L. Gordon Crovitz warns against trying to predict technology trends and gives his list of the ten worst technology predictions of all time. My favorite: “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night,” Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946.
Curt Fischer says:
I am always glad to see someone revisit the past predictions of various experts and see how they turned out. It reminds me to be skeptical of the contemporaneous experts’ predictions that we always see in the news, business, and politics.
But it’s interesting that so many of the wrong predictions were as much about markets as about technology. What about new markets that are unassociated with a new technology? Is predicting the evolution of technology-independent markets easier than predicting technology-associated markets like the future of television in the 1940s or personal computers in the 1970s? Examples of technology-independent markets might be consumer credit cards and organic foods. Did most experts predict the blossoming of those markets? If not, it lends credence to the idea that it is the marketplace, and not just technology, that is hard to predict.
December 28, 2009, 2:32 pmJoseph Slater says:
Where is the flying car that so much mid-late 20th century science fiction promised me?
December 28, 2009, 3:13 pmDavid Nieporent says:
What do you mean, where is it? I have one.
December 28, 2009, 3:56 pmJack Jones says:
I respectfully refer you to Taleb’s “Fooled By Randomness”. In particular, the chapter “Skills in predicting past events”
December 28, 2009, 3:58 pmThe eclectic skeptic
Jack Jones
RoyLitmus says:
In the end Zanuck might be right. There is a new trend developing that rejects television. Many of my friends, especially those in major cities, have been cutting their cable service and in exchange now spend more evenings out.
(Of course, the computer screen and the internet might be an upcoming substitute for TV. Only time will tell though.)
December 28, 2009, 4:30 pmkrs says:
J. Slater, I think Back to the Future II was set in 2015, so it’s just around the corner, unless the auto industry’s recent financial problems have delayed the release…
December 28, 2009, 4:36 pmShelbyC says:
Well, nobody stares at a plywood box anymore.
December 28, 2009, 4:40 pmgasman says:
Ye cannae change the laws of physics captain. (say it in your best fake Scottish brogue for full effect).
Clearly these predictions were taken out of the context from which they were originally uttered. There might have been both explicit and implicit assumptions made regarding the predictions. Darryl Zanuck might have been saying something like ‘dear lord I hope that humanity has not sunk so low that it would still be staring at the idiot-box 65 years from now’.
Other comments might have been merely short sighted on the economics:
The implicit statement might have been given the expense, size, limited functionality, and legions of human servants to maintain our current product, we cannot expect to dump many of these on the world market. Obviously someone at IBM understood the nuance and developed a model of computer that would be capable of capturing a larger market.
December 28, 2009, 4:40 pmDave N. says:
Of course, my cell phone works better (and is smaller) than Captain Kirk’s communicator.
December 28, 2009, 4:42 pmChrisTS says:
IIRC, the head of the Patents Office around 1920 said it would have to be shut down because nothing new could be invented.
December 28, 2009, 4:52 pmChrisTS says:
Oh, duh; it was in the article:
December 28, 2009, 4:54 pmShelbyC says:
And guess what exactly the last thing folks envisioned the SMS protocal being used for was?
December 28, 2009, 4:56 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
Killing dinosaurs?
December 28, 2009, 5:00 pmSoronel Haetir says:
In regard to technology and assumptions that is certainly true of Gates’ 640k comment. Although I’ve seen a similar quote from Von Neumann with a much lower figure.
What I find even more amazing as a modern programmer is that people actually were able to get sophisticated results out of such limited machines.
December 28, 2009, 5:09 pmShelbyC says:
Nope. Slightly below killing dinosaurs was, of course, tapping out short text messages using the number keys on your phone to make letters, and sending them out to people instead of calling them.
December 28, 2009, 5:13 pmKen Arromdee says:
http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2005/05/hosteny-explaining-us-6206000-on.html
The patent office quote is an urban legend.
December 28, 2009, 6:06 pmagesilaus says:
It seems to me that the worst prediction was the one that was never made. No one predicted the microelectronics revolution and the rise of the computer. Not that I have ever seen anyway. All the visionaries, Heinland, Asimov and others completely missed it. Generally they predicted huge building size, or larger computers. Sometimes as large as a planetoid. Cell phones, mp3 players, handheld computers, notebook computers, the entire electronic world that pervades our daily life was completely missed by everyone.
December 28, 2009, 6:36 pmJoseph Slater says:
David Nieporent:
Well jeez, could you at least give me a ride some time? I’ll pay for the gas/jet fuel/nuclear material . . . .
December 28, 2009, 6:52 pmSoronel Haetir says:
Heinlein’s For Us the Living (written before 1940 but published quite awhile after his death) featured a mechanical internet analog. Asimov’s positronic brains were of course compact computers but the technology wasn’t really all that important to his stories.
I find the rolling road concept to be one of the silliest ever put forward.
December 28, 2009, 6:59 pmagesilaus says:
But later in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Mike is the giant computer altho one that uses distributed computing. You are right about the positronic brain tho, I had forgotten that.
December 28, 2009, 7:22 pmChrisTS says:
No, no. They run on light waves, don’t they?
By the by, I am still waiting for the three day workweek that exhausts George Jetson.
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December 28, 2009, 8:56 pmrmd says:
We’re pretty darn close to having Dick Tracy’s “2-way wrist TV” but I’m still holding out for his flying trash can.
December 28, 2009, 9:07 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Agesilaus, here. 1946.
December 28, 2009, 10:59 pmJmaie says:
Flying cars? Just what we need, road rage in three dimensions.
December 28, 2009, 11:12 pmJohn Moore says:
What I find amazing as a modern, but old programmer, is that my browser is using 250 megabytes. What the hell are they doing with all that memory?
I used to work a Hughes Aircraft when all of their scientific computing was done on one 3-MIPS, 1.25 megabyte machine (GE-635, 3 CPUs) with about 1000 users!
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December 28, 2009, 11:58 pmSoronel Haetir says:
Cache of course. I recently hauled my 486-33 (win3.1) out of storage for a reminder of what browsing without it is like. People tend not to have a good memory for that sort of thing. It gets even worse when you consider just how busy many modern sites are.
I’ve talked with someone who was working at Boeing in the late 80s time frame, their group was trying to create a pre-internet document server system for keeping a bunch of remote stations current on standards docs (the old system involved cabinets full of notebooks, when an update came along someone had to physically go to each of some 100 cabinets spread over a huge area and insert the pages into the correct spot). The government documents had to be served as scanned images for legal reasons, couldn’t use OCR or even manual typists. Images simply take a lot of memory, the project failed for that reason, the computers simply weren’t up to the task. They tried a test one night and it saturated the network at 10 users.
Even better of course was that they were doing this under DOS so that in order to show the images they had to flip back and forth between graphics mode and text mode where the browsing operation occurred.
December 29, 2009, 1:17 amJohn Moore says:
I think not. If I open an additional tab, memory goes up 65MB. There’s nothing to cache but the contents of that page, which is, maybe, 5MB. I suspect it’s perhaps a great big stack, and lots and lots of OO overhead.
Oh well.
December 29, 2009, 12:26 pmRed says:
There may not be a flying car, but there is a driveable airplane.
December 30, 2009, 12:11 pm