They weren't so wrong... sure their form factors were way off but they had all the ideas down...
1. Electronic Books
2. High speed aerodynamic trains
3. Computer aided manufacturing
4. Motorized personal transport
6&7. Ok no one is letting a robot cut their hair or do makeup, but we're using robots for surgery
9. Aerodynamic motorcycles
10. Webcams
11. Where's my flying car!
12. Tanks
13. Electronic news
etc. etc.
If you look at the concept alone, for 100 years ago they weren't THAT far off. Personalized flight on the whole was really the only big miss.
Edit: I understand the horse one now. Back then horses were used for everything... but by 2000 they predicted everything would be machines, so seeing a horse would be a curiosity, not the daily norm. You would take your kids to see a horse, petting zoo anyone? Pretty prescient to me.
The other big miss is that the outside scenes have one or two people and a lot of green, and the indoor scenes have a tiny amount of utilitarian furniture.
There's no sense of stuff and clutter, urbanisation and buildings everywhere and people people people.
( and the train is nothing like high speed and aerodynamic - it has balconies! )
This could be limitations of the artist and of the medium.
These images were produced by chromolithography, a many-staged process of chemical interactions. Adding lots and lots of details and tiny, realistic figures would be difficult. And perhaps expensive. I can imagine a situation where the cost of the process is an exponential function of the number of places different colours have to border each other without bleeding.
It's tricky enough to draw that kind of thing in any medium.
Personalized flight on the whole was really the only big miss.
I think the main reason that isn't more mainstream is that even with small planes, we chose to emphasize safety far more than with road vehicles. I don't know why that is; I'd gladly trade some amount of safety if it meant I could afford to own and operate a plane.
A Cessna 172 is no more complicated than an economy car. It costs $275,000 due to regulation and low volume, not because it's inherently more expensive to produce than a car.
A Cessna 172 is no more complicated than an economy car.
Not trying to sound snarky here, but have you ever piloted an airplane? The pre-takeoff checks take a little while, require a good bit of technical expertise, and are absolutely required if you want to be pretty damn sure that your airplane won't fall out of the sky. Safety is, at times, overemphasized, but then again your car won't fall from the sky when it stalls.
I read him as saying it's no more complicated to build; not that it's no more complicated to operate. This interpretation makes sense in view of his point that safety concerns (pre-takeoff checks) are what prevent widespread personal flight.
Well, there was this time when I was two and I was sitting on the pilot's lap....
I've spent a lot of time as a passenger in small planes and I have a good idea of what's involved in a preflight. I'm not against safety in general, but I think lawsuits and government oversight have really held back general aviation. A plane should be more reliable and therefore expensive than a car with a similar level of sophistication, but it doesn't need to cost 15 times as much.
Edit: based on khafra's comment, a possible reading of my earlier comment is that it's no more complicated to fly a plane than drive a car. I intended to say that it's no more complicated to build a single-engine propeller-driven airplane than to build a car.
People often underestimate how important regular car maintenance is for safety. Just because it statically holds on ground or casual speed doesn't mean it'll grip in a quick wet corner or handle safely in an emergency situation. Hence (partly) car death+accident rate is abysmal compared to flying vehicles. In addition to weekly maintenance checks, I personally always run quick pre+post drive checklists on my car, but then that may be because I received flight education :)
Like the parent, I had an informal "pre-flight" inspection that I'd execute on my motor home on travel days. Hatches closed and locked, hoses and cables and steps and awning retracted and secured, ceiling vents closed, LP gas shut off, tires aired up, engine fluids nominal.
172's were introduced in 1956. I'm certain if personal flight were more mainstream, flying could be quite as easy as hoping in your car. Further, it's easier to automate flight because of the vertical space available for traffic separation. The hard part is space for taking off and landing.
I personally don't agree that safety has held personal flight back. It's just not practical except for longer distances.
I actually agree with you, but I have also yet to see a relatively inexpensive autopilot system that can successfully navigate all of the many horrible scenarios that could arise. We're probably already (or nearly) there tech-wise, but in the current Cessnas, you still need to be able to land and take off, and if there's even a minor crosswind on landing, this requires a very good bit of training and understanding of the technical limitations of the airplane. Not impossible for people to learn, but certainly a lot more difficult than "gas = go, break = stop, wheel left = turn left, wheel right = turn right".
As far as safety goes...I agree that personal flight has a great track record. But it's difficult to say if this would continue (absent a beautiful autopilot system) if we gave out pilot's licenses to 90% of 17 year olds and filled the sky with millions of small aircraft.
You don't have to know how to fly an airplane by instruments alone, either, until you want to get an instrument rating.
As an example of a lower barrier to entry, the (relatively) new Sport Pilot certificate allows for the operation of smaller, lighter aircraft with training and testing requirements that are not dissimilar to those for getting a driver's license.
with all this modern priority of safety over everything else, man on the Moon is impossible. Heck, even bringing an open fire into a cold dump cave full of people would be a grave safety violation.
Fly an ultralight instead? Then you don't have to deal with regulations and all that.
I think if people really wanted to fly, there would be mass-market ultralights. But the reality is that driving is just as good and feels safer and easier to understand. (What do you if you get lost flying? You can't just pull over and ask for directions.)
Ultralights aren't very practical due to the government limitations placed upon them. There are few situations in which there's an advantage to flying an aircraft with a cruise speed lower than a freeway speed limit cross-country rather than driving.
I agree 100%. But if there were millions of people dying to fly, then the ultralight could be a very lucrative market. If you lived in the middle of nowhere, an airplane could be more practical than an SUV for commuting.
Instead, cars and commercial airlines are where Society Has Decided that their limits are. Everyone can understand paying $500 a month for a car, and everyone can understand paying $159 to sit in a chair and be levitated to Phoenix for the weekend. So that's where the land / air tradeoff currently is.
(Do I like this? Nope. I fly 100,000 miles a year and am willing to pay $10,000 to $20,000 to become a private pilot, with the expected benefit of saying "I'll rent a plane and fly us to Door County this weekend" to some girl I like. Economically sensible? Absolutely not. Hence, not very many people do it. Flying is magic. The general public is not ready to harness magic in the form of throttle, elevator, aileron, and rudder.)
I agree, and hence the unpopularity of being a private pilot. When you drive a car, the consequences and required training are minimal. If you don't know where you are, you follow the signs to the gas station and ask for directions. If you run out of gas, you put your hood up and wait for someone to stop and give you gas. The net intelligence required is about zero. Hence, the popularity.
When flying, not only are you responsible for getting yourself where you want to go, you are also responsible for not running out of fuel and crashing onto a family of four having a nice barbecue. This is beyond the risk that most people are willing to take. Learning about VORs and DMEs and NDBs and GPSes are not worth the ability to travel across the country 2x to 4x faster than driving, especially when the distances people want to cover are in th 2-6 hour range. 6 hours is not much time. Neither is 3h time. So why not drive the same vehicle you use every day to get to work? There is no risk involved and what are you going to do with the 3 hours flying you own plane got you? Drink beer? Meh. Much better than not accidentally murdering anyone.
(Not saying I'm happy with this, but it's the reality. If you want to fly an airplane, You Are Weird. I Am Weird, but I can't expect everyone else to be weird...)
Although we are using a electric mechanical device to do so. In particular with shaving we have devices that do all the cutting and make it virtually impossible to cut yourself. So kind of similar even there.
It really depends on how literal you take these pictures to be. You could say that picture three suggests "we will have computer aided manufacturing," but you could also say it suggests "robots will build our houses." I think what these pictures show more than anything, is the kind of tangential predictions people seem to make about the future. "Everything will be automated with lots of tiny mechanical arms and levers. Everything will fly (because flight is really hot right now." This is a great example of zeerust (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust). Though interpreted vaguely these predictions are for the most part pretty good IMO.
The robot surgeon is just an interface for the real surgeon, providing some smooth, precise motion and access into small places (where a human surgeon would have to cut his way through). Hair is on the outside of the body and quite accessible. There is yet no technology that can replace the human hand (yet).
I think the true wisdom in past future predictions is something that people didn't get right. For example another (my) take on the three first predictions, that you listed as successes, are: no practical text-to-speech(1), no truly intercontinental trains(2), no robots on construction sites(3)
If you look it from that perspecive, there's something to be learned. It's easy to vision, but it's difficult to understand what things are truly hard or things that surprisingly worked against all odds.
For example, people have been waiting for practical home robots for decades, but operating autonomously in the real world is really difficult problem, much harder that it intuitively feels (because we are so good at it).
On the otherhand, I think very few people predicted something like Wikipedia (or HN, Quora etc): free, quality information, produced by volunteers. It's hard problem too, but it just worked.
My gut feeling is that it's the social phenomena that we underestimate in our future predictions.
Huh? How do you figure? I use text-to-speech all the time and besides sounding distinctly robotic, it works extremely well. And the current state-of-the-art stuff is damn near as good as HAL9000.
EDIT: and we do have practical home robots, they're called roombas and programmable microwaves. They just don't look like something out of the Jetsons, and we've seen the technology improve over time, so we don't think of it as anything special.
Not only is it good enough for mainstream adoption, it is mainstream. It's available in cars and practically every GPS device these days. Any time you call your credit card company, you deal with TTS (plus a fair bit of speech-recognition).
As for robots, sure we don't have robots of the kind in the images shown, but the machinery we use to build skyscrapers in a fraction of the time it took 100 years ago is quite amazing. The heavy-earth machinery, cranes, railway-track building machines etc don't look like robots, but they do the same stuff.
I'd be interested to see what percentage of random dialed phone numbers end up connected to text-to-speech "if you want sales, press 1 now. If you want support, press 2 now, for all other queries, press pound or just wait." type of responses.
(Hmmm, a free $30 credit Twilio account and their "detect answering machine" API call could generate a sample of 3000 random phone numbers pretty quickly...)
I'm not sure what your definition of mainstream is, but I commonly see text-to-speech listed as an advertised feature of mainstream consumer products.
TTS's dirty little is that it's actually much faster to read something yourself than have something read to you, assuming you are fluent in the language. It's not a failing of TTS, it's just people not properly considering the use of technology. The same goes for the roomba and the programmable microwave. It makes much more sense to have small single-purpose robots that function well, than a single multipurpose humanoid robot.
I wonder to what extent these prints are just jokes. Will someone in a thousand years look back at Futurama and think it was a serious prediction of the future?
Whether they were serious or not, they'd probably find it weird to be held up as the canonical word on 'what people thought in 1910' (for all of 15 minutes)
Yeah I'm not sure they were really predicting that police would fly around in hang-glider suits. The image was probably just comical then, as it is now.
The one thing they totally failed to predict was the trend toward much more casual clothing. Partially due to technology becoming available to all the classes but even upper class people would find this level of dress over the top for current times. How long before we end up in the stereotypical white space jump suit?
One reason for the "casualization" of dress were the world wars. Rationing and general mood (and having your country ripped apart) made it kinda impossible to dress extragantantly as a rule anymore. After the war ended, it kinda stuck (just like the daily shaving thing).
That sure sounds plausible, but is there any evidence that this was actually the case? I'm always looking for excuses to dress extravagantly and not shave.
If they could have accurately predicted today's women's clothing, the cards would have been banned as porn. Even SF cant manage the future. Forbidden Planet, one of my favorite movies, all the men had DA haircuts. Start Trek crew had these monster devices hanging out their ears. Heinlein envisioned Autodesk but the drawings were made by a robot device.
What's interesting is that these illustrations are only 100 years old. The things we have right now, smart phones, robots, the internet, MP3 players, etc. seem far beyond what the futurists of the last century were imagining.
Honestly, the things we have now seem beyond what people were imagining even 50 years ago.
I wonder if we'll see this large of a technological revolution again in the coming 100 years (or an even bigger one [check this video out: http://vimeo.com/2319926 for an interesting take on this])
MP3 players, etc. seem far beyond what the futurists of the last century were imagining.
Yes; the servant carrying a wax cylinder for the gramophone device was a huge miss.
It missed electronic amplification and loudspeakers, it missed miniaturisation of audio players, it missed room sized personal libraries of vinyl/tapes/CDs, and of course it missed digitisation of music and electronic or wireless transfer of information, and it potentially missed the ubiquity of cheap music such that he's more likely to have music playing in the background while doing something else than to sit down and listen to it as an activity in itself.
(and now that I think of it, why do they have robot builders, robot barbers, robot makeup machines, but still a servant to carry a song to him on a silver platter?)
My interpretation is that the wax cylinder is being used as a calling card to announce a visitor. If so, it's a miss for at least two reasons: 1. Why would you choose to listen to a calling card rather than read it and 2. social customs changed, eliminating the custom of leaving calling cards.
The label next to "concierge" reads "descenseur". It's a reference to the French word for a lift, "ascenseur", from "ascension", "to go upwards". A descenseur would then be the exact opposite of a lift - an apparatus to go downwards. :)
The sense of perspective in these is mind-bending. Look at the lady passenger, and imagine her taking a couple of steps 'away' from the viewer, to approach the green walkway.
By then she has to be short enough to fit under the wing, and after walking over the gangway, she has to be small enough to get in the Alice-in-Wonderland door, under the wing with no headroom, into a box so small the coachman-pilot would barely squash into it.
The walkway is on top of a building high enough to have an elevator, but the handrail varies Escher style from shin-height to shoulder-height along it's ~two meter length. (And if it is shin height like the steps side suggests, then it's of no use, and if it's shoulder height like the door side suggests then she would fall between the railings, and the gap to the door is a circus acrobat's leap!).
Then the wings, which are about the height of the pilot, but also about thrice the height of the door - not to mention it's a winged vehicle which hovers.
"In the year 2000" the unshielded outside light bulb would be a health and safety violation, let alone all the other aerial acrobatic bits!
It reminds me a little of ukiyo-e, where even beautiful and finely detailed images would have basic errors of perspective.
(For example, in http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3g08423/ , the way the boat meets the water is baffling. As far as I can tell, this is an error, not a knowing artistic cheat.)
I assume that the drafting skill of even low-quality drawing went up quickly as photographs became ubiquitous, but I don’t have the art history background to support the notion.
My theory is that this isn't a pun, but rather a term that's no longer in use.
I seem to remember that some early elevator systems had two connected shafts and two cars, instead of one car and a counterweight like modern elevators. In this arrangement, cars go in a loop around a pulley at the top and bottom, always in the same direction. Thus, one shaft is the "up" shaft and one is the "down" shaft.
This image depicts the top floor, so elevators only go down from there. It may have been common practice at the time in France to call the elevator shaft that carries you down to be the descenseur and the one that carries you up to be the ascenseur. Nowadays, ascenseur is used all the time because an elevator car goes both ways.
This is amazing. I didn't know this system at all. a-priori's comment is probably in the right then!
(And "descenseur" seems to be an actual French word according to http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/descenseur, so much for showing off and knowing my native tongue.)
Well, this is the pun; although I guess a better description would be "a made-up word with a meaning that might not be instantly clear to non-French speakers" rather than a "pun".
They even got the helicopter and humvee right (sort of).
The people in 1900s have over-estimated the usage of robotic arms. We don't have that kind of arms working on human yet, but we do have them on automotive manufacturing.
The projector thing is really a very accurate prediction. Since there is no such concept at that simply a light bulb could produce a clear imaging of some remote users, without using any prerecorded films.
They even got the helicopter and humvee right (sort of).
The French started experimenting with helicopters in 1906, so it's not that surprising.
The people in 1900s have over-estimated the usage of robotic arms. We don't have that kind of arms working on human yet, but we do have them on automotive manufacturing.
We don't have robotic arms in consumer products yet (I believe this will change in the next 10 years), but they are pervasive in the manufacturing industry in general, not just in the automotive manufacturing.
We don't have robotic arms in consumer products yet (I believe this will change in the next 10 years)
Why do you believe that?
The best use I've come up with for them is for disabled people - a *plegic with a robot arm on a desk able to manipulate post, or on wheels able to be an avatar in the real world.
But that's the sort of profitable insurance-funded medical use which still isn't around. Currently they only exist in consumer space in the arm-for-amputees sense, and in the Lego Technics sense, and I expect that to continue, but where else would they start appearing for consumer products?
I think I could replicate that set up right now. Webcam attached to the wall below my projector. Anybody else with a projector want to make this a reality? ;)
Looking back at old visions of the future, they always seem to imagine the obvious things, e.g. flying cars and nuclear power. What I haven't ever seen is anything close to modern computers, which arguably have just as profound an impact on our lives and are probably more impressive technologically.
Another well known phenomenon in old science fiction is the utter lack mobile phones. Flying around space, shooting at each other with laser rifles. And then they hop into a phone booth to have A VIDEO CALL! (Yes, I'm looking at you, Blade Runner.)
(And before anybody mentions Star Trek - Those were actually more like small and fancy Walkie-Talkies. Deal with it.)
In other words, the reason we don't have flying cars is the same reason we don't have nuclear powered devices that run for decades or centuries without recharging. We can't trust the general public to be responsible with them.
Thinking of this article that was on the front page of HN a couple days ago:
The surprising thing is what they totally got wrong.
1. For instance, the backdrop of trees and green at the railway station. The intensity of urbanisation over the century sees every piece of land getting built over.
2. The mass availability of high technology. For instance, we were shown imaginings of servants bringing musical pieces for the phonograph.
3. An unpredictable technology - the age of electronics - totally transforms machines.
I believe you'd have to turn to science fiction writing these days. Well, that or the futurist movement.
But for the most part, I think the public has lost its thirst for knowledge about the far off future. We're much more of a "want it now!" culture. I find it very sad.
I think this is because people have gotten so used to rapid innovation that they no longer look to the far future for the arrival of new tech, because it now arrives week on week.
As a consumer, why speculate on the next 100 years when you know from experience that you will have some undreamed of tech next year?
I don't see this as a bad thing. As long as those in society that actually do the innovating don't completely succumb to a similar myopia.
Sure - technology will advance to a point where it will be indistinguishable from magic. So the world will look exactly like World of Warcraft. Everyone monotonously doing the same stuff over and over every day while dragons (and any other kind of genetic mutations) will roam the landscape (carrying ads most likely).
What's interesting is that they weren't really that far off with a lot of their predictions. They just couldn't get past their current level of technology, their imagination was restricted by what they were familiar with.
Hm, for some of them I couldn't even see which part is supposed to be so two-thousandy, e.g. the fifth from the top. (Edit: Got it from paleofuture - it's the "phonographic message")
>Apparently fashions weren't ever going to change!
It is very sensible of them not to attempt to predict fashion IMO, because it is by its very nature unpredictable, and possibly irrational and random, depending on how you look at it.
Imagine how much more ridiculous these would have been were all the people depicted in one-piece silver jumpsuits or something.
Also, using fashion from their own era enabled the artist to describe the social contexts. So you know who are wealthy people, who are servants, policemen etc, because they wear the stuff you expect them to. Otherwise you'd have to explain "the guys with the red jumpsuits are police, the yellow..."
A lot of the concepts are correct, but the surprising thing is the lack of advancements in materials. The images use cloth, soft metals, wood and canvas for everything. It's almost impossible to state how big an impact plastics and high quality metals have made on our day-to-day lives.
Glad I didn't live in that future. As has been said by others, predictions of the future often tell you more about the society making the prediction than what will actually come to pass.
1. Electronic Books 2. High speed aerodynamic trains 3. Computer aided manufacturing 4. Motorized personal transport 6&7. Ok no one is letting a robot cut their hair or do makeup, but we're using robots for surgery 9. Aerodynamic motorcycles 10. Webcams 11. Where's my flying car! 12. Tanks 13. Electronic news etc. etc.
If you look at the concept alone, for 100 years ago they weren't THAT far off. Personalized flight on the whole was really the only big miss.
Edit: I understand the horse one now. Back then horses were used for everything... but by 2000 they predicted everything would be machines, so seeing a horse would be a curiosity, not the daily norm. You would take your kids to see a horse, petting zoo anyone? Pretty prescient to me.