earth

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