![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Came across a 1966 Time article THE FUTURISTS: Looking Toward A.D. 2000 with predictions like these:
McLuhan and others predict that both the wheel and the highway will be obsolete, giving way to hovercraft that ride on air. Where's my hovercraft?
programmed household robots would wash dishes, dispose of the garbage (onto a conveyer belt moving under the street), vacuum rugs, wash windows, cut the grass. And where's my household robot - Roombas and Scoobas are too limited.
In Rand's Delphi study, 82 scientists agreed that a permanent lunar base will have been established long before A.D. 2000 and that men will have flown past Venus and landed on Mars. I guess we're a bit late.
In automated industry, not only manual workers, but also secretaries and most middle-level managers will have been replaced by computers. The remaining executives will be responsible for major decisions and long-range policy. Thus, society will seem idle, by present standards. According to one estimate, only 10% of the population will be working, and the rest will, in effect, have to be paid to be idle. Did they ever get that wrong.
By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy. And this too.
Medical men foresee fetuses grown outside the uterus Not yet maybe not ever.
Nearly all experts agree that bacterial and viral diseases will have been virtually wiped out. Boy are we far from that.
In general, drug control of personality will be widely accepted well before the year 2000. If a wife or husband seems to be unusually grouchy on a given evening, says Rand's Olaf Helmer, a spouse will be able to pop down to the corner drugstore, buy some anti-grouch pills, and slip them into the coffee. Or a lackadaisical person could be dosed into a sense of ambition. Now that's downright scary
They did get that we would be able to transplant organs and had a dim vision of the internet. The whole thing was a bit male-oriented with a number of predictions for "the little housewife". I wonder what they would predict today for 2250? Care to guess?
McLuhan and others predict that both the wheel and the highway will be obsolete, giving way to hovercraft that ride on air. Where's my hovercraft?
programmed household robots would wash dishes, dispose of the garbage (onto a conveyer belt moving under the street), vacuum rugs, wash windows, cut the grass. And where's my household robot - Roombas and Scoobas are too limited.
In Rand's Delphi study, 82 scientists agreed that a permanent lunar base will have been established long before A.D. 2000 and that men will have flown past Venus and landed on Mars. I guess we're a bit late.
In automated industry, not only manual workers, but also secretaries and most middle-level managers will have been replaced by computers. The remaining executives will be responsible for major decisions and long-range policy. Thus, society will seem idle, by present standards. According to one estimate, only 10% of the population will be working, and the rest will, in effect, have to be paid to be idle. Did they ever get that wrong.
By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy. And this too.
Medical men foresee fetuses grown outside the uterus Not yet maybe not ever.
Nearly all experts agree that bacterial and viral diseases will have been virtually wiped out. Boy are we far from that.
In general, drug control of personality will be widely accepted well before the year 2000. If a wife or husband seems to be unusually grouchy on a given evening, says Rand's Olaf Helmer, a spouse will be able to pop down to the corner drugstore, buy some anti-grouch pills, and slip them into the coffee. Or a lackadaisical person could be dosed into a sense of ambition. Now that's downright scary
They did get that we would be able to transplant organs and had a dim vision of the internet. The whole thing was a bit male-oriented with a number of predictions for "the little housewife". I wonder what they would predict today for 2250? Care to guess?
