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I 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

I 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 ago
  Ok, 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 ago
    I'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.
  - bigiain 16y ago
    I'd be interested to see what percentage of random dialed phone numbers end up connected to text-to-speech "if you want sales, press 1 now. If you want support, press 2 now, for all other queries, press pound or just wait." type of responses. (Hmmm, a free $30 credit Twilio account and their "detect answering machine" API call could generate a sample of 3000 random phone numbers pretty quickly...)
  - alphakappa 16y ago
    Not only is it good enough for mainstream adoption, it is mainstream. It's available in cars and practically every GPS device these days. Any time you call your credit card company, you deal with TTS (plus a fair bit of speech-recognition). As for robots, sure we don't have robots of the kind in the images shown, but the machinery we use to build skyscrapers in a fraction of the time it took 100 years ago is quite amazing. The heavy-earth machinery, cranes, railway-track building machines etc don't look like robots, but they do the same stuff. The future is definitely here :)

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 ago
Ok, 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 ago
  I'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.
- bigiain 16y ago
  I'd be interested to see what percentage of random dialed phone numbers end up connected to text-to-speech "if you want sales, press 1 now. If you want support, press 2 now, for all other queries, press pound or just wait." type of responses. (Hmmm, a free $30 credit Twilio account and their "detect answering machine" API call could generate a sample of 3000 random phone numbers pretty quickly...)
- alphakappa 16y ago
  Not only is it good enough for mainstream adoption, it is mainstream. It's available in cars and practically every GPS device these days. Any time you call your credit card company, you deal with TTS (plus a fair bit of speech-recognition). As for robots, sure we don't have robots of the kind in the images shown, but the machinery we use to build skyscrapers in a fraction of the time it took 100 years ago is quite amazing. The heavy-earth machinery, cranes, railway-track building machines etc don't look like robots, but they do the same stuff. The future is definitely here :)