Technological predictions from the past, and how come they didn't?

We are witnessing new technological predictions come true and statistics show that at least half of them are wrong. More precisely, today 60% of predictions come true, while in the not so distant past about 60% of predictions were proven wrong, thanks to the profession of technological futurism

"Everything that can be invented has already been invented" - this absurd sentence was said by Charles H. Doel who worked at the US Patent Office in 1899, or so the legends say. For about seventy years researchers have been trying in vain to find any evidence of this quote, yet I chose it to open my article. Whether the sentence has been said or not, it seems that it is difficult to predict the future in an absolute way and it is equally difficult to "predict" even the past.

We are witnessing new technological predictions come true and statistics show that at least half of them are wrong. To be more precise, today 60% of the predictions come true while in the not so distant past about 60% of the predictions were proven wrong. The reason for the change is the study of futurism, which makes it possible to study trends and identify changes and advanced technologies more precisely and at a relatively early stage.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, we have heard far-reaching predictions about life in the "XNUMXs". Thus, we were promised, we will live in smart houses maintained by robots, drive in flying cars on a XNUMXD road system, travel in a spaceship, consume capsules instead of food and if we're lucky - maybe we'll even join a time travel or two. Some predicted utopia and a world without crime, and some predicted nuclear war and robot armies, but no one predicted the personal computer, the Internet, the cell phone or even the microwave.

How did most of the predictions go wrong? Why did the creators of science fiction, academics and other researchers not succeed in predicting the technologies that exist today and, in contrast, predicted imaginary predictions devoid of any connection to reality? I hope this article will shed some light on this topic.

ladies and gentlemen! reverse!!

One of the main reasons for the failure of predictions is the revolutions created as a result of certain technologies. People tend to know an existing situation and it is difficult for them to imagine revolutions that can be created as a result of one or another future technology. For example, advisers to the Queen in the Victorian period examined the growth rate of the number of horses in London, and predicted that in the future people would be basking in horse dung. They, of course, could not foresee the development of cars and the invention of steam (which, as we know, brought with them other problems).

And another flaw is the computing revolution. When the first computers were created, they were huge and filled halls with a multitude of switches, light bulbs and vacuum cleaners. Most researchers did not recognize the trend of the change in the size of computers until the XNUMXs, the computers in the Madev movies were huge. No one really thought about a graphic interface either. In the movie "A Space Odyssey", the famous ship's computer "Hal" appeared in the form of a flashing red light. Only when computers started to appear in homes did they finally realize that computers could be very small and have a graphical interface and the way they appeared in science fiction books and movies changed. The appearance of the computer led to the development of the Internet, but even this phenomenon was hardly preceded by predictions until the Internet became a common and existing reality.

Electricity, the computer, the Internet, the laser and other important discoveries did not constitute a substitute for an existing product, so it was not possible to predict the far-reaching consequences they would have on society. They created an unexpected transformation that changed the Western world beyond recognition. No one could have predicted these changes based on the past, simply because there were no similar technologies in the past.

Lack of understanding of the potential inherent in new technologies

When a new technology appears in the research labs, it is usually in an initial and very primitive stage. This situation makes it difficult to assess the real potential inherent in these technological developments. But the investment in improving and perfecting the basic technologies is very massive and in many cases we see a significant improvement in new technologies within a short period of time. A recent survey shows that about 80% of research and development is invested in improvement and not in the creation of new products and these improvements lead to the significant revolutions that accompany many technologies. Two famous quotes in the computer world present the problem in all its seriousness:

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" (Thomas Watson, CEO of IBM, 1943)

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." (Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment, 1977). Apparently these are absurd quotes. How is it possible that after the computers were already invented, people who worked with them did not understand the tremendous potential inherent in them? As mentioned, in the early 8800s there were formidable steel monsters that filled huge halls and consisted of tens of thousands of vacuum tubes. The maintenance of these machines required enormous resources, the reliability was appalling and the price tag was in the millions of dollars. In addition, the only benefit of these computers was mathematical operations, and for that a lot of complex technical knowledge was needed. Even in the mid-seventies the situation did not look bright and it was hard to think that anyone would want a computer for home use. The first personal computer called the Altair 1975 came out in XNUMX and its developers expected to sell only a few hundred units. The computer consisted of a row of red lights and switches and the only way to work with it was by clumsily raising and lowering the switches. The only product of computer "programming" were programs that made the lights blink. On the face of it, this is not a particularly interesting product and even though several thousand units were sold already in the first month, the matter could easily be dismissed as a passing fashion craze among a small and neglected fringe culture, at least that is what the computer giants such as IBM assumed. In contrast, Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak, the founders of Apple, realized that there was real potential here and the computer they developed - Apple-I became a resounding success.

It wasn't just the computer that met with a chilly reception when it emerged from the research labs. It was said about the phone in the British Parliament that it is not needed because they have enough couriers, and then it was claimed that the phone has too many technical problems to seriously consider commercial use of it. It was said about the radio in the early XNUMXs: "The wireless jukebox has no conceivable commercial value. Who will pay for messages that are not sent to a specific person? "

Other cases of rejection of new technology were caused when there was a need to combine several technologies when one depended on the other. For example, the laser was rejected at the time by Bell Laboratories because they claimed it had no connection to the world of communication. This was before the invention of optical fibers which, together with the laser, created a real revolution in the world of communication.

Lack of understanding about the human factor and human nature

Many predictions are made as a result of technological ability but they are simply contrary to human nature. For example, since the massive penetration of computers into our lives, we hear about the death of paper. Roger Smith, chairman of General Motors, claimed in 1986 that "by the end of the century we will live in a world without paper". And despite everything paper is still with us and although technically it has long been possible to make do with digital copies, people prefer to print e-mails, presentations, contracts and even scanned documents in many cases, simply because they prefer to read from a sheet of paper rather than from a computer screen. By the way, I personally believe that in the next decade we will still see a significant reduction in the use of paper and its replacement by digital paper - a technology of thin and flexible screens, just like a sheet of paper, which also do not tire the eyes.

Perhaps the most common example of a prediction that didn't come true is the flying car. The first combination between a car and an airplane was presented already in 1917 when the Curtiss company introduced the Autoplane, a car with three seats and wings, which even managed to fly. In 1940, Henry Ford said "Remember my words, the combination of an airplane and a car is already on its way." So how is it that today we still continue to be stuck in traffic jams in our land cars? The main reason for this is the human factor. Aircraft are much more sensitive than ground vehicles to accidents. In the case of an air accident, any collision, even if it is only very slight, can lead to a very serious disaster. If we haven't been able to overcome the human factor in car accidents, who will guarantee us that a flying car will be safer? If you add to this the difficulty in establishing laws in the form of traffic signs, lanes and enforcement, the picture becomes much more complicated. The solution will probably come in the form of an autonomous navigation system that will eliminate the dangerous human factor from flying, but until then we will have to make do with our family car.

The human factor is also a major and important obstacle in space exploration and leads to further wrong predictions in this field - permanent basic existence on the moon and Mars and long manned flights to the edge of the solar system. Such tasks will require a long stay in closed and small places and the results can be devastating. An experiment done in the early 2s called "Biosphere XNUMX" included seven crew members who entered a closed and airtight structure where they had to produce their own food, water and oxygen. A few months later, the experiment failed when friction and fights led to some of the staff leaving the building in protest. If this happened on another planet, the situation might have been much worse...

And there were also cases of the opposite in which wrong predictions actually predicted that the person would reject a certain technology, and this was due to a basic lack of understanding of human nature. The "New York Times" published an article in 1939 about a new invention - television. The popular newspaper claimed that television would not succeed in being a commercial tool. According to the newspaper: "The problem with television is that people have to constantly look at the screen. The average American family does not have time for this activity" it was determined.

The difficulty in assessing the rate of technological progress

The twentieth century led the Western world to an incredible revolution that completely changed humanity. The technological revolution has led many to think that science can solve everything, and the amazing rate of progress in some areas has led to unrealistic expectations in other areas. People who saw how cars, airplanes, electricity, radio, and the telephone changed their lives from end to end over the course of several decades expected to see similar revolutions in areas such as space exploration, artificial intelligence, robotics, flying cars, and even time travel. But these expectations ignored the difficulties in making significant progress in these areas.

Creating artificial intelligence, for example, requires significant breakthroughs in two areas: hardware and software. An in-depth understanding of how the brain works is the basis for artificial intelligence, and to reach it, sophisticated tools and long and complex research are needed. In recent decades we have witnessed sophisticated scanning technologies that create significant breakthroughs in brain research, but despite this, many researchers claim that we are still at the stage of defining the problem and not at the stage of finding the solution. In other words, we are still trying to understand exactly how intelligence works and what intelligence is, so we cannot create artificial intelligence. For example, some claim that artificial intelligence is already here, at least in some basic forms such as automatic script reading, expert systems for detecting forgeries and fraud, facial recognition, playing chess and more, but it is debatable whether this is real intelligence. In my opinion, in the coming decades we will reach a complete understanding of the workings of the brain and as a result we will be able to create "real" artificial intelligence. Ray Kurzweil, probably the most important and influential futurist in the world today, estimates that the calculation power of the brain is about 1016 - 1014 (1 followed by 14 or 16 zeros) operations per second. Supercomputers will have such calculation capabilities already in about five years, and in 2025 even a cheap home computer will be able to do it. Kurzweil continues and claims that it will be another decade before we can create the software required to create true artificial intelligence for the reasons I mentioned earlier.

Time travel is an even more complex issue. According to the laws of nature known to us today, time travel is far beyond the horizon of predictions. Einstein's theory of relativity gave us a clue about the possibility of time travel, and many researchers claim that, at least theoretically, time travel is possible, at least to move into the future. But in order to create a bend in the time-space continuum, a huge amount of energy is required, some estimate it to be a greater amount of energy than all the energy in the universe. After a little more than two years on the Mir space station, the journey at 28,162 km/h placed Sergey Abdeev two hundredths of a second into the future, and he is the greatest time traveler to date. To make a serious distance in time, one must move at a very high speed, let's say over 99% of the speed of light. But such tremendous speed requires energy that is far, far beyond human capacity as of today.

Many other technologies have turned out to be much more complex and complicated than initially thought, partly because they require the integration of many complex technologies in themselves. In addition to the examples I mentioned earlier, we can also mention the simultaneous translation from language to language, the automatic driver, the teleporter that will transport us from place to place and many other examples.

political and economic considerations

Politics is an integral part of our lives for better, and perhaps mostly, for worse. In the mid-seventies of the twentieth century, following the Arab boycott, oil prices skyrocketed. The surge in oil prices led to accelerated development of alternative technologies - green energy, use of fuel cells, electric energy, solar energy and more. Many billions have been invested in these technologies and if fuel prices had continued to be so high, there is almost no doubt that we would be driving cars with alternative energy today. However, the oil producers realized the potential damage that could be caused to them as a result of such technologies and therefore fuel prices fell back down. Studies that were already in fairly advanced stages were stopped because the funding sources that supported them disappeared when fuel prices fell again. When fuel is cheap, there is no interest in investing billions in energy that will eventually be more expensive than oil. Some even claim that the oil companies also purchased many of the alternative energy patents to bury them for sure. Today we see in a very tangible way the damage caused as a result of the use of oil - environmental pollution that leads to terrible disasters and, of course, serious damage to the global economy. We can only hope that we have learned enough from history to finally develop the alternative solutions now, even if fuel prices will drop soon (and the likelihood of that, at least in my opinion, is very low).

Another example of political considerations that influenced technology can be seen in the space race. At the beginning of the second half of the XNUMXth century, the space race was at its peak when the USA and Russia waged a real war between themselves for the conquest of space. The resources allocated for this purpose were enormous - hundreds of billions of dollars were poured to fly satellites into space, research spacecraft into the solar system and, of course, to place a man on the moon. If the pace of progress had continued as it was in the sixties, we would have seen a man on Mars already in the eighties and permanent stations on the moon before the end of the century, as many predicted. However, the collapse of Russia led to a significant slowdown in the space race. The US preferred to direct the vast resources to other needs, among other things because of public demand. Today we are witnessing a resurgence in space flights due to the entry of commercial parties such as Virgin, which plans to allow tourist flights to the edge of space and, in the future, to the moon as well. When the flight to space will be in private hands and profits can be made from it, it can be assumed that we will again see a significant breakthrough in space exploration.

Religious and moral considerations

For thousands of years, scientific research was held back because it was contrary to the ruling religion. Socrates who was sentenced to death for heresy to the gods and Galileo who ended his life under house arrest while being ostracized and cut off from the outside world, are just two examples of such cases. Even today, religion interferes in various fields such as research and distribution of contraceptives, applying a ban on abortions in a regulated and legal manner and more. In addition, the scientific community does not look favorably on research in controversial areas such as time travel, UFO research, supernatural research and medical use of various drugs such as ecstasy and LSD as a cure for various psychiatric illnesses. As a result, important scientific progress is hindered in many cases, which ultimately also affects the ability to predict the technological future.

Genetic engineering is a great example of this. Almost automatically, genetic engineering arouses strong opposition among believers of all religions and also among many secularists. As a result, draconian laws were enacted to ban genetic engineering research in many western countries. Recently, there has been a public uproar due to experiments conducted in the USA and the UK during which human embryos were used. Apparently this sounds shocking, but it must be remembered that this is a cluster of cells that developed for only about five days and was destroyed afterwards. The resistance in the West leads to the fact that scientific progress in the field remains among countries such as China, Korea and Russia and naturally leads to delays in the development of genetic medicines and treatments that can save the lives of millions around the world. The author Michael Crichton claims that since the seventies of the twentieth century, between ten and thirty million people have died as a result of the war of various organizations in genetic engineering and spraying materials. There is no doubt that the uncontrolled use of pesticides is dangerous, but DDT is not carcinogenic and does not cause the death of birds as some stakeholders have claimed. On the other hand, the ban on its use led to the death from starvation of about ten million people in the third world, most of them children. The writer and man of science, Zvi Yanai, cites as an example the fact that while millions of their citizens are dying of hunger, the leaders of Zambia and Zimbabwe rejected the donation of thousands of tons of genetically modified corn kernels out of fear for the health of their citizens, and this despite the fact that even a mild upset stomach has never been recorded as a result of this type of corn.

The limits of human imagination

The difficulty of breaking away from conventional thinking characterizes many of the failed predictions. The forecasters do want to make a change, but they are not able to go all the way, not even in their mind's eye. Since the dawn of mankind, humans have aspired to fly, and countless attempts have been made for this purpose, but almost without exception these attempts included imitating the flight of birds using artificial wings that need to be flapped. The Wright brothers succeeded where all their predecessors had failed, simply because they were able to break the mental fixation that there is only one way to fly. In the same way, man's ambition to swim faster than the dolphins succeeded only when the movement of the oars was replaced by sails and propellers and the ambition to move faster than the doe succeeded only when man converted the movement of the legs into the rotation of the wheels. If a general conclusion can be drawn from this experiment, claims Zvi Yanai, then the attempt to impart artificial intelligence to computers will succeed only after we stop trying to teach them to think like humans.

The limitations of human imagination also lead to the fact that in the past many envisioned humanoid robots performing various household chores, but it is much more complex, expensive and cumbersome to create a human robot that will hold a vacuum cleaner, than a small and simple cheap robotic vacuum cleaner, such as the ones that were eventually developed and are now sold on every corner . In the same way, in the past humanoid robots were envisioned to serve as stenographers, librarians and filers in archives, while today we use software to perform tasks such as typing and editing text, searching, processing and saving information.

In conclusion, it can be said that there are many reasons for the failure of future forecasts. As someone who deals in the field of futurism, I have learned over the years to approach various predictions with utmost caution, and to take all the mentioned factors into account. However, it is still clear to me that predictions for the future are very complex and complicated. A Chinese saying from the sixth century BC states that "those who have knowledge do not contract, and those who contract do not possess knowledge". Nobel laureate Niels Bohr added another insight in this context: "Forecasting is a very complicated thing, especially in regards to the future..."

(This article is taken from Amnon Carmel's blog which deals with futurism, technology, science and more)