On April 3, 1988, the Los Angeles Times Magazine published a 25-year look ahead to 2013. Some of it is very accurate, some of it…not so much. We were really obsessed with robots back then, weren’t we?!
“Alma can draw on an extensive laser-disc research library, as well.” Did PSXer write this article? (Okay, you can’t fault them for failing to predict the terms “CD” or “DVD”.)
I guess “robot butlers” were the new “flying cars” in 1988.
It might be more accurate if you just substitute every mention of “robot” with “underpaid Latino immigrant.”
And boy did they nail the rise of “new-fangled Indian cigarettes.”
CD’s were widely available in 1988.
Given that it was only a 25 year window, I think they did a pretty bad job.
The sidebar with the predictions about the features 2013 cars will have was eerily accurate.
As a matter of fact, I’ve been considering changing my username.
Do they “accidently” serve you cat food for breakfast too?
That article is quite accurate in many ways. It predicted computers would be cheaper, faster and store more data, so learning could take place at school, home and community.
One thing that futurists seem to have a hard time predicting is the mix of data storage and CPU usage. Will it be all in one small, portable package, or at a remote location with only a controller in your hand?
In the article, they talk about students carrying a 3x5" card with their data on it, presumably grades, courses, etc. They plug it in to a reader/writer and it gets updated. Perfectly doable, but the cloud has taken over and most data is now stored remotely but accessed locally.
I remember making some predictions myself about that time, and making some of the same mistakes. Starting with the 45RPM record single, I imagined a 4 minute song being stored in a single computer chip, because that was the trend in data storage – more compact and cheap. Teeny boppers would carry around a pocket full of them. It didn’t occur to me that one device would store thousands of songs or that they would be stored remotely even though that now seems like a logical progression.
I also envisioned a kiosk system, much like the photo booths in shopping centers, where you would drive up and order a custom-arranged piece of music – you choose the song and specify the instruments. The kiosk would print it out on the spot using expensive, specialized equipment. Or perhaps “perform” the music to a recorder. It never occurred to me that this might eventually be done on a general-purpose computer and printer at home.
I want my home robot!
100% accurate here:
“This is all I need, Bill is thinking, as his car sits motionless in the gridlock on the Golden State Freeway just before the 101 interchange. For a while, he was really zipping - his digital speedometer clocked him at almost 13 m.p.h. - but that was for only a mile.”
Not so much:
“It’s possible because of the Itegrated Services Digital Network, which allows the same cables to transmit diverse types of information…” ISDN used to be joking called It Still Does Nothing, and has been probably 99.99% supplanted with various forms of DSL that are much faster.
The one sidebar about the future of education correctly predicted what we could have in schools right now. The technology for floor-to-ceiling displays to put our kids in a Mayan village is there, they just forgot to think about where the money was going to come from.
Automated translation has always been 25 years in the future and always will be.
If computers are so cheap (they got that right), why doesn’t Camille have her own? And that robot seems to be more trouble than it is worth. I thought it was a terrible prediction, but then I have never been to LA (not counting changing at its airport once).
As I look around, the only significant difference I see in 25 years has been the internet. I’ve had a computer at home for 31 years, used email for 29, cars mostly look much the same. The car I bought in 1990 looks and feels quite similar to the one I bought in 2007 and the same model is still sold today.
That’s one thing that I find interesting in predictions of the future, even if they DO get the technology right, they totally fuck up on social norms. Thisvideo from 1967 predicts online shopping, but still has the housewife doing the shopping and the husband paying for it from his office.
Both of my kids have to use thumb drives to bring in assignments, so except for the media, this is actually pretty accurate. They don’t use cloud storage at our schools currently.
Does it mention how gloriously big women’s shoulder pads would be?
The article reminds me of my favorite line by the late lamented Greg Giraldo. “It’s the 21st century! Why aren’t I snorting vitamin-enriched coke off the tits of my sex robot?”
Flawless automated translation, yes – it requires strong AI, which I suspect will sneak up on us unpredicably, but not soon.
On the other hand, things like Google/Bing translations are more than good enough now to make myself understood in languages I don’t know, and vice versa. Both sides might read like a three year old with a bizarrely large vocabulary, but communication will occur.
That was definitely not the case in 1988.
I like “Camille would prefer to talk to a bank teller face to face like in the old days, but that costs $25 extra”. That part’s funny because it’s true. The silly part? So she connects via the computer…which gives her a video call to a bank teller. So she has online banking, but all done with a human in the loop.
Yeah, they have an AI for a house slav—er, butler, but they need a person for “how much money do I have in this checking account?”
Some schools are a little behind. Just you wait until 2014 or 2015.
For the technologically hip, having to load 30 thumbdrives with identical homework data compared with loading a single web site is no contest.