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The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have predicted a moon landing only 66 years

The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have predicted a moon landing only 66 years later? Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone, let alone 1922? Only one prediction is worthy of confidence - the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate...and the world will improve. We lament progress, but few of us would choose 1922 over 2022 (I mean, the sanitation and medical care alone makes the decision trivial on my end). Even fewer would choose 2022 in 2122.

GrumpyNl 5y ago
Jules Verne did a pretty good job.
amelius 5y ago
Stallman could have.
inglor_cz 5y ago
Too many smart (or smart-sounding) people either here or on Reddit claim casually that some X will take hundreds of years to do. Where X may be artificial intelligence, conquest of longevity or whatever else. The reality is that we do not know. Some things may be out of our reach forever, but contemporary world has by far the highest count of scientists ever and the talent pool is widening as countries such as Bangladesh escape their previous crushing poverty. To this comes politics. A second Cold War with China may be terrifying and yet enormously scientifically productive, much like WWII and the previous Cold War was. I am personally not willing to make any technical/scientific predictions beyond 2030. Political even less so.
- Guillaume86 5y ago
  > Too many smart (or smart-sounding) people either here or on Reddit claim casually that some X will take hundreds of years to do. Where X may be artificial intelligence, conquest of longevity or whatever else. > The reality is that we do not know Yeah, but it works both ways, I see a lot of people on reddit claiming aging will be solved in X years (usually in their lifetime) and it does not sound any smarter.
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    I have never seen a that claim, but since 2012 I have seen not numerous upvoted posts on various forums that full self driving cars are only five years away. I routinely saw similarly outlandish claims about AI in general.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    True, it does not sound any better, especially if you take into account the progress of other challenges in medicine. We aren't anywhere close to, say, solving cancer, but we are conquering new territory inch by inch, with a massive difference of outcomes in last 50 years or so. I suspect the same is going to happen in the longevity field. Dr. Gregory Fahy managed to rejuvenate the thymus in several individuals (TRIIM and TRIIM-X trials) and lower their epigenetic age. It might have well been the first baby step on that journey.
Damogran6 5y ago
In none of the hard Sci-Fi I read as a child did they say "I needn't worry for light, as I had my portable cellphone" Will you have AR displays that hide the information an make a room otherwise appear devoid of technology? Yes...because normal people don't fetishize technology and HGTV tells me it should be hidden from sight. Will it be a display projected on your contact lenses, a mist excreted from a rod with lasers shined upon it, or a projector with a funky short throw lens? Man, I've got no clue...but all the fiction I've seen with fantastic display technology shows: We'll will it into existence.
- Laforet 5y ago
  70s and 80s scifi media frequently depict floppy disks being used well into the 22nd century and beyond, despite the fact that optical and solid state storage did exist in some form back then. Either is is done to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, or human beings really lack the abiltiy to imagine things they have no empirical experience with.
  - ogogmad 5y ago
    Do the details of the storage medium matter? It still stores ones and zeros - who cares how?
    - Laforet 5y ago
      Yes it does. Like it all not we all subconsciously associate media format with a certain era or genre. A gramophone places a story back in the early 20th century and a minidisc surely brings up memories of the late 1990s. Having a period-specific piece media show up in depictions of the future surely breaks the veil of suspended disbelief.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    TV/Movie scifi is mostly the last place you'd look for bold imaginings of future technology. Star Trek had a few hits with communicators, PADDs, and touch screen controls, but generally designs are very much of their time. It's very obvious with modern scifi where controls are usually holographic projections with cyan grids and twirly animations. After a while these designs become lazy tropes - like villains who wear chunky black leather. Compare with something like Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which is far more adventurous about possible futures. The background problem is that the 20th century was set up for an explosion of invention by the late 19th, with Maxwell/Heaviside leading the charge and eventually leading to game changer developments like relativity and quantum theory. In math Boolean algebra fell out almost by accident from attempts to find a theory of computability which eventually led to modern computing. These were all bedrock insights which completely changed what was possible in the physical world. Where's the modern equivalent? There isn't one. Insights at that level more or less stopped happening after the discovery of DNA and the creation of Shannon's Information Theory. Quantum Gravity might be the next game changer, but it also might not, and in any case it's an unknown distance away. The rest is detail work, not ground breaking transformation.
intrasight 5y ago
A telco executive's astute predictions "Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, pure speculation. Here is my prophecy: In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk. Who knows but it may actually translate from one language to another?" - Mark Sullivan, April 9, 1953
- dougmwne 5y ago
  Of all our technology, I truly think the smartphone is one of the most impressive and futuristic things ever invented. It’s the kind of thing Star Trek thought was hundreds of years in the future and that most sci-fi failed to imagine. It is individually transformative in a way that space flight will probably never be. Our information tech is likely to continue racing forward and this current moment will look analog in comparison.
  - intrasight 5y ago
    The future may be analog - if you look far enough. We are analog.
    - hackernudes 5y ago
      Or maybe the universe is digital if you could look small enough!
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    There was a great scene in Station 11 which is partially set after civilization-destroying pandemic in which one character who was born before the pandemic explains to someone who was born after how ride sharing apps worked on a cell phone. It's magic of you describe it from scratch. The tiny device has access to a detailed mail of the entire planet, knows where you are and then a car shows up to transport you to your destination without exchanging and tangible money or even talking about it. It's also telling that older SciFi gets this all wrong. In Asimov's Lucky Starr the protagonist had a space ship that can travel through the outer layers of the sun and someone had a dwelling on an hollowed out asteroid. Tables use energy fields for easier cleaning. Yet, the ships board computer doesn't even have a display and needs to print everything.
ctdonath 5y ago
“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” - Nicola Tesla, 1926
jfk13 5y ago
> Only one prediction is worthy of confidence - the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate...and the world will improve. I'm not actually very confident about that last part...
Macha 5y ago
> Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone Yes. It was called a communicator in fiction of the day. Did they get the exact details right, or every use case (e.g. replacing flashlights and music players)? No. Some of them used holograms from watches or big old handsets with a screen instead of a keypad but still big ear cups. But a portable device that could be used for voice calls, video calls, information lookup, note taking, certainly existed in fiction prior to the 90s.
- jpindar 5y ago
  In the 1950s, comic book detective Dick Tracy wore a two-way wrist radio, which later included video.
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    Still waiting for them to add a camera to the Apple Watch. Then it can be a full phone replacement for low tech days.
    - heavyarms 5y ago
      I've been thinking this since the Apple Watch came out, but other than practical limitations (battery life) there's always this problem: have you tried to hold your arm out in front of your face and stare at your watch for a while? It's not the most comfortable position. You might have to add some extra arm/shoulder days in your exercise routine.
      - dougmwne 5y ago
        I think a fisheye lens plus face recognition should solve that nicely. As long as you can see the watch screen, the image could be cropped, skewed and rotated to focus on your face.
  - jaclaz 5y ago
    For the record it appeared in 1946: https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_Radio https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_Radio and the video in 1964: https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_TV https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_TV More or less both are (fictional) "miniaturization" of existing, known technologies.
Robotbeat 5y ago
> The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have predicted a moon landing only 66 years later? I mean, Jules Verne suggested trips to the Moon earlier than that in 1965 via cannon (from the coast of Florida!). Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, rejecting cannons on technical grounds (the speed of gunpowder's gases too slow to break from Earth's gravity as well as the impractical extremes in acceleration), proposed using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen in a multistage rocket for reaching the Moon... Which is what 2 of the 3 stages of the Saturn V used, so he was pretty accurate. He also suggested the need for oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, automatic machine guidance, thrust vector control using both external fins and fins in the flow of the gases (both methods became used on rockets for early spaceflight) as well as suggesting the use of a sun sensor (star tracker) and gyroscopes for guidance. It's remarkable how many critical features of spaceflight were invented by Tsiolkovsky in that document. Granted, I don't remember an actual forecasted date for these predictions, but he foresaw most of the technical features of spaceflight correctly. https://spacemedicineassociation.org/download/history/history_files_1920-1930/Tsiolkovsky%20Oberth%20Goddard.pdf https://spacemedicineassociation.org/download/history/histor... Projections from Nikola Tesla suggested similar things to the smartphone around that timeline. If you look at technical pioneers using logical consequences of actual known physics and engineering, they can make pretty remarkably prescient predictions.
pbourke 5y ago
> Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone, let alone 1922? Yes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
rbanffy 5y ago
> The reality is that no such projection is plausible. It's getting increasingly difficult. The world of 1600 would be easily understandable to someone from 1500 or 1400. When I was born, no human eyes had seen the far side of the Moon (although it was reasonably sure someone would, shortly, as happened in december that year) and the closest thing to a cellphone was a prop being used by Captain Kirk on the 23rd century. > the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate There are physical limits to that, so the exponential factor may be reduced for a while. There is also a limit on how fast we can develop new things that will give us a hard time (at least until we develop a general enough AI, at which point all bets are off - because we are literally not smart enough to predict what happens next). BTW, a couple years ago I had an accident that, if it happened in 1900, I'd lose my leg. So, yeah, 2022 is good for me, but I wouldn't turn down a chance to last until 2122.
tempestn 5y ago
Over the broad arc of history things have gotten better over the long term. I'm not sure that's always the case though. Exponential growth of technology, or anything else, physically can't last forever. What does it look like when it stops? I do agree that whatever complaints we might have about the present though, it's better than any time in history save for possibly the very recent past. And I think it's a good bet that 2122 will indeed be better. I just wouldn't call it a certainty.

GrumpyNl 5y ago

Jules Verne did a pretty good job.

amelius 5y ago

Stallman could have.

inglor_cz 5y ago

Too many smart (or smart-sounding) people either here or on Reddit claim casually that some X will take hundreds of years to do. Where X may be artificial intelligence, conquest of longevity or whatever else. The reality is that we do not know. Some things may be out of our reach forever, but contemporary world has by far the highest count of scientists ever and the talent pool is widening as countries such as Bangladesh escape their previous crushing poverty. To this comes politics. A second Cold War with China may be terrifying and yet enormously scientifically productive, much like WWII and the previous Cold War was. I am personally not willing to make any technical/scientific predictions beyond 2030. Political even less so.

Guillaume86 5y ago
> Too many smart (or smart-sounding) people either here or on Reddit claim casually that some X will take hundreds of years to do. Where X may be artificial intelligence, conquest of longevity or whatever else. > The reality is that we do not know Yeah, but it works both ways, I see a lot of people on reddit claiming aging will be solved in X years (usually in their lifetime) and it does not sound any smarter.
- lelanthran 5y ago
  I have never seen a that claim, but since 2012 I have seen not numerous upvoted posts on various forums that full self driving cars are only five years away. I routinely saw similarly outlandish claims about AI in general.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  True, it does not sound any better, especially if you take into account the progress of other challenges in medicine. We aren't anywhere close to, say, solving cancer, but we are conquering new territory inch by inch, with a massive difference of outcomes in last 50 years or so. I suspect the same is going to happen in the longevity field. Dr. Gregory Fahy managed to rejuvenate the thymus in several individuals (TRIIM and TRIIM-X trials) and lower their epigenetic age. It might have well been the first baby step on that journey.

Damogran6 5y ago

In none of the hard Sci-Fi I read as a child did they say "I needn't worry for light, as I had my portable cellphone" Will you have AR displays that hide the information an make a room otherwise appear devoid of technology? Yes...because normal people don't fetishize technology and HGTV tells me it should be hidden from sight. Will it be a display projected on your contact lenses, a mist excreted from a rod with lasers shined upon it, or a projector with a funky short throw lens? Man, I've got no clue...but all the fiction I've seen with fantastic display technology shows: We'll will it into existence.

Laforet 5y ago
70s and 80s scifi media frequently depict floppy disks being used well into the 22nd century and beyond, despite the fact that optical and solid state storage did exist in some form back then. Either is is done to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, or human beings really lack the abiltiy to imagine things they have no empirical experience with.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  Do the details of the storage medium matter? It still stores ones and zeros - who cares how?
  - Laforet 5y ago
    Yes it does. Like it all not we all subconsciously associate media format with a certain era or genre. A gramophone places a story back in the early 20th century and a minidisc surely brings up memories of the late 1990s. Having a period-specific piece media show up in depictions of the future surely breaks the veil of suspended disbelief.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  TV/Movie scifi is mostly the last place you'd look for bold imaginings of future technology. Star Trek had a few hits with communicators, PADDs, and touch screen controls, but generally designs are very much of their time. It's very obvious with modern scifi where controls are usually holographic projections with cyan grids and twirly animations. After a while these designs become lazy tropes - like villains who wear chunky black leather. Compare with something like Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which is far more adventurous about possible futures. The background problem is that the 20th century was set up for an explosion of invention by the late 19th, with Maxwell/Heaviside leading the charge and eventually leading to game changer developments like relativity and quantum theory. In math Boolean algebra fell out almost by accident from attempts to find a theory of computability which eventually led to modern computing. These were all bedrock insights which completely changed what was possible in the physical world. Where's the modern equivalent? There isn't one. Insights at that level more or less stopped happening after the discovery of DNA and the creation of Shannon's Information Theory. Quantum Gravity might be the next game changer, but it also might not, and in any case it's an unknown distance away. The rest is detail work, not ground breaking transformation.

intrasight 5y ago

A telco executive's astute predictions "Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, pure speculation. Here is my prophecy: In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk. Who knows but it may actually translate from one language to another?" - Mark Sullivan, April 9, 1953

dougmwne 5y ago
Of all our technology, I truly think the smartphone is one of the most impressive and futuristic things ever invented. It’s the kind of thing Star Trek thought was hundreds of years in the future and that most sci-fi failed to imagine. It is individually transformative in a way that space flight will probably never be. Our information tech is likely to continue racing forward and this current moment will look analog in comparison.
- intrasight 5y ago
  The future may be analog - if you look far enough. We are analog.
  - hackernudes 5y ago
    Or maybe the universe is digital if you could look small enough!
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  There was a great scene in Station 11 which is partially set after civilization-destroying pandemic in which one character who was born before the pandemic explains to someone who was born after how ride sharing apps worked on a cell phone. It's magic of you describe it from scratch. The tiny device has access to a detailed mail of the entire planet, knows where you are and then a car shows up to transport you to your destination without exchanging and tangible money or even talking about it. It's also telling that older SciFi gets this all wrong. In Asimov's Lucky Starr the protagonist had a space ship that can travel through the outer layers of the sun and someone had a dwelling on an hollowed out asteroid. Tables use energy fields for easier cleaning. Yet, the ships board computer doesn't even have a display and needs to print everything.

ctdonath 5y ago

“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” - Nicola Tesla, 1926

jfk13 5y ago

> Only one prediction is worthy of confidence - the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate...and the world will improve. I'm not actually very confident about that last part...

Macha 5y ago

> Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone Yes. It was called a communicator in fiction of the day. Did they get the exact details right, or every use case (e.g. replacing flashlights and music players)? No. Some of them used holograms from watches or big old handsets with a screen instead of a keypad but still big ear cups. But a portable device that could be used for voice calls, video calls, information lookup, note taking, certainly existed in fiction prior to the 90s.

jpindar 5y ago
In the 1950s, comic book detective Dick Tracy wore a two-way wrist radio, which later included video.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  Still waiting for them to add a camera to the Apple Watch. Then it can be a full phone replacement for low tech days.
  - heavyarms 5y ago
    I've been thinking this since the Apple Watch came out, but other than practical limitations (battery life) there's always this problem: have you tried to hold your arm out in front of your face and stare at your watch for a while? It's not the most comfortable position. You might have to add some extra arm/shoulder days in your exercise routine.
    - dougmwne 5y ago
      I think a fisheye lens plus face recognition should solve that nicely. As long as you can see the watch screen, the image could be cropped, skewed and rotated to focus on your face.
- jaclaz 5y ago
  For the record it appeared in 1946: https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_Radio https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_Radio and the video in 1964: https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_TV https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_TV More or less both are (fictional) "miniaturization" of existing, known technologies.

Robotbeat 5y ago

> The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have predicted a moon landing only 66 years later? I mean, Jules Verne suggested trips to the Moon earlier than that in 1965 via cannon (from the coast of Florida!). Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, rejecting cannons on technical grounds (the speed of gunpowder's gases too slow to break from Earth's gravity as well as the impractical extremes in acceleration), proposed using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen in a multistage rocket for reaching the Moon... Which is what 2 of the 3 stages of the Saturn V used, so he was pretty accurate. He also suggested the need for oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, automatic machine guidance, thrust vector control using both external fins and fins in the flow of the gases (both methods became used on rockets for early spaceflight) as well as suggesting the use of a sun sensor (star tracker) and gyroscopes for guidance. It's remarkable how many critical features of spaceflight were invented by Tsiolkovsky in that document. Granted, I don't remember an actual forecasted date for these predictions, but he foresaw most of the technical features of spaceflight correctly. https://spacemedicineassociation.org/download/history/history_files_1920-1930/Tsiolkovsky%20Oberth%20Goddard.pdf https://spacemedicineassociation.org/download/history/histor... Projections from Nikola Tesla suggested similar things to the smartphone around that timeline. If you look at technical pioneers using logical consequences of actual known physics and engineering, they can make pretty remarkably prescient predictions.

pbourke 5y ago

> Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone, let alone 1922? Yes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

rbanffy 5y ago

> The reality is that no such projection is plausible. It's getting increasingly difficult. The world of 1600 would be easily understandable to someone from 1500 or 1400. When I was born, no human eyes had seen the far side of the Moon (although it was reasonably sure someone would, shortly, as happened in december that year) and the closest thing to a cellphone was a prop being used by Captain Kirk on the 23rd century. > the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate There are physical limits to that, so the exponential factor may be reduced for a while. There is also a limit on how fast we can develop new things that will give us a hard time (at least until we develop a general enough AI, at which point all bets are off - because we are literally not smart enough to predict what happens next). BTW, a couple years ago I had an accident that, if it happened in 1900, I'd lose my leg. So, yeah, 2022 is good for me, but I wouldn't turn down a chance to last until 2122.

tempestn 5y ago

Over the broad arc of history things have gotten better over the long term. I'm not sure that's always the case though. Exponential growth of technology, or anything else, physically can't last forever. What does it look like when it stops? I do agree that whatever complaints we might have about the present though, it's better than any time in history save for possibly the very recent past. And I think it's a good bet that 2122 will indeed be better. I just wouldn't call it a certainty.