

Los Angeles in 2013 as Predicted in 1988 - tokenadult
http://documents.latimes.com/la-2013/

======
ghc
I think the real test of a futurist's predictions, in order to determine if we
have in fact arrived in the future, is not to see what came true and what did
not come true.

No, the real test is to see how many predicting things make you stop and say,
"wait, they didn't already have that back then?"

I stopped several times at the 6AM section and realized I thought something
predicted had _always_ worked that way. I would think this only works when the
predictions are from before you were born, but I was certainly alive in 1988
and I can't for the life of me remember a time without smart thermostats that
run on a schedule or coffee makers with simple timers. When you're astonished
that something basic now wasn't already common when the prediction was made
(within reason), that's when you're definitely living in the future, even if
you're still waiting for your flying car.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Actually, they did have a lot of that back then, I'm not sure why the author
thought it was so fantastically futuristic. Coffee makers with timers are old
as dirt, and the heating system is not terribly more advanced than lots of
systems in existence back then.

~~~
ijk
And, very pedantic point, but my current apartment's thermostat doesn't have a
timer, either. "The future is unevenly distributed," I guess.

------
ChuckMcM
Wow, that is great. When people extrapolate out the bad things in their life
to predict a dystopian future, they should read something like this. It
totally reinforces the axiom that you can't know what you can't know. Or more
simply you can't predict innovation. The only person who came even remotely
close was John Brunner [1] whose novel "The Sheep Look Up" might seem obvious
now but was written in _1972_.

I don't know what 25 years from now the world will look like but I am pretty
sure that 99% of us trying to guess will get it wrong.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up>

~~~
epicureanideal
From the Wikipedia description, I think "The Sheep Look Up" also didn't come
remotely close.

"By the end of the book rioting and civil unrest sweep the United States, due
to a combination of poor health, poor sanitation, lack of food, lack of
services, ineffectiveness of services (medical, policing), disillusionment
with government/companies, oppressive government, civil unrest, high incidence
of birth defects (pollution-induced), and other factors; all services
(military, government, private, infrastructure) break down."

The economy outside the valley sucks, but I think we're a long way from that
description.

~~~
derleth
Here's something I've noticed about looking back at predictions of the future:
They're all wrong, but some people are bound and determined to claim some of
them are more-or-less accurate even if it means twisting the author's words
beyond all reason. Therefore, someone who predicted a home news service based
around everyone having a Telex terminal in their home will be hailed as
predicting the Internet.

It's something that always happens. I don't know why.

~~~
hatu
This is why Nostradamus was one of the best at prediction, all of his
predictions were incredibly vague when you look at them objectively and can be
twisted to foretold almost any major world event.

~~~
rmc
Best? Or Worst? :P

A vague, unfailable prediction is terrible.

------
marshray
They seemed to do a lot of inserting of laser discs and paying money for 200
year old music.

 _Ito likes one symphony so much that Bill records the whole piece on a laser
disc, telling the cable company to bill his bank account for the recording,
and gives it to Ito as a gift._

In today's 2013, Bill's cable company is unlikely to allow the burning of
discs, even at a price. If it does, it will be against the license agreement
to give one as a gift. When Ito takes the disc back to Tokyo, it won't work
due to region locking DRM.

Or maybe I'm too cynical. Ito can just pull up the info on the recording and
torrent it himself from TPB.

~~~
davidroberts
Bill hands Ito a cd with a symphony and mp3s for 20 other albums burned on it
and Ito shows him the Spotify play list on his iPhone that already has all of
them on it.

~~~
mikeash
The other day, my daughter brought me a CD off the shelf and asked me to play
it. Well, the CD player was _all the way over there_ , terribly inconvenient,
while my phone with Spotify was in my pocket. CD went back on the shelf, music
played from the cloud.

The future is weird.

~~~
mikecane
>>>The future is weird.

Now she's learned the lesson. Instead of buying you a CD next time, she'll
just give you a list of music you might enjoy to stream.

Wow, the future gets even weirder.

------
haberman
"For instance, Schinella predicts, we may one day be able to drive around Los
Angeles in a "sports-utility" vehicle that can go from being a two-seat sports
car to a beach buggy--thanks to a plug-in module."

Amazing that they can be so right and so wrong at the same time.

~~~
__david__
Along the same lines, I liked the part about the husband trying to phone his
wife and not reaching her (she wasn't at work or at home) but hooks up to his
networked fridge and gets an inventory remotely.

Totally underestimates telecommunications, but grossly overestimates standard
fridge technology. :-) (though my parents _do_ have a Samsung fridge that can
tweet for some reason).

~~~
fbnt
Just out of curiosity, what is it tweeting about? I've always been interested
by what refrigerators thinks.

~~~
libria
"LOL, owner just did this!! <http://goo.gl/ZTlJ8> #stupidhumans"

"@oven you're lookin hot today"

------
kingkawn
One thing they got as exact as you can conceive:

"Population is the primary consideration. Currently 12.6 million, it's
expected to reach 18.3 million in the Los Angeles area by 2010."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles> "The city is the focal point of the
larger Los Angeles–Long Beach–Santa Ana metropolitan statistical area and
Greater Los Angeles Area region, which contain 12,828,837 and nearly 18
million people respectively as of 2010, making it one of the most populous
metropolitan areas in the world[6] and the second largest in the United
States."

------
rvkennedy
Reading through the sci-fi tropes of this article, they could have just gone
with "2013 is the same as 1988 but with networked computers", and saved a
great deal of paper.

25 years is not remotely long enough for a city in the developed world to have
more than a smattering of new buildings, and yet the future LA they came up
with is utterly transfigured into a Syd Mead utopia. I love a bit of Mead, but
Blade Runner was set in 2019, and I'm not sure that our attack ships have even
_reached_ the Shoulder of Orion yet, much less caught fire!

So what will 2038 look like? Pretty much like 2013, but most of the cars will
be electric. But they'll still _look_ like cars, not space-cruisers, and they
won't fly (often).

~~~
aswanson
Right. The only technology that has over-delivered in the last 25 years is
computer hardware (MIPS, networking, and storage). Of course, this has had
incredible nth order effects on society, but the rest of tech (cancer
research, energy, transportation) is not ridiculously beyond 25 years ago.

------
mikecane
Viewing page source reveals:
<http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/612500/la-2013.pdf>

I guess I should also mention what's at the end too:

    
    
        <!--Good with data?-->
        <!--Tired of grinding on the same old apps?-->
        <!--Want to use your skills in defense of truth, justice and the American way?-->
        <!--Email ben.welsh@latimes.com and let me know you're out there.-->

------
petercooper
It seems the least accurate parts of predictions like these are always the
parts that would require billions in infrastructure changes or new
construction. We simply don't build stuff that fast anymore or have the drive
to pay for it. Metro Rail is the only large scale, new infrastructure project
I can think of in LA over that time, but it's still based on old technologies
used in other cities for decades.

~~~
lutusp
> It seems the least accurate parts of predictions like these are always the
> parts that would require billions in infrastructure changes or new
> construction.

There are also the predictions that are never made because they would require
"billions in infrastructure changes or new construction", like the Internet,
which no one predicted.

~~~
polshaw
The difference is that projects like the internet were incremental. At no
single point did it require "Billions in infrastructure"; to start it
basically required just a couple of modems (which aren't fundamentally
complex) and it ran off the existing POTS lines. It could grow organically,
unlike major construction works.

~~~
lutusp
> The difference is that projects like the internet were incremental.

That's the funny part -- one could argue that, because it was incremental,
someone ought to have seen what was coming. But instead it was much like the
early days of television -- the experts thought it was a gimmick, a fad that
people would get tired of, then return to radio and printed matter.

------
vinhboy
Wow. That smart car piece almost describes the Tesla. Especially the whole
part about there being more storage space. It made me think of front cargo
area on the Tesla since there is no engine.

However, they failed to predict that half of America still believes bigger,
louder, and burn more fuel is the way to go... Not to mention actively work to
suppress progress in this area.

~~~
monsterix
I don't understand. Pick up any sci-fi movie, article or a book describing 25
years from now and it will come to life. Doesn't our curiosity about future
work like a catalyst for the mechanism of self-fulfilling prophecy?

25 years seem hardly news worthy. Had it been 100 years ago, well yes, that
could probably be a startling one.

------
robryan
I find it interesting that as recent as 25 years ago they were still
suggesting that we would used advanced technology to print off a newspaper
instead of read it off a screen.

A lot of even older future predictions contained the same thing. It must not
have been until the web come along and got widespread adoption that people got
it.

~~~
InclinedPlane
It comes of people stopping too soon when asking "why?" From the perspective
of 1988 it would seem relatively unreasonable to read an entire newspaper on a
monitor. And one might easily imagine a future where the contents of a
newspaper could be available digitally without re-examining that conclusion. A
monitor then was low-resolution, had poor color reproduction, was stationary
and heavy (being CRT based), and was an expensive shared family resource. Of
course today displays can be cheap, lightweight, thin, portable, and high
resolution, so some of the advantages of print fade away.

It's funny, in 1988 Star Trek: The Next Generation was running, and they had
handheld and tablet computers, but few people in 1988 thought we would have
such things in a mere 25 years instead of in the far future.

~~~
rmc
Star trek missed somethings with thus tablet/pads. Each one seemed to only
store 1 books worth of content. You can sometimes see people in the show using
or handling a dozen tablets/pads. They seemed to miss that storage size would
increase a lot.

~~~
philwelch
If you could have unlimited free iPads, maybe you'd do the same thing. It's a
more intuitive UI paradigm than switching apps!

~~~
tomjen3
But there is a cost -- the characters would often have trouble carrying so
many pads (or that many pads + a cup of coffee, thanks Janeway).

~~~
philwelch
Each padd is just as capable, people can just choose to use more than one at a
time.

------
mynameishere
Eh. Take away everything cool from Blade Runner and that's what actually
happened.

------
johncarpinelli
Air pollution has dropped 50% judging by the chart in this article. Much
better than the LA Times prediction.

[http://www.mnn.com/green-
tech/transportation/stories/study-c...](http://www.mnn.com/green-
tech/transportation/stories/study-cleaner-cars-have-reduced-some-los-angeles-
air-pollution-lev)

I guess they were too optimistic on the home robot. Hopefully, they will start
to become useful in the next few years. I personally would like to see
Microsoft, Google and the other big tech brands launch home robots.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I think home robots are a non-starter. They're seductive ideas because they
duplicate things we already know (servants). But robots and automation don't
work the way humans do, and there's no reason to assume that there will be a
point where that stops being true. It used to be that if you were wealthy you
had servants, or a service, who would clean your clothing by hand, wash your
dishes, cook your meals, etc. Today automation has changed much of that. You
have specialized devices which make washing clothes and dishes far less of a
chore. You also have innovations in the kitchen which make cooking far less of
a chore (everything from electric ovens to stand mixers to refrigeration to a
wide variety of prepared or partially prepared foods and so forth) and you
have a significant increase in the ability to acquire pre-made foods (at
restaurants, fast food places, delivery, frozen foods, etc.)

By the same token I don't imagine that further automation in the home will
necessarily take an anthropomorphic shape. It'll be things we haven't even
thought of yet, tasks we don't appreciate are time sinks or perhaps don't
consider to be automate-able. Look at the roomba, for example.

~~~
visarga
I beg to differ. We already have walking and object handling robots and their
agility is rapidly increasing. In the future we will have to deal with the
aging population. As the quality of life increases and more people get
university education, the rate of birth declines. Then who will take care of
all those old men and women? We need household robots and they will be
invented in Japan if not in some other place. They will be a good expensive
item to mass produce and sell.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Japanese are incredibly xenophobic, it makes more financial sense just to
import housekeepers from the Philippines or Indonesia, but many don't like the
idea of that so they'll develop household robots instead (lucky for us!).
Also, the rise of China set manufacturing robots back by about 10 or 15 years;
we are just now beginning to recover.

~~~
byoung2
_Japanese are incredibly xenophobic, it makes more financial sense just to
import housekeepers from the Philippines or Indonesia, but many don't like the
idea of that so they'll develop household robots instead_

With the housing so limited in places like Tokyo, wouldn't it make more
financial sense to get a robot you can store in a closet than hire a live-in
housekeeper?

~~~
rmc
Sure, people like coming up with reasons why they _aren't_ racist and
xenophobic, and how it's perfectly logical, see?!

------
zobzu
I forgot how pleasing to read were those news articles compared to today's
fast-paced news delivery mechanisms.

------
InclinedPlane
Moderately entertaining. It's interesting how many things they got "right" but
missed the point entirely. For example, somehow the kid has a hand-held
computer but the authors fail to grok the implications. Also, I find it
amusing that the authors imagined live-in robots and yet can think of little
better use to put them to than pouring a bowl of cereal in the morning. I can
fairly confidently say that if there is one chore that doesn't need automating
it is pouring cereal.

It's also interesting how pessimistic the authors were about things like
pollution (smog, ozone layer), traffic, and water supply.

~~~
derleth
> It's also interesting how pessimistic the authors were about things like
> pollution (smog, ozone layer), traffic, and water supply.

I'm always amused at how many people in the 1970s were predicting global
famine to hit the far-future world of a decade ago. Food lines and meat
rationing and everything else in NYC, 2001.

Instead, we got an epidemic of Type II diabetes. So it goes.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Something to consider when reading all the doom'n'gloom climate change stuff
today.

Things change, including change.

~~~
derleth
Except AGW is massively well-supported by the evidence.

[http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-
globa...](http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-global-
warming.htm)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_c...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change)

<http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/>

~~~
maxerickson
The extent of the consequences 50 years from now and our ability to deal with
said consequences are rather unknown.

------
codezero
The smart car blurb is prescient.

Not so much on how Sports Utility vehicles work, but about a sonar shield
(proximity braking) and computer system optimizations, as well as the diverse
range of car types to fit niche needs. Pretty awesome. Obviously this makes
some sense since the people they interviewed were working on the bleeding edge
of car development at the time, but still, most of this stuff didn't manifest
heavily even in the 90s.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I don't think it's as prescient as it seems. Imagine someone making the same
claim that there would be a diverse range of car types to fit niche needs from
the perspective of 1963 to 1988. They'd be just as right. In 1988 people drove
sedans, and compact cars, and 2 door sport-coupes, and luxury cars, and pick-
up trucks, and vans, and mini-vans, and 4-wheel drive vehicles, and muscle
cars, and station wagons, and so forth. The diversity of cars today is hardly
greater than it was in 1988.

Also, things like automatic braking and computer optimization of cars were old
hat by 1988. Electronic fuel injection was introduced in mass market cars in
the '70s and commonplace by the late '80s. And radar based automatic collision
avoidance systems were patented back in the mid '70s.

------
danjones
And I always imagined LA would end up something like this
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116225/>

------
mikecane
>>>Bill marvels at the way the neighborhood sleaze has been systematically
cleaned up, thanks to massive redevelopment among Sunset Boulevard.

Yes. Now Bill can marvel at the Corporate Playpen it's become, just like New
York's Times Square.

Really, is that a future _real_ people want?

~~~
randallsquared
I guess you could redefine people who want that as not "real" people, eh?

~~~
mikecane
Tourists and outsiders love Corporate Times Square. Native New Yorkers loathe
it.

------
bornonmars
Robo-pet anyone? Disruption of the nannies' market.

~~~
mikecane
Everyone has forgotten Nolan Bushnell's Petster?

Hackers Get Cat Of Their Own
[http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-08-14/entertainment/...](http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-08-14/entertainment/8502220963_1_carson-
pirie-scott-cat-pets)

There's not even a Wikipedia entry for it. Shame.

------
tragomaskhalos
Cool - I can have my robo-butler read this article to me while we're
jetpacking our way to the spaceport.

------
delinka
The article page is crashing Chrome on my iPhone 5. Is it just me?

------
_pferreir_
What about "Los Angeles, November 2019"?

------
martinced
This is kiddie stuff compared to Huxley's writings ; )

