Despite my love of sci-fi and love-hate for technology, I’ve always been skeptical of the wide-eyed “gee-whiz the future will be so advanced” claims of the futurists. I enjoyed Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, but he argues, breathlessly, that we will have exponentially increasing technological gains. Written in 2000, he predicts various leaps in technology by 2010, 2020, and so on. For example, computers will exceed the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain by the year 2020 (with human-level capabilities not far behind).
Fat chance. The future dystopias and utopias always show older items like today’s clothing, furniture, houses, cars, etc., all replaced by gleaming brushed-nickel-facade hyperplastic. This is just stupid. I know people with 20 year old color televisions (their mom’s or grandma’s console with the prototype remotes or the rotating changer with the variable UHF knob) and 30 year old cars. They don’t throw stuff away, even if a “better” replacement is available for cheap.I can’t remember what Kurzweil’s predictions were for 2010. But they were radical. “Everything different,” blah blah blah. Hey, it’s just around the corner. I predict people will still have crashing PCs, 7 versions of their address files on different systems, all uncoordinated and lost. When you buy a new cell phone the minimum wage idiot at the counter will scratch his head and tell you he dos not think you can transfer the address book from the old one to the new one. Etc.
An article on the Future of Windows buttresses this point (and after all, points need buttressing, do they not? Do I hear an amen?). As the article points out: “Microsoft’s initial plans for Longhorn were ambitious. Last year, Bill Gates described the next Windows as a “technological breakthrough” … Considering all the attention it’s been getting … you’d think the new Windows was going to change your life tomorrow. But you’d think wrong. … Although a beta version of Longhorn was originally due later this year [i.e., 2004], that target slipped to next year [2005] as the company shifted programmers to bolstering Windows XP’s security …. Now, Microsoft says, Longhorn won’t show up on new PCs or store shelves until 2006. … Facing real-world development deadlines, however, Microsoft executives have started to scale back their Longhorn ambitions, saying that Longhorn will not deliver all of its planned improvements, and Gates’s complete vision–Longhorn with all its bells and whistles–might not reach PC users until 2009.”
Hmm, the world’s most successful and pervasive software company. They schedule a software upgrade for 2004 … then 2005, wait, 2006, umm, might be 2009 before we see it. Yeah, the future is just around the corner, Ray.
Coda: John Bartel writes:
“It is wise to exercise skepticism about a technologist’s claim of imminent revolutionary change.
“An example from the field of artificial intelligence is illuminating:
“* In the 1960’s, artificial intelligence researchers predicted that they could build a computer ten times smarter than a human being.
* In the 1970’s, they predicted they could build a computer as smart as a single human being.
* In the 1980’s, they predicted they could write a program that would do as well as a human expert in a specialized field.
* In the 1990’s, they predicted they could create “expert” systems that would aid humans in making decisions.
“Needless to say, none of these predictions came true. The interesting problems invariably turn out to be much more complex than expected, and the capabilities of our technologies are quite primitive in comparison.
“One would hope that such a dismal track record would build some humility and perspective, but those are rare traits today.
“As a footnote to the above story, it is amusing that one of the complaints of the artificial intelligence experts is that the human experts in medicine, pharmaceuticals, etc., are unwilling to spend time with the computer types trying to build “expert” systems. The human experts were more interested in extending the boundaries of knowledge and working on real problems then to waste endless hours answering clueless questions in an attempt to build human insight into lifeless machines.”
Coda 2:
Gil “The Gilster” Guillory writes:
“Keeping in line with subjectivism, what the heck would exponential progress be, anyway? By some (false) measure, maybe we are undergoing exponential
progress.
“I saw a great show on food tv this weekend, “Kitchens of the Future“. It was mainly filled with “futuristic” footage earlier periods showing what the kitchen of the future might look like. This was punctuated with some current incarnations of the same. (Microsoft and MIT and Phillips have kitchens of the future with lots of obviously useless stuff.) Hosted by Alton Brown.”
Re the first point–yes, this is correct. However even by their own standards the futurists have a miserable record. Their technical predictions usually do not come true or only come true much later than predicted.
12:07 am on May 26, 2004
