Digital computers and software supposedly change fast. Therefore it should be more challenging to predict how they will evolve compared to other parts of society and technology. New Yorker magazine looks at this question by cracking open a book from 1968 about the world of 2018.
It turned out to be easy to predict where computers would take us:
What “Toward the Year 2018” gets most consistently right is the integration of computing into daily life. Massive information networks of fibre optics and satellite communication, accessed through portable devices in a “universality of telephony”—and an upheaval in privacy? It’s all in there. The Bell Labs director John R. Pierce, in a few masterful strokes, extrapolates the advent of Touch-Tone to text and picture transmission, and editing the results online—“This will even extend to justification and pagination in the preparation of documents of a quality comparable to today’s letterpress.” And it’s Ithiel de Sola Pool—he of the free love and controlled economies—who wonders, five decades before alarms were raised over Equifax, Facebook, and Google, how personal information will be “computer-stored and fantastically manipulative” in both senses of the word: “By 2018 a researcher sitting at his console will be able to compile a cross-tabulation of consumer purchases (from store records) by people of low IQ (from school records) who have an unemployed member of the family (from social security records),” Pool predicts.
Writing just a year before arpanet went live, the Harvard information scientist Anthony Oettinger envisions “a kind of gargantuan version of Vannevar Bush’s Memex”—a hypothetical electromechanical text and audio-visual reader—which is about as good a summary of the Internet as you can find from 1968. But Oettinger, a veteran of U.S. intelligence-panel work on information overload, was no Utopian: his essay is titled “Electronics May Revolutionize Education, But Is Unlikely to Solve Problems of Human Frailty.” He’s particularly skeptical of how well governments would adapt to this mega-Memex: “Putting broad-band communications, picture telephones, and instant computerized retrieval in the hands of such an organization is like feeding pastry to a fat man.”
The smartest folks of 1968, however, were terrible at predicting anything involving “nuclear.” Nuclear breeder reactors for electric power did not become popular, as predicted. Folks in 1968 couldn’t see that the U.S. was about to discard the nuclear family in favor of alternative means of child production and rearing (see Real World Divorce for statistics on how the U.S. became the country where children are least likely to live with their two biological parents).
A reviewer on Amazon says “This book is really a remarkable document of how huge the technological changes were in the period from 1918 to 1968; they merely assumed the rate of change would remain unchanged. Well, as it happened, progress slowed down rather a lot.” So maybe the toughest thing to predict is the rate?
Related:
- Amazon shows a new copy available for $2,340(!)
For every book that got it right, there are many that got it wrong. The modern AI boom, basically viavoice rebranded as shitty personal assistants, is far from the 1960’s prediction of a computer indistinguishable from a human. So how accurate are modern AI startup CEOs going to be at predicting the future?
Bell Labs director John R. Pierce…
I bet, in 1968, Mr. Pierce could never imagined what would become of Bell Labs by 2018.