When I Was A Kid…
By Mitch Berg
…I remember reading books from the 1910’s through the 1930’s, in the back room of the local library, that predicted what life’d be like in, say, 1975 or 2000. The technology predictions, of course, were the funniest in retrospect; dreams of personal aircraft buzzing people about on sky highways, robot servants, automated houses looked like the quaint noodlings of a bunch of grade school kids, to my sophisticated eighth-grade perspective in 1977.
But I can imagine, say, certain bloggers sitting around in 2040 looking at yesterday’s Houston Chronicle and muttering “hurry up, dammit” under their breath.
January 4th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Rule of thumb for the future, from an engineering point of view: that rate of changes for mechanical things are far over-estimated by futurists, underestimated for chemical, pharmacological and electronics things. For example, nearly all the improvements in car performance in the last half decade have come from electronic controls. Or as my ophthalmologist says, the best thing for the medical profession would be a huge melt-down in engineering like in the late 70s and early 80s since that was the last time there was a quantum improvement in their equipment.
January 4th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Heard one theory on inventions, kind of ties to nerdbert….that we talk about recent advances, but for the most part, little new has been invented in 70 years. The the 70 (more or less) years before that, we had the phonograph, light bulb, automobile, airplane, rockets, TV, radio. Since the 1930’s, what new inventions have rivaled those? Computers I suppose.
January 4th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Genetic engineering. Nuclear energy (including, maybe someday, fusion). Digital technology in general. Biomedical sciences.
I could go on, but I have a meeting to get to…
January 4th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
One word…
Bladerunner.