Predictions are Hard, Especially About the Future

Via Tyler Cowen, some 1968 predictions about life in 2008. Some predictions are pretty good, but as Tyler observes there was a marked tendency of mid-century prognosticators who lived through the rise of the car and the jet to predict ever-increasing gains in transportation technology:

The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart. [...] Private cars are banned inside most city cores. Moving sidewalks and electrams carry the public from one location to another. [...] Tube trains, pushed through bores by compressed air, make the trip between modemixer and central city in 10 to 15 minutes. A major feature of most modemixers is the launching pad from which 200-passenger rockets blast off for other continents. For less well-heeled travelers there are SST and hypersonic planes that carry 200 to 300 passengers at speeds up to 4,000 mph. Short trips— between cities less than 1,000 mi. apart—are handled by slower jumbo jets.

This is, needless to say, all wrong. Our cars are nicer in many respects than the cars of 40 years ago but in general getting around is slower because traffic is much worse and our rail infrastructure is pathetic. Jet travel has become cheaper and more widespread, but the basic technology hasn't really improved (indeed, it's regressed since the end of the Concorde) and the quality of the air travel experience has declined.

I sometimes wonder about this with regard to computers. We live in a time of astounding advances in information technology, so the general assumption is that these advances will continue (until, of course, the computers become self-aware and rebel) apace. But people a few decades ago lived in a time of astounding advances in transportation technology, and generally assumed that those advances would continue forever.

Comments

And yet nobody predicted that we would become a nation of fat pigs!

Posted by blah | April 4, 2008 4:42 PM

you're forgetting nanotech! it could be seen as an extrapolation of the miniaturization behind modern computers, but really is an independent line of speculation.

Posted by kieran hervold | April 4, 2008 4:44 PM

Predictions are indeed hard, and also irresitable. Fortunately, there is usually no accountability.

So, I will predict that when people are doing this to us, they will indeed laugh at how focused we were on electronic gadgetry when making predictions, and how we completely missed the coming revolutions in biotechnology.

By the way, those 1968 predictions really aren't that bad as these things go (except maybe for the city domes--that never made much sense). They just assumed cheap stable energy prices, which is understandable for someone writing at the time.

Posted by DTM | April 4, 2008 4:49 PM

Air travel: Depends on what you mean by improved. SSTs didn't "take off" (haha) because of pollution concerns - both air and noise. Also, current wide body jets are more advanced than the 60s versions of the same. They consume less fuel, use more advanced materials, and are safer.

Posted by stm177 | April 4, 2008 4:51 PM

"And yet nobody predicted that we would become a nation of fat pigs!"

Actually, MAD Magazine did in the 60s sometimes. They anticipated that we'd never walk, using special carts to go from our doorsteps to our cars, and that as a result, we'd all turn into weeble-like people.

But they got one thing wrong--they predicted that then, the Russians would invade and we'd be too fat to resist.

Posted by RWB | April 4, 2008 4:52 PM

I have newfound respect for MAD Magazine. And there is still time for the Russians.

Posted by blah | April 4, 2008 4:55 PM

I'd have more respect for MAD if they had also predicted that in 2008, they would still be making the same jokes they had made in the 1960s.

Posted by DTM | April 4, 2008 4:58 PM

I sometimes wonder about this with regard to computers.

Indeed-- just Google "end of moore's law".

Posted by Dave Herman | April 4, 2008 4:59 PM

"And there is still time for the Russians"

Not sure if they'll be able to mount an effective invasion. A lot of their military hardware is decrepit, and I think they are nearly as fat as we are. Maybe we can stage the battles Sumo-style.

Posted by CParis | April 4, 2008 5:01 PM

What these predictions assumed is massive and contiunual public spending for newer and better transportation infrastructures -- an assumptin that now seems quaint. Recall that the interstate highway system was not 20 years old in 1968, and that it was justified largely by national defense requirements, plus maybe interstate commerce. Which of the people movers described could have been justified in the same way?

Posted by mark | April 4, 2008 5:05 PM

Maybe the Chinese will be fit enough to invade. Their hardware is improving, they maintain a population advantage, and they are not nearly as obese as we are.

Posted by blah | April 4, 2008 5:06 PM

I like the bit about the average work day being 4 hours. Boy, as if. Unfortunately, the part about spending 2 hours a day keeping up with new technology does seem prescient at times.

Posted by Doug-E-Fresh | April 4, 2008 5:07 PM

I have newfound respect for MAD Magazine. And there is still time for the Russians

On a related note, have you seen the MAD fold-ins at NYTimes? Really cool, that Java tool they have is neat. And I remember some of those old ones from the mags I inherited from my older brother:
http://tinyurl.com/3yffr2

Posted by ResumeMan | April 4, 2008 5:10 PM

If you'd like to see an example of an article that was dead on in it's predictions of the future you can find it in the archives of your own magazine.

This 1967 article published in The Atlantic predicts all of the issues related to the government keeping, and having access to, giant databases of personal information.

The problems discussed are all currently in the headlines (FISA, Wiretapping, TIA, Passport office snooping, etc).

THE NATIONAL DATA CENTER AND PERSONAL PRIVACY

Posted by Charlie | April 4, 2008 5:12 PM

Have you been under the Concorde flight path? I have and the noise was so loud that it was no longer possible to talk, whereas you wouldn't have been even aware of the other aircraft travelling overhead (we were in London under a Heathrow stack). The same is true of advances in fuel-efficiency, carrying capacity and safety (Concorde flew so few miles that its single accident makes it unsafe). That ordinary people can travel between London and Chicago in 8/9 hours is quite an amazing achievement and the engineering to make this happen is quite astonishing. Getting that down to 4/5 hours is pretty irrelevant, especially as it may take half that again to final destination.

The way cars have degraded our lives, and that cars move around London no faster than horses, points to an astonishing failure.

Posted by Chris Dornan | April 4, 2008 5:21 PM

I'd have more respect for MAD if they had also predicted that in 2008, they would still be making the same jokes they had made in the 1960s.

Actually, they predicted that.

Posted by alkali | April 4, 2008 5:26 PM

Moore's Law is probably becoming irrelevant to computer power in the real world.

Posted by Bill Quick | April 4, 2008 5:32 PM

My favorite aspect of that article is that as forward-looking as they were, and for as much as they got right, they had one giant blind spot: women. They simply couldn't conceive of a future in which women were anything other than housewives. The only reference to women in the whole thing is to say how much easier technology makes the housewife's work is in 2008. LOL.....

Posted by jamois | April 4, 2008 5:37 PM

A couple of fun things I noticed in the article:

The general assumption that energy is going to be very cheap in the future. Rockets and SSTs and hypersonic planes--oh, my.

The idea that eating would become little more than consumption of calories: you get some pre-processed food out of a microwave, dump it on a paper plate, eat it with plastic fork and knife, and throw the remains away. And recycling? What's that?

Posted by RSA | April 4, 2008 5:37 PM

RSA is right - the key assumption those people made was cheap energy, not any kind of govt. commitment to investment in transportation infrastructure.

For example, it would be hard to imagine a government with MORE desire to invest in public infrastructure than that of Japan in the 1990s, who spent trillions to paper over their country with concrete. But it sill costs a fortune to fly back from Kyushu to Tokyo and back. Why? Energy is expensive.

When we switched from wood to coal, our EROEI (energy return on energy invested) went from 10 to 50; when we switched to oil it went from 50 to 100. If we had managed to find some magic energy source like fusion that gave us an EROEI of 200 (or even kept it at 100 for the long-term), we'd have those inter-city rockets by now. Sadly, our EROEI is back down to around 10.

Posted by Mr. Noah | April 4, 2008 5:45 PM

just Google "end of moore's law".

Hmm, when I put that into google, the first result is End of Moore's Law? Wrong question

And the answer - symetrical multiprocessing:

The future of multicore processors, already well understood in the lab, will deliver symmetrical multiprocessing on a chip. When one core is processing a calculation, for example, another might be fetching data from memory or sending instructions to the operating system, and so on. With multiple "threads" of information processing, the result will be a huge improvement in overall system performance (to say nothing of bypassing the end of Moore's Law). Moreover, with the future of computing dominated by distributed processing on heterogeneous networks, the applications users need will be highly suited to the multithreaded architecture of these new processors.

Posted by novakant | April 4, 2008 5:51 PM

We already have the traffic computer technology to enable cars to travel safely faster than 200 mph on freeways. The issue isn't technology, it is simply that people like driving. Thus we aren't willing to reserve entire roads for cars that drive automatically.

Posted by Brian Young | April 4, 2008 5:55 PM

We already have the traffic computer technology to enable cars to travel safely faster than 200 mph on freeways. The issue isn't technology, it is simply that people like driving. Thus we aren't willing to reserve entire roads for cars that drive automatically.

The issue is that building a robots-only highway system would be enormously expensive. For that reason any automated driving system is going to have to be able to drive safely in the presence of other cars driven by humans. Worse, it's going to have to use a system of lane markers, signs and other cues that were designed for people and not machines, since we're probably not going to pay for installing more machine-friendly markers all over the place.

People are pretty close to accomplishing that feat, but getting it tested, approved and deployed is going to take a little while yet.

Also: 200mph!? That's really fast and unsafe for anything but the most precisely tuned cars and road conditions. It's also extremely inefficient from a fuel consumption standpoint. Driving at that speed would require completely redesigned cars and absolutely no chance of traffic jams -- ie, all robot-driven cars.

Posted by Tom | April 4, 2008 6:33 PM

"Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive, don't touch it, but I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them."

One of my all time favourite predictions.

Posted by raff | April 4, 2008 6:39 PM

Most technological change is characterized by the logistics curve: as a function of cost, the parameter of interest at first rises slowly, then shoots up rapidly, then slows again as smaller increments of improvement cost increasingly more.

Humans who are experiencing the steeply rising part of the curve are always surprised when it tips over, and it always does. Silly monkeys.

JC

Posted by john casey | April 4, 2008 6:52 PM

More broadly, couldn't there come a time when technological progress just kind of ends, or at least slows way down? And, for that matter, almost all economic productivity gains do the same thing? We've invented amazing technologies, tools, and systems that do amazing things and accomplish work in more and more efficient ways. But it seems a little crazy to think it's just automatically going to go on forever.

Has anyone written about what the world would look like if we stopped getting more productive? Would the economy just stop growing?

Oh yes, I see that they have.

Posted by Christopher M | April 4, 2008 6:52 PM

Most technological change is characterized by the logistics curve: as a function of cost, the parameter of interest at first rises slowly, then shoots up rapidly, then slows again as smaller increments of improvement cost increasingly more.

Humans who are experiencing the steeply rising part of the curve are always surprised when it tips over, and it always does. Silly monkeys.

JC

Posted by john casey | April 4, 2008 6:55 PM

I suppose it is theoretically possible to run out of things to invent, but we certainly aren't there yet--from a historical perspective technology-producing sciences like biology are still in their infancy.

The other thing to keep in mind is that one of the things we tend to invent is new needs. In fact, if we start seriously monkeying around with our genetic makeup (pun intended), it is not at all clear to me what sort of needs we may end up inventing as a result.

Posted by DTM | April 4, 2008 8:03 PM

Matt,

This seems like a classic case of diminishing marginal returns.

If you hold progress in all areas constant, 50 years of advance in computing isn't likely to be worth the cost.

Over the last few decades we've put a lot of resources into computer and communication technology. This is because they've been new fields with wide externalities and wide adoption. We're now experiencing a merging of these two fields. Once we have communication and computing tools that are very convenient to use we wouldn't expect continued large investment in that area because people wont be willing to pay at the same rate for smaller marginal advances.

The result is the most rapid technological growth happens in new fields. My predictions are robotics , genetics (mostly in agriculture) and energy. My reasons:

First, look to Japan and MIT as drivers of new technologies and consider what they're working on. Its mostly robotics.

Second, we have massive food price inflation which is not temporary. India is going to industrialise just as China has been and the result will be massive increased demand for food, with less agricultural space to grow it on. Agricultural genetics has been constrained by lack of consumer trust. But this is because most advances in the area have been beneficial mostly to producers (better yields and disease resistance). But the advances are now moving to better quality and variety, which is good for consumers. Expect consumers to embrace these, even as a counter movement for organics grows.

Finally, there is massive political will for 'greening' our infrastructure (I don't know about the US, but in the rest of the world at least). This will drive new forms of energy producing technology, and new ways of using that energy (eg clean engines, smarter use of infrastructure etc).

The final big change to expect over the next 30 years is from China. China specialises is pushing costs down and increasing product variety. This is going to continue, but will spread into new industries as China becomes capital and technology intensive and massively educated. India will continue trailing China keeping the cost down in industries China moves on from (textiles and manufacturing) while china pushes down prices in new areas. Airplanes and cars will be next. We've already seen the effect on clothes, televisions and computers.

Posted by Domino | April 4, 2008 8:03 PM

The lack of advance in transportation versus the explosive growth of computer communications are related.

Basically, companies noticed that most business meeting attendees don't contribute much of value --and that it's much easier to just move those people's email around coast to coast rather than flying their fat asses 5000 miles, paying for motel rooms so they can sleep 1/3 of the day and then paying for meals so their fat asses can get fatter.

Plus you can just delete their email. Whereas the police frown if you do the equivalent in non-virtual world--i.e, shoot time wasters in the head.

Posted by Don Williams | April 4, 2008 8:05 PM

Re: A lot of their military hardware is decrepit, and I think they are nearly as fat as we are.

Don't know about fat, but they sure are a lot drunker.

Re: Maybe the Chinese will be fit enough to invade.

Their problem is they are a nation of "little Enperors" whose parents don't want to risk their only begotten sons.

Re: Sadly, our EROEI is back down to around 10.

If that's really true then how in the world do we support ten times the population that the wood-burning world could support?

Re: More broadly, couldn't there come a time when technological progress just kind of ends

Ends, as in forever? No, I can't conceive of that, given that our scientific knowledge is already vastly far ahead of our technical ability to utilize it. But I can imagine our technology stagnating due to lack of investment in R&D, or an excessive conservatism which sees change as bad. The latter is why China, despite being a brilliant culture in many ways, could never really exploit its brillance in centuries past.

Posted by JonF | April 4, 2008 9:44 PM

Can I just say that it warms my heart to see that the comments on this post haven't been invaded by a bunch of Ray Kurzweil-worshipping Singularitans. I actually read "The Singularity is Near," and it was rather painful to do so. His main problem is that not only does he take Moore's Law to its logical extremes, but he treats it as if it were an actual law of nature rather than a useful way of describing one aspect of technology over a limited period of history. Plus, the prose is just terrible, it's three times as long as it needs to be... I could go on. God, that was the worst book I've ever read.

Posted by Adam Villani | April 4, 2008 11:51 PM

How was your book, Villani?

As usual, few people here have a clue.

The problem with multiple CPUs is precisely developing the software for it. It's not easy, and not many programmers have a clue how to do it. So that's going to slow the advance of multicore machines. We can do the hardware - we can't do the software (very well, at least.)

However, all that means is that we will push off in some other direction. Software development is pathetic. The software industry produces crap. Twenty years ago at a West Coast Computer Faire, Ted Nelson declared that there was no acceptable software on the market. Twenty years later, that is still true.

That will change eventually because it must. And the development of nanotech-based neuroscience research which contributes advances in our understanding of how the brain works will advance our understanding of conceptual processing which is THE critical issue in developing any kind of AI and the application of AI techniques to software engineering.

Moore's Law is not particularly relevant to the discussion. While it is likely to continue for another X years (the prediction of its demise has been regular for some years now, and the prediction has been wrong every year as well), what matters is the development of nanotech.

People really don't understand just how radical that technology will be. Predicting the timing of advances in that area is not easy at this point. What can be predicted is that advances will be made, and applications of those advances will materially change the human experience in the next fifty years - much more than even cheap, small computers did - and eventually obsolete that experience.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | April 5, 2008 5:16 AM

what jumped out at me was the prediction that it will still be "housewives" who are running the kitchens and taking care of the kids. Interesting that gender relations remain stuck in the 1950s in this guy's predictions.

Posted by U.G. | April 5, 2008 8:23 AM

I was alive in 1968 and I never expected anything like the scenarios painted in these types of articles. I suspect the writer didn't either. It was just an exersize in imaginative writing.

Posted by Van | April 5, 2008 9:14 AM

Re: China specialises is pushing costs down and increasing product variety. This is going to continue, but will spread into new industries as China becomes capital and technology intensive and massively educated.

Left out of your analysis are two very significant things: 1) the possibility (very high, IMO) of massive political instability or outright war in Asia's future and 2) The increase in shipping costs due to higher oil prices. My prediction is that we are going to see a return to local (or at least regional) production of most goods after some major political catastrophe, on the order of, say, WWI, devastates the globalization networks and higher transportation costs cancel out the advantages of cheaper labor. That doesn't mean Detroit will come back, more likely that a lot of that Chinese production will come back to Mexico and non-union South. China, assuming it doesn't damage itself beyond repair, will mainly be a producer for itself and the rest of East and Central Asia.

Posted by JonF | April 5, 2008 10:21 AM

Maybe the Chinese will be fit enough to invade. Their hardware is improving, they maintain a population advantage, and they are not nearly as obese as we are.

Not yet they aren't. However, much like their economy, their girth is growing at a faster rate than ours. When you figure that their obese is limited to the wealthy coastal areas, their obesity epidemic is actually worse than ours.

Posted by Mo | April 5, 2008 11:19 AM

On women's changing role:
That's the thing that dates old science fiction. They'll have super transport and super communication, but then before the hero leaves the house his girlfriend needs to put on a hat. Changing social mores are the hardest to get--just look at gay marriage or gays in the military now, 10 years ago, and 40 years ago.

There's a sci-fi short to be written wherein we're too obese to fight would-be invading hordes, but due to our foresight in the green revolution and worldwide economic growth all the other nations are too tubby to come over and topple us.

Posted by Deborah | April 5, 2008 6:05 PM

I must say that I find Mr. Yglesias hate affair with the automobile to be quite typical of people from New York City, as opposed to people like myself who came from California. The fact is that automobiles produced today are far superior in terms of efficiency and performance then automobiles produced in the 1960s, much of which is due to the introduction of microcomputers which have revolutionized automobile engines.

Just as a for instance, the power output per unit of engine displacement is double what it was in the 1960s, despite lower compression ratios. This is due to the now universal replacement of carburetors with multiport fuel injection systems and the introduction of 4 valve/cylinder technology, both made possible by the microcomputer revolution.

In addition, automobiles engines today produce much greater fuel economy then they did in the 1960s. As a for instance, the top fuel economy vehicle in the 1960s was the Volkswagon beetle weighing 1700 pounds with a 40 Hp engine and getting 27 mpg on the highway. A 2600 pound modern Honda Civic with a 130 Hp engine can get better then 40 mpg on the highway.

Posted by SLC | April 5, 2008 6:51 PM

Re: Changing social mores are the hardest to get

Just as weird are the SciFi stories set in a future with incredible technology, but governed like Queen Victoria's British Empire. Ursula LeGuin once wrote an esay criticizing the decidedly reactionary vision about politics, and her own stories tried to address this, albeit she was unable to see beyond Communism. Religion is another awkward element. Often futuristic SciFi ignores it. Some include it in pretty much its present day form. Rarely someone like Frank Herbert will come up with a radical new religion as the centerpiece of the story. What we almost never see are religions that are clearly descended from our own, but much reformed. Imagine a gay couple being joined in holy matrimony in a Catholic cathedral, or female Imams debating Shari'a law.

Posted by JonF | April 5, 2008 7:38 PM

"Jet travel has become cheaper and more widespread, but the basic technology hasn't really improved (indeed, it's regressed since the end of the Concorde) and the quality of the air travel experience has declined."

See your senior colleague James Fallows's article about the DayJet air taxi company in the current Atlantic.

"Just as weird are the SciFi stories set in a future with incredible technology, but governed like Queen Victoria's British Empire."

Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age featured a group of people in the future who had deliberately decided to live in a high-tech version of Victorian society.

Posted by Fred | April 5, 2008 7:51 PM

Okay, I'll play the resident Singularist.

Fact is, the technological changes of the 21st century will utterly dwarf those of the 20th. Transportation just isn't one of the technologies that will change much. What will change is things that will make transportation less important, as is already happening with communications technology.

Yes, Moore's law will continue for quite some time. And new energy technologies are already emerging which will completely change the world. THere's at least 10 new solar power technologies which each have the potential to transform the world in the next 25 years. There's all kinds of new tech that will do crazy ass stuff in biotech and nanotech.

What I find amazing is how NONE of this stuff gets talked about in politics, as if it's just sci-fi. I guess people are spooked by the dumb-ass futurist thinking of the past, when people didn't really think this stuff through very well.

Yes, Kurzweil is a lousy writer, but he's not a lousy thinker. He's overly optimistic, I think, but not by as much as it seems. The only problem with is way of thinking is assuming that technological progress equals happiness. We are not appreciably happier now than we were in the Stone Age.

Posted by conradg | April 6, 2008 7:28 AM