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They weren't so wrong... sure their form factors were way off but they had all the ideas down... 1. Electronic Books 2. High speed aerodynamic trains 3. Comput
by 51Cards 16y ago
They weren't so wrong... sure their form factors were way off but they had all the ideas down...
1. Electronic Books
2. High speed aerodynamic trains
3. Computer aided manufacturing
4. Motorized personal transport
6&7. Ok no one is letting a robot cut their hair or do makeup, but we're using robots for surgery
9. Aerodynamic motorcycles
10. Webcams
11. Where's my flying car!
12. Tanks
13. Electronic news
etc. etc.
If you look at the concept alone, for 100 years ago they weren't THAT far off. Personalized flight on the whole was really the only big miss.
Edit: I understand the horse one now. Back then horses were used for everything... but by 2000 they predicted everything would be machines, so seeing a horse would be a curiosity, not the daily norm. You would take your kids to see a horse, petting zoo anyone? Pretty prescient to me.
- jodrellblank 16y agoThe other big miss is that the outside scenes have one or two people and a lot of green, and the indoor scenes have a tiny amount of utilitarian furniture. There's no sense of stuff and clutter, urbanisation and buildings everywhere and people people people. ( and the train is nothing like high speed and aerodynamic - it has balconies! )
- JonnieCache 16y agoThis could be limitations of the artist and of the medium. These images were produced by chromolithography, a many-staged process of chemical interactions. Adding lots and lots of details and tiny, realistic figures would be difficult. And perhaps expensive. I can imagine a situation where the cost of the process is an exponential function of the number of places different colours have to border each other without bleeding. It's tricky enough to draw that kind of thing in any medium.
- itsnotvalid 16y agoPeople still see horses in that way -- Horse racing anyone?
- bane 16y agoOk no one is letting a robot cut their hair Oh, but how close we are! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bgRszdUdhQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bgRszdUdhQ
- iwwr 16y agoThe robot surgeon is just an interface for the real surgeon, providing some smooth, precise motion and access into small places (where a human surgeon would have to cut his way through). Hair is on the outside of the body and quite accessible. There is yet no technology that can replace the human hand (yet).
- Zak 16y agoPersonalized flight on the whole was really the only big miss. I think the main reason that isn't more mainstream is that even with small planes, we chose to emphasize safety far more than with road vehicles. I don't know why that is; I'd gladly trade some amount of safety if it meant I could afford to own and operate a plane. A Cessna 172 is no more complicated than an economy car. It costs $275,000 due to regulation and low volume, not because it's inherently more expensive to produce than a car.
- treeface 16y agoA Cessna 172 is no more complicated than an economy car. Not trying to sound snarky here, but have you ever piloted an airplane? The pre-takeoff checks take a little while, require a good bit of technical expertise, and are absolutely required if you want to be pretty damn sure that your airplane won't fall out of the sky. Safety is, at times, overemphasized, but then again your car won't fall from the sky when it stalls.
- khafra 16y agoI read him as saying it's no more complicated to build; not that it's no more complicated to operate. This interpretation makes sense in view of his point that safety concerns (pre-takeoff checks) are what prevent widespread personal flight.
- 9ec4c12949a4f3 16y agoCars were not as reliable as they were today either. Things broke down all the time 40 years ago.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- silverbax88 16y agoIt does sound like someone who hasn't experienced flight training. You don't have to know how to drive a car by instruments alone.
- kenjackson 16y agoOk no one is letting a robot cut their hair Although we are using a electric mechanical device to do so. In particular with shaving we have devices that do all the cutting and make it virtually impossible to cut yourself. So kind of similar even there.
- rumblestrut 16y agoFlobee. Enough said. http://www.flowbee.com http://www.flowbee.com
- lloeki 16y agoAnd there are electric hair driers, hair irons, shavers and various chemical products allowing one to change hair shape and color at will.
- riffraff 16y agothe hair perming helmets or whatever they are called still seem futuristic to me, but hair irons and hair dye have been around for a few millennia
- dirtyaura 16y agoI think the true wisdom in past future predictions is something that people didn't get right. For example another (my) take on the three first predictions, that you listed as successes, are: no practical text-to-speech(1), no truly intercontinental trains(2), no robots on construction sites(3) If you look it from that perspecive, there's something to be learned. It's easy to vision, but it's difficult to understand what things are truly hard or things that surprisingly worked against all odds. For example, people have been waiting for practical home robots for decades, but operating autonomously in the real world is really difficult problem, much harder that it intuitively feels (because we are so good at it). On the otherhand, I think very few people predicted something like Wikipedia (or HN, Quora etc): free, quality information, produced by volunteers. It's hard problem too, but it just worked. My gut feeling is that it's the social phenomena that we underestimate in our future predictions.
- burgerbrain 16y ago"no practical text-to-speech" Huh? How do you figure? I use text-to-speech all the time and besides sounding distinctly robotic, it works extremely well. And the current state-of-the-art stuff is damn near as good as HAL9000. EDIT: and we do have practical home robots, they're called roombas and programmable microwaves. They just don't look like something out of the Jetsons, and we've seen the technology improve over time, so we don't think of it as anything special.
- dirtyaura 16y agoOk, granted, text-to-speech works, but it's still not good enough for main stream adoption. Roomba, on the otherhand, is a pathetic, if you compare it to visions.
- burgerbrain 16y agoI'm not sure what your definition of mainstream is, but I commonly see text-to-speech listed as an advertised feature of mainstream consumer products. TTS's dirty little is that it's actually much faster to read something yourself than have something read to you, assuming you are fluent in the language. It's not a failing of TTS, it's just people not properly considering the use of technology. The same goes for the roomba and the programmable microwave. It makes much more sense to have small single-purpose robots that function well, than a single multipurpose humanoid robot.
- efnx 16y agoIt really depends on how literal you take these pictures to be. You could say that picture three suggests "we will have computer aided manufacturing," but you could also say it suggests "robots will build our houses." I think what these pictures show more than anything, is the kind of tangential predictions people seem to make about the future. "Everything will be automated with lots of tiny mechanical arms and levers. Everything will fly (because flight is really hot right now." This is a great example of zeerust (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust). Though interpreted vaguely these predictions are for the most part pretty good IMO.