Here's how a futurist saw 2008 back in 1968

[kpete]

Here's how a futurist saw 2008 back in 1968:

People have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours . . . . Homes are practically self-maintaining. Robots are available to do housework and other simple chores . . . . You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination. Ninety minutes later, you slide beneath the dome of your destination city. . . . A typical vacation in 2008 is to spend a week at an undersea resort, where your hotel room window looks out on a tropical underwater reef.

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/03/24/what-will-life-be-like-in-the-year-2008/

[pscot]

1. "Futurists" are the guys who missed

the oil shocks of the 70's. Zero credibility.

[snooper2]

2. ROFL...

For leisure activities we actually watch moonshiners on Discovery channel

[DippyDem]

3. Who knew that a 'blah' person was going to be president? n/t

[alcibiades_mystery]

4. It's actually kinda accurate in ways

It's not a "national traffic computer," but the technology he's referring to did lead eventually to geo-location technologies that do, indeed, tell us where we're going. Hell, the Garmin is now built into models, never mind all the people that attach them to the dash.

Relative to 1968, many people do have "robots" that take care of many household tasks.

I don't know about undersea resorts, but here's a pic of the restaurant at the Hilton Maldives:



http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9670397-1.html

The comments on the role of the computer in 2008 households is actually remarkably prescient, and I've read quite a lot of futurist and computer promoter literature from the time. The reduction of the workday is the real sticking point, but it gives us insight into how many technology innovators saw their roles in the 1960's. The arguments for "post-scarcity" economics seemed to be there (and remain, I'd argue, far more realistic than the scarcity promoters let on. Certainly, much of this changed into the implicit post-scarcity arguments about information as it has transformed intellectual property discussions, but you can see the kernel of it there in that piece.

The Reaganite adventure was largely meant to convince us that scarcity must and always must remain the ground of production, when that seems largely invented for the purpose of capital accumulation. Scarcity is a sham.

[SomethingFishy]

15. There is an undersea resort in the Florida Keys..

Key Largo I think... The Jules it's called if I remember correctly.

[Little Star]

5. I want the intelligence pill for everyone now!!!!

All kidding aside he was right about quite a few things.

[Bandit]

9. When I was a child I used to sell "Smart Pills"

Moose pellets......You eat one and immediately notice it tastes like ......... much smarter after that..

[JBoy]

6. Many people are working 4 hrs a day

Unfortunately, they need to work 12 hrs a day to make ends meet.

[Capitalocracy]

7. The workday SHOULD be 4 hours.

With what they pay their CEOs, corporations could easily pay a living wage for a 20-hour workweek for all their employees, and the economy would vastly improve. But then the CEOs wouldn't be able to suck us dry and accumulate superhuman amounts of wealth and power.

[cthulu2016]

8. These predictions are always about the super-rich (and are fairly accuarte)

The technology described is not far-fetched.

The economic structure required is, however, far-fetched.

Think of the marvelous medical advances since 1968. The futurist will focus on those advances without noting that your overall level of medical care might be lower in the future.

[L0oniX]

10. The Jetsons.

[LeftinOH]

11. A few direct hits among the many misses:

Some of the spot-on accurate predictions are-

"Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees’ accounts..... Each time you buy something, the card’s number is fed into the store’s computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance."

"Besides school lessons, other educational material is available for TV viewing. You simply press a combination of buttons and the pages flash on your home screen. The world’s information is available to you almost instantaneously."

[chrisa]

14. Wow. That's pretty cool - I missed both of those.

Pretty accurate!

[MisterP]

12. http://www.paleofuture.com/

[chrisa]

13. How the heck could we build all of this stuff in 40 yrs?

Me thinks they exaggerated a bit!

Maybe in 2108, though.