4 ms·

In 1901, a 14-year-old published article in a newspaper describing the world of 2001

24 points by nickb 18y ago

timcederman 18y ago
I didn't think it was that impressive to be honest. Skyscrapers were around at the end of the 19th century, we haven't reached 200 livable floors yet (as one of the commenters on that article said), and you certainly don't see "air-ships and carriages fastened to balloons for the transportation of the people through the air, and you will often see collisions in the clouds." It just seems like a linear prediction based on what was seen during that era.
- nickb 18y ago
  I think it's impressive. If you read some other predictions and if you're a fan of Sci-Fi, you'll see that this one is actually pretty close for a change. Try making a linear prediction for 2100 and see how hard it is.
  - jcl 18y ago
    Funnily enough, the article is a good description of the 1997 movie The Fifth Element (which is supposed to take place in the 2200's).
  - jodrellblank 18y ago
    The Law(?) of Accelerating Returns implies it will be enormously much harder to predict from now to 2100 than it was from 1900 to 2000. (Or that a linear prediction will be enormously much less accurate). "we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate)" - http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
    - netcan 18y ago
      I wonder how much that law applies. The 20th century will be hard to beat. For one thing, we'll need to find new resources to exploit.
      - woodsier 18y ago
        Queue space travel.
      - DTrejo 18y ago
        "find new resources to exploit" instead make use of resources we already have found, but remain unused for the most part (solar etc).
        netcan 18y ago
        similar
    - lacker 18y ago
      But according to that same law, shouldn't your skill at predictions be much greater than that of a future-predictor living in the year 1900? You can't just map the whole world onto a linear scale and expect resulting metrics to be consistent.
      - jodrellblank 18y ago
        My skill at predictions is better. He tried to predict, I didn't. ;) Meat brains aren't subject to the law (yet). We don't change ourselves so we don't get a growing return on our own improvements. I ought to have the same skill at predictions (environment, nutrition, education, age, culture, upbringing, effort, normal human variations in ability and the quirk of ever increasing IQ levels notwithstanding).
    - tocomment 18y ago
      I used to believe that when I first read it, but now it's 2008 and nothing seems much different than 2000, right?
      - jodrellblank 18y ago
        Compare a recent car with one from 10 years ago, they seem nicer for the same money. Computers are, obviously, better - more transistors in CPUs, much more cache, much bigger harddrives, cheaper memory. Digital cameras are way better, not only higher megapixel sensors and larger, cheaper storage cards, larger LCDs but also more realtime processing than before with face-detection, Sony's smile-detection, and they're around the same price. Broadband in the UK has gone from being a new choice for the leading edge, to being commonplace, to flattening out the choices so 8Mb is the standard, to ADSL2+ being available at the larger exchanges outside London. Popular screen technology for computers and TVs has almost entirely switched to LCDs when it was CRTs for everybody 10 years ago. The first iPod I bought was a 3rd generation 40Gb model. It would have been in 2003 or so, now I have one that's cheaper, lighter, smaller, faster, nicer screen, longer battery life, which is also a video player, phone, emailer and has 3d acceleration hardware. What about the new Macbook's unibody construction? They couldn't mill cases out of solid aluminium in large quantities without CNC machines. They have been around for years, but presumably it's only a small number of years that it's been precise/cheap/available enough for Apple to use it profitably. I took a few laptops apart around 2000, there were lots of parts, widely spread out. Check the disassembly of the new Macbook - the mainboard is tiny. It's almost certainly largely built by very precise robots and designed with the help of a lot of computing power. USB has gone from being a bit of a joke (in 2000 I had a USB Zip 100 drive) to being the file transfer and peripheral connection medium of choice with multi-Gb sticks for sale anywhere and everywhere. Could you have bought a roomba in 2000 to sweep your floors for you? Or a friendly robotics Robomow? Or a games console with built in, low hassle, online ability? Or a BluRay player and a HD TV? OK, my life as a day-to-day event is different because I work with and on computers using the internet, and that's where I can see the changes, but on a day to day basis it's much the same, the same sort of transport, food, books, consumables, etc. Although I could now (had I the money) buy a car which would pre-arm the brakes if I was too close to the car in front so they will apply quicker, parallel park for me, alert me if there's someone in the blind spots, silence the carphone incoming calls when cornering hard as it would be too distracting to ring then. None of these things were around 10 years ago. Nothing seems much different, but then most of my life is spent wearing woven thread, sitting on wood or plasticfoamy chairs, eating plants and being around brick buildings. At that level, how much change do you expect?
- cstejerean 18y ago
  Looks pretty good for something written by a 14 year old. If I had to take a guess when I was 14 at what the world would look a hundred years later I wouldn't even know where to start (I still don't). Things like air-ships fastened to balloons you have to translate to their modern equivalent -- for example in NY you can take a helicopter shuttle to the airport (to avoid being stuck in horrible traffic).
- mhb 18y ago
  Also this could have been cherry-picked from a universe of predictions of the future by 14-year-olds. So it's even less impressive.
okeumeni 18y ago
'Old People Restored to Youth by Electricity, While You Wait.' Were still working on that one.
- benbeltran 18y ago
  actually, someone in the comments said this is already being done in japan. (Results may vary) I think he had a better idea of 2001 than those old looney tunes cartoons.
markbao 18y ago
At least this 14-year-old writes better than the 17-year-olds of today.
Darmani 18y ago
It's quite interesting to look at this from a cultural point of view. Most interesting to me is the assumption that the transportation of today would be just like the centralized system of then, only bigger and better. There's been such a massive movement toward individualization over the past century over the past century that it seems completely natural. We've gone from semaphore towers transmitting a few messages over a single line for the central government, to a few telegraph operators sending and receiving scores of messages for corporations and individuals, to citizens renting standard-model telephones from AT&T, to owning one of a bajillion landline phone models and having cellphones with customized ringtones as a personality item. While anyone who's seen a horse -- heck, anyone who's ever walked -- is familiar the concept of a transportation device that moves according to your whims, it would have taken a great deal of insight to see these racing curiosities called "automobiles" as a potential return to that model in an age where increasing progress in transport was synonymous with expensive machines incorporating more and more advances the only conceivable way to make their use efficient was to make it centralized. (I've heard the first subway line in New York changed a three-hour trip into a 10-minute one.) It's just like how most '50s and '60s sci-fi ('70s, even!) foresaw computers as becoming ever-bigger, ever larger undertakings. I know Isaac Asimov, in his 1958 (?) short story "The Last Question," had computers initially growing to hundreds of square miles for a few centuries before taking a sudden leap down to the size of a family-owned ship, before transitioning again to the centralized-model of having galactic and universal computers, even though miniaturization happened along the way. If he made the connection during that time period that miniaturization would happen continuously rather than discretely and might cause individual-owned computers to be present for a larger chunk of history, he made it in one of his hundreds of short-stories I haven't read. Of course, it is expected that we will, not too long from now, reach a fundamental limit on component miniaturization and revert to building larger, centralized computers, which highlights that we should not conceive of the old model of centralization as wrong, just wrong for the present time period. Naturally, people back then conceived of advances solving the aging problem, but it's interesting electricity was conceived as the vehicle that would deliver it. They foresaw miracle inventions, and assumed it would come from electricity, just as we assume future advancements will come from nanotech, or biotech, or Ajax. It was their buzzword of the day. While it's much more reasonable that de-aging will come from nanotech or biotech since it's easily conceivable how those would create a relatively straightforward mechanism for achieving that, I think we'd do well to remember this example if we start to point to anything well-known today as the solver of more diverse problems.
ArcticCelt 18y ago
Like pointed out elsewhere, I think the interesting thing about this story is not the prediction of the future but the fact that description looks like some kind of crazy Nostradamus quatrain predicting 911.

24 points by nickb 18y ago

I didn't think it was that impressive to be honest. Skyscrapers were around at the end of the 19th century, we haven't reached 200 livable floors yet (as one of the commenters on that article said), and you certainly don't see "air-ships and carriages fastened to balloons for the transportation of the people through the air, and you will often see collisions in the clouds." It just seems like a linear prediction based on what was seen during that era.

nickb 18y ago
I think it's impressive. If you read some other predictions and if you're a fan of Sci-Fi, you'll see that this one is actually pretty close for a change. Try making a linear prediction for 2100 and see how hard it is.
- jcl 18y ago
  Funnily enough, the article is a good description of the 1997 movie The Fifth Element (which is supposed to take place in the 2200's).
- jodrellblank 18y ago
  The Law(?) of Accelerating Returns implies it will be enormously much harder to predict from now to 2100 than it was from 1900 to 2000. (Or that a linear prediction will be enormously much less accurate). "we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate)" - http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
  - netcan 18y ago
    I wonder how much that law applies. The 20th century will be hard to beat. For one thing, we'll need to find new resources to exploit.
    - woodsier 18y ago
      Queue space travel.
    - DTrejo 18y ago
      "find new resources to exploit" instead make use of resources we already have found, but remain unused for the most part (solar etc).
      - netcan 18y ago
        similar
  - lacker 18y ago
    But according to that same law, shouldn't your skill at predictions be much greater than that of a future-predictor living in the year 1900? You can't just map the whole world onto a linear scale and expect resulting metrics to be consistent.
    - jodrellblank 18y ago
      My skill at predictions is better. He tried to predict, I didn't. ;) Meat brains aren't subject to the law (yet). We don't change ourselves so we don't get a growing return on our own improvements. I ought to have the same skill at predictions (environment, nutrition, education, age, culture, upbringing, effort, normal human variations in ability and the quirk of ever increasing IQ levels notwithstanding).
  - tocomment 18y ago
    I used to believe that when I first read it, but now it's 2008 and nothing seems much different than 2000, right?
    - jodrellblank 18y ago
      Compare a recent car with one from 10 years ago, they seem nicer for the same money. Computers are, obviously, better - more transistors in CPUs, much more cache, much bigger harddrives, cheaper memory. Digital cameras are way better, not only higher megapixel sensors and larger, cheaper storage cards, larger LCDs but also more realtime processing than before with face-detection, Sony's smile-detection, and they're around the same price. Broadband in the UK has gone from being a new choice for the leading edge, to being commonplace, to flattening out the choices so 8Mb is the standard, to ADSL2+ being available at the larger exchanges outside London. Popular screen technology for computers and TVs has almost entirely switched to LCDs when it was CRTs for everybody 10 years ago. The first iPod I bought was a 3rd generation 40Gb model. It would have been in 2003 or so, now I have one that's cheaper, lighter, smaller, faster, nicer screen, longer battery life, which is also a video player, phone, emailer and has 3d acceleration hardware. What about the new Macbook's unibody construction? They couldn't mill cases out of solid aluminium in large quantities without CNC machines. They have been around for years, but presumably it's only a small number of years that it's been precise/cheap/available enough for Apple to use it profitably. I took a few laptops apart around 2000, there were lots of parts, widely spread out. Check the disassembly of the new Macbook - the mainboard is tiny. It's almost certainly largely built by very precise robots and designed with the help of a lot of computing power. USB has gone from being a bit of a joke (in 2000 I had a USB Zip 100 drive) to being the file transfer and peripheral connection medium of choice with multi-Gb sticks for sale anywhere and everywhere. Could you have bought a roomba in 2000 to sweep your floors for you? Or a friendly robotics Robomow? Or a games console with built in, low hassle, online ability? Or a BluRay player and a HD TV? OK, my life as a day-to-day event is different because I work with and on computers using the internet, and that's where I can see the changes, but on a day to day basis it's much the same, the same sort of transport, food, books, consumables, etc. Although I could now (had I the money) buy a car which would pre-arm the brakes if I was too close to the car in front so they will apply quicker, parallel park for me, alert me if there's someone in the blind spots, silence the carphone incoming calls when cornering hard as it would be too distracting to ring then. None of these things were around 10 years ago. Nothing seems much different, but then most of my life is spent wearing woven thread, sitting on wood or plasticfoamy chairs, eating plants and being around brick buildings. At that level, how much change do you expect?
cstejerean 18y ago
Looks pretty good for something written by a 14 year old. If I had to take a guess when I was 14 at what the world would look a hundred years later I wouldn't even know where to start (I still don't). Things like air-ships fastened to balloons you have to translate to their modern equivalent -- for example in NY you can take a helicopter shuttle to the airport (to avoid being stuck in horrible traffic).
mhb 18y ago
Also this could have been cherry-picked from a universe of predictions of the future by 14-year-olds. So it's even less impressive.

okeumeni 18y ago

'Old People Restored to Youth by Electricity, While You Wait.' Were still working on that one.

benbeltran 18y ago
actually, someone in the comments said this is already being done in japan. (Results may vary) I think he had a better idea of 2001 than those old looney tunes cartoons.

markbao 18y ago

At least this 14-year-old writes better than the 17-year-olds of today.

Darmani 18y ago

It's quite interesting to look at this from a cultural point of view. Most interesting to me is the assumption that the transportation of today would be just like the centralized system of then, only bigger and better. There's been such a massive movement toward individualization over the past century over the past century that it seems completely natural. We've gone from semaphore towers transmitting a few messages over a single line for the central government, to a few telegraph operators sending and receiving scores of messages for corporations and individuals, to citizens renting standard-model telephones from AT&T, to owning one of a bajillion landline phone models and having cellphones with customized ringtones as a personality item. While anyone who's seen a horse -- heck, anyone who's ever walked -- is familiar the concept of a transportation device that moves according to your whims, it would have taken a great deal of insight to see these racing curiosities called "automobiles" as a potential return to that model in an age where increasing progress in transport was synonymous with expensive machines incorporating more and more advances the only conceivable way to make their use efficient was to make it centralized. (I've heard the first subway line in New York changed a three-hour trip into a 10-minute one.) It's just like how most '50s and '60s sci-fi ('70s, even!) foresaw computers as becoming ever-bigger, ever larger undertakings. I know Isaac Asimov, in his 1958 (?) short story "The Last Question," had computers initially growing to hundreds of square miles for a few centuries before taking a sudden leap down to the size of a family-owned ship, before transitioning again to the centralized-model of having galactic and universal computers, even though miniaturization happened along the way. If he made the connection during that time period that miniaturization would happen continuously rather than discretely and might cause individual-owned computers to be present for a larger chunk of history, he made it in one of his hundreds of short-stories I haven't read. Of course, it is expected that we will, not too long from now, reach a fundamental limit on component miniaturization and revert to building larger, centralized computers, which highlights that we should not conceive of the old model of centralization as wrong, just wrong for the present time period. Naturally, people back then conceived of advances solving the aging problem, but it's interesting electricity was conceived as the vehicle that would deliver it. They foresaw miracle inventions, and assumed it would come from electricity, just as we assume future advancements will come from nanotech, or biotech, or Ajax. It was their buzzword of the day. While it's much more reasonable that de-aging will come from nanotech or biotech since it's easily conceivable how those would create a relatively straightforward mechanism for achieving that, I think we'd do well to remember this example if we start to point to anything well-known today as the solver of more diverse problems.

ArcticCelt 18y ago

Like pointed out elsewhere, I think the interesting thing about this story is not the prediction of the future but the fact that description looks like some kind of crazy Nostradamus quatrain predicting 911.