1. The stuff they predicted using dedicated technologies (video pay phones, etc.) ended up being built on top of general purpose platforms (laptops). The fax-from-the-beach thing is another example, although one would just send an email today.
2. AT&T tended to predict evolutionary change when more profound change actually happened. Payphones, faxes, etc. Perhaps marketers realized that they had to attach the wow factor to something concrete that everybody already understood.
What they didn't predict (or at least tell us about) was that voice would become just another service on a general network (Skype). I guess this has only partially happened, but it's clearly the endgame.
Most - not all - of these feel obvious. Land lines? Fax machines? They were already niche in 2012. IDK, these weren't (bold) predictions, as much as already established market trends push out 10 years and then deciding how dead they'd be or not.
Side note: In the late 80's, I worked for AT&T in the consumer marketing dept. I remember there was a manager who repeatedly said, "Someday our phone numbers will follow us no matter where we live." Now, he was _not_ predicting the mobile phone, only that if you moved you wouldn't have to change numbers. But that, even then, he was viewed as a mad man. I wonder that he'd say today.
Prediction #7 about the mobile revolution was particularly interesting to me at the time. I was working in the telecoms industry and everyone was saying that super-smartphones were coming out in just a year, 2 at most, that would revolutionize everything, but that was all marketing hype. The reality at the time was to my mind looking really bad. WAP was pretty much a conscious effort by the telecoms industry to trap itself (or actually the users) in a technological stone age ghetto run by committees of marketing executives. The fact that Apple forced the carriers to allow an open mobile internet was utterly shocking to me - in a good way. I was expecting mobile computing to be a dismal carrier-controlled dystopia for a generation at least.
Yeah, this is all interesting in relation to a collectively shared idea of the future.
Growing up in the 70s, video phones were like flying cars and jet packs. Things right around the corner but never to arrive over the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Could be seen on The Jetsons, represent progress, a progress we saw clearly on TV, a recent invention itself.
And now, unlike flying cars and jetpacks, video phones have arrived. Not with a bang but with a whimper - no one actually looks forward to a video call, I'd guess.
And flying cars and jetpacks? They're not impossible, just absurdly dangerous and less likely because of this.
And video phones are similarly not actually desirable, just less extreme. Between 70s and the 2000s, I think most people figured out that video phones didn't exist 'cause unlike TV, they would be weird and awkward and unpleasant.
The big thing is that, very roughly, ~1850~1950 saw an incredible transformation of the infrastructure of daily life. The gas/electric stove, the gas/electric light bulb, the train and the automobile and beyond saw an incredible transformation of the physical environment in which people lived. After this period, technology has continued but the modernized items are improvements rather than fundamental innovations (with the exception of the Internet, which didn't change physical space).
It seems like the "science fiction world" of Robert Heinlein and others was very much a linear extrapolation of this earlier period of changing physical infrastructure - from sea ports to star port. Now, it's more obvious that if the physical structure of daily life changes, it's going to be following a different curve and transforming different things. The Internet, for example, was a vast change but it augmented, not supplanted, earlier tech.
Here, I think the main thing that hasn't caught up are certain kinds of imagination. The proponents of "Fermi's paradox" still imagines every intelligent species will "reach for the stars" despite the lack of evidence of any having done so.
This. Given the Wired advocacy for newish techs at the time and AT&Ts market and economic dominance we could have seen this as the pager or the late 1990s. Dominate and then reduced to a niche like Blackberry as the smartphone took over. Who'd a thunk?
That expectation seemed so natural back then that nobody really talked about it much. It wasn't a radical prediction theory, like the paperless office (nope) or global warming (ouch), it was an everyday observation: young people, if they had access to computers, were universally way ahead of older people with access to computers. It was am absolute no-brainer to extrapolate from this that all young people would become super fluent at computing once they all had access. It would have been a radical prediction to expect that this would not happen, like it did (due to ever-increasing simplifications). But nobody made that prediction, at least not in a notable way.
People are generally very bad at predicting stagnation or even a reversal of trends. If you asked anyone to describe a 2020 communications device in early 2000, when cellphones had just recently evolved from bricks to the miniscule 8210, the prediction would have been a device the size of a keychain fob, not the pocket TVs we actually have.
Handheld phones and video calls were easy to predict by extrapolation. No-one predicted Twitter, social media, usenet, forums and the idea of things going 'viral' because that requires a complete paradigm shift to 'anyone can publish'. It's a fundamental of how the world works now but it wasn't on anyone's radar 50 years ago as anything possible, useful or interesting.
- communication in relation to computing: half of computing early history was digital communication (telegraph)
- phones were just the seed: we don't really have phones, we have pocket computers with vestigial microphone tail. Phones were just the pivot to a new market.
my 0.02cents
ps: "Makes me wonder what connection I'm not making today." I'm curious if there still are connections to make. Not wanting to sound jaded or grim; but I feel we're at the end of a technological cycle. We have too much if I may phrase it like that, at least on the digital electronics. Maybe surprises will come elsewhere: say a blend of ubiquitious local assisted manufacturing on top of a different financial layer (spin off from the crypto idea) ?
We thought the future was gonna look like a movie, or something like The Jetsons. The future like actually much more mundane, and predictable. It's curved tv screens and smaller phones. That's kind of cool, but nothing special. I think part of it is people had very big expectations for the future and those are only rarely met.
I also think we already got a lot of the low hanging fruit. Growing up, I used to dream of being able to use my computer anywhere. Now I can, as a modern phone is even more capable than my computer back then. Phones used to regularly come out with cool new features that put it in front of competitors. Now most phones are identical-- they have all the features and apparently no one has any ideas for any new ones. I can run doom on my fridge and I don't care, but Dall-e impresses me.
The previous comment reminds me of how older people used to describe the internet when it was slowly gaining traction. It’s obvious that there were a lot of rough edges, but it would be really short sighted not to see the future potential. The same thing happened to the first smart phones.
The smartphone was probably predictable from the early 2000's at the very least.
Thinking about smartphone predictability reveals a pattern that might apply to other technologies: an actual dip in predictability caused by technological progress. If you leave out the always-internet-connected aspects of the smartphone, you still have a very small and portable device with books, amusements, up-to-date reference materials such as maps and encyclopedias, current periodicals, and real time voice and video communication. If the Internet did not exist, the iPhone would still have been a breakthrough product. A web-ignorant but otherwise capable iPhone was theoretically predictable half a century ago, but the technological reality of the intervening decades (ugly low-res screens, huge devices with pathetic capabilities, painfully clumsy input methods) depressed our expectations to the point that when it finally happened, it was something of a surprise.
AI may be another area where decades of technological disappointment have narrowed our expectations and reduced our ability to imagine what the future will bring. Someone transported from the 1960s might be better at predicting the future of AI than anyone who lived through the intervening decades.
10 years ago, did you see all your family members keeping a computer with a constant internet connection in their pocket? I think our predictive abilities of the future are often lacking.
> Most people own more than one PC, though the concept of what a "computer" is has changed considerably. Computers are no longer limited in design to laptops or CPUs contained in a large box connected to a monitor. Instead, devices with computer capabilities come in all sorts of unexpected shapes and sizes.
Doesn't seem like much of a prediction these days, but from the vocabulary of the past the iPad and smartwatch would qualify, and they weren't easy to predict at the time.
I remember telling my mum in the early 2000s that one day (I didn't realise quite how soon) all phones would just be touch screens. She didn't believe me, or thought she'd be dead before it happened. It is hard to imagine the future.
I'd say we're tracking behind on a lot of these but I don't think he's so far off (and it'd be interesting to check again in just a couple years). For instance:
> People communicate with their computers via two-way speech and gestures instead of with keyboards.
In the parlance of the past, touch screens, virtual assistants and face unlock all qualify.
> Most business transactions or information inquiries involve dealing with a simulated person.
Our bar for a "simulated person" is quite high these days, but again look at it from the perspective of the past. I quite often have chats with services of varying sophistications that try and emulate a natural conversation. I'm not fooled, but that isn't the prediction.
> Pinhead-sized cameras are everywhere.
Quite literally. I have a couple looking at me right now.
> Cables connecting computers and peripherals have almost completely disappeared.
Most of my peripherals actually are wireless. "Almost completely disappeared"? Sadly not. But we're probably talking years, and this was written twenty years ago.
> Rotating computer hard drives are no longer used.
> Massively parallel neural nets and genetic algorithms are in wide use.
Speak for themselves.
> Thin, lightweight, handheld displays with very high resolutions are the preferred means for viewing documents.
This one is interesting because again if you immerse yourself in the time it was written, paper was a very common occurrence on a work desk. Now? Rarely.
> Worldwide economic growth has continued. There has not been a global economic collapse.
Not as far off as it might seem.
> "Virtual sex"—in which two people are able to have sex with each other through virtual reality
Increasingly true. Check back in 12 months.
> Three-dimensional nanotube lattices are the dominant computing substrate.
Oh.
I actually think that, all in all, and taken in the spirit of the time, these are surprisingly accurate. Many are of course way off, but I personally think they show a rare prescience.
Yeah, I said this about videophones in 2002 or so. I was sure I was right. Videophones had been reinvented five times over. You could only use it at home, sitting on the couch, giving it your full attention. Who would want to have regular conversations that way enough to pay for a videophone with limited compatibility?
Now I go to the supermarket and people are holding their phones out at arm's length having FaceTime conversations at full volume with their adult kids.
Once 3-D works and integrates with physical objects it's going to be a big deal. We just keep failing at that.
I don't want to downplay the impact of Internet, but I do think it is similar and the other advancements also faded some behavioral patterns, such as exchanging letters, which used to be an integral part of people's lives (for some perhaps the most important one).
Second, we are not there yet on 24/7, anywhere connection, but we are working on it. Perhaps if we have instantaneous world-wide telepathy one day, Internet will also feel as just another advancement, like the car plane phone.
Interesting to get the 1985 perspective. Some thoughts:
- the industry always announces things way too early even if they are good ideas (this article was pretty much right about the next ~10 years)
- the price always comes down
- "unforeseen consequences" (the rise of even more portable devices - phones and tablets) went on to succeed even the laptop, which was probably impossible to predict at the time. One technology revolution is debatable, but two seems to be beyond anyone to anticipate.
1. The stuff they predicted using dedicated technologies (video pay phones, etc.) ended up being built on top of general purpose platforms (laptops). The fax-from-the-beach thing is another example, although one would just send an email today.
2. AT&T tended to predict evolutionary change when more profound change actually happened. Payphones, faxes, etc. Perhaps marketers realized that they had to attach the wow factor to something concrete that everybody already understood.
What they didn't predict (or at least tell us about) was that voice would become just another service on a general network (Skype). I guess this has only partially happened, but it's clearly the endgame.
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