Tis the season for projections into the future. What will 2012 bring us?
This seems to be a favorite past-time of a lot of the talking head shows in early January. Prophesies range from how many hurricanes will we have to which celebrities will get divorced to what will the job market do to what features will the iPad 3 contain. It would probably be an interesting exercise to go back once a year and compare predictions versus reality...maybe one of these days when I'm not doing anything else I'll look into that.
What I have done lately is watch a few classic science fiction movies, namely "Blade Runner" and "2001 A Space Odyssey". Like most futuristic sci-fi, both of these movies attempted to see into the future and paint a picture of the world as it would exist many years from now. For Blade Runner, it was 1982 trying to predict Los Angeles in 2019 (I think the Philip K. Dick novel that the movie is based upon goes back to the late 1960s.) "2001 ASO" was made in 1968, and it attempted to picture the world as it would exist in, you guessed it, 2001.
Both movies probably got a few things right, but in most cases they over-estimated the advancements that we humans would make in 30 to 40 years (I'm assuming that 2019 in LA won't look that much different than it does now.)
There are two things that both movies got wrong that caught my attention right away. The first is somewhat whimsical - neither movie anticipated Pan Am going out of business. Both movies featured the airline-turned-spaceline prominently, not realizing that the company wouldn't make it past the early 1990s.
The other misfire is more interesting. Neither movie predicted the invention, much less the proliferation, of cell phone technology. They still envisioned phone booths where you would sit down and have a private conversation. Sure, they spiced it up a bit and made them video phones, but phones were still these huge, clunky machines with buttons in privacy booths. Talk about quaint. Incidentally, 2001 ASO also failed to anticipate the divestiture of AT&T. So, no Sprint or Verizon for those guys.
What I find interesting here is how something that is so completely integrated into everyday life now wasn't even on the radar screen back then. Despite their attempts to paint all the little details of how people would lead their daily lives in the future, from flying cars to rotating space stations to Velcro zero-gravity shoes, they couldn't imagine much change in the ubiquitous telephone with a handset. This was a paradigm that they just could not picture going away.
From this side looking back, it seems an obvious oversight. But that's easy for me to say. It sort of makes you wonder what major shift is just around the corner that will one day be obvious, but for now is all but unimaginable. And it makes me appreciate even more the incredible foresight that the real inventors sometimes have.
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