Is it future o’clock yet?
2010 was always one of those dates that seemed fantastically far away back in the 1980s. It was one of those benchmark dates that was spoken of in terms of jet pack and flying car type predictions in science and technology shows like Tomorrow’s World on BBC.
And yet here we are in 2010, living in Tomorrow’s World. While it’s easy to be despondent at the marked and unremitting absence of jet packs and flying cars, here’s something to cheer you up – a page by page reproduction of a kid’s book from 1972 called “2010 – Living in the Future“.
While it’s funny to look at how quaint and crazy some of the predictions are, it’s interesting to see how much the author got right, more or less. The vision phones are essentially internet-enabled computers with web cams. The video school is a distance learning set up, with streaming video conference. The school computer is an combined learning management and learning content management system. The library system is Google with ebooks and YouTube. The planes like a town bus is Ryanair.
It’s also interesting to see the kind of systemic mistakes that futurologists make. Futureologists seem to have a complete blind spot for the role of social inequality (everyone lives in a house suited to their needs), fashion and trends (everyone wears jumpsuits), markets and economics (free public transport and a 3 day work week?), not to mention basic practicality (country-wide transport by a literal series of (pneumatic) tubes?)
One elephant trap no futurist seems to be able to avoid is the fact that technology doesn’t always progress linearly or even exponetially without hitting hard physical limits. In 2060, Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity may well seem as quaintly mad an idea as Geoffrey Hoyle’s 4,000 mph rocket planes.
