
In 1901, a 14-year-old published article in a newspaper describing the world of 2001 - nickb
http://holy-web.blogspot.com/2008/10/in-1901-14-year-old-student-published.html
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timcederman
I didn't think it was that impressive to be honest.

Skyscrapers were around at the end of the 19th century, we haven't reached 200
livable floors yet (as one of the commenters on that article said), and you
certainly don't see "air-ships and carriages fastened to balloons for the
transportation of the people through the air, and you will often see
collisions in the clouds."

It just seems like a linear prediction based on what was seen during that era.

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nickb
I think it's impressive. If you read some other predictions and if you're a
fan of Sci-Fi, you'll see that this one is actually pretty close for a change.

Try making a linear prediction for 2100 and see how hard it is.

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jodrellblank
The Law(?) of Accelerating Returns implies it will be enormously much harder
to predict from now to 2100 than it was from 1900 to 2000. (Or that a linear
prediction will be enormously much less accurate).

"we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be
more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate)" -
<http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1>

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netcan
I wonder how much that law applies.

The 20th century will be hard to beat. For one thing, we'll need to find new
resources to exploit.

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DTrejo
"find new resources to exploit"

instead

make use of resources we already have found, but remain unused for the most
part (solar etc).

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netcan
similar

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markbao
At least this 14-year-old writes better than the 17-year-olds of today.

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okeumeni
'Old People Restored to Youth by Electricity, While You Wait.' Were still
working on that one.

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benbeltran
actually, someone in the comments said this is already being done in japan.
(Results may vary)

I think he had a better idea of 2001 than those old looney tunes cartoons.

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Darmani
It's quite interesting to look at this from a cultural point of view. Most
interesting to me is the assumption that the transportation of today would be
just like the centralized system of then, only bigger and better. There's been
such a massive movement toward individualization over the past century over
the past century that it seems completely natural. We've gone from semaphore
towers transmitting a few messages over a single line for the central
government, to a few telegraph operators sending and receiving scores of
messages for corporations and individuals, to citizens renting standard-model
telephones from AT&T, to owning one of a bajillion landline phone models and
having cellphones with customized ringtones as a personality item. While
anyone who's seen a horse -- heck, anyone who's ever walked -- is familiar the
concept of a transportation device that moves according to your whims, it
would have taken a great deal of insight to see these racing curiosities
called "automobiles" as a potential return to that model in an age where
increasing progress in transport was synonymous with expensive machines
incorporating more and more advances the only conceivable way to make their
use efficient was to make it centralized. (I've heard the first subway line in
New York changed a three-hour trip into a 10-minute one.)

It's just like how most '50s and '60s sci-fi ('70s, even!) foresaw computers
as becoming ever-bigger, ever larger undertakings. I know Isaac Asimov, in his
1958 (?) short story "The Last Question," had computers initially growing to
hundreds of square miles for a few centuries before taking a sudden leap down
to the size of a family-owned ship, before transitioning again to the
centralized-model of having galactic and universal computers, even though
miniaturization happened along the way. If he made the connection during that
time period that miniaturization would happen continuously rather than
discretely and might cause individual-owned computers to be present for a
larger chunk of history, he made it in one of his hundreds of short-stories I
haven't read.

Of course, it is expected that we will, not too long from now, reach a
fundamental limit on component miniaturization and revert to building larger,
centralized computers, which highlights that we should not conceive of the old
model of centralization as wrong, just wrong for the present time period.

Naturally, people back then conceived of advances solving the aging problem,
but it's interesting electricity was conceived as the vehicle that would
deliver it. They foresaw miracle inventions, and assumed it would come from
electricity, just as we assume future advancements will come from nanotech, or
biotech, or Ajax. It was their buzzword of the day. While it's much more
reasonable that de-aging will come from nanotech or biotech since it's easily
conceivable how those would create a relatively straightforward mechanism for
achieving that, I think we'd do well to remember this example if we start to
point to anything well-known today as the solver of more diverse problems.

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ArcticCelt
Like pointed out elsewhere, I think the interesting thing about this story is
not the prediction of the future but the fact that description looks like some
kind of crazy Nostradamus quatrain predicting 911.

