Actually, it rather fails to hold, in large part because the terminology has so changed in the intervening decades.
In 1964, the idea that computers would largely be small devices that sit on your disk or even in your pocket was unimaginable. The microcomputer--the forerunner of today's computers--wouldn't be developed for another decade. The term computer back then meant the big room-filling mainframes, and it would certainly have been infeasible that home users could own those computers.
When you look at the context of the article, it's clearly describing the future where you have access to time-shared resources on a large, central computer. On-line and interactive are meant as a reference in contrast to batch systems: in the days of punch cards, you typically operated by submitting your punch cards to be run and waiting for the results to come back--sometimes hours.
In effect, to use more modern terminology, the article is predicting:
"By 2000, you'll be able to purchase from Comcast (or other friendly telco) access to a computer that runs a suite of intelligent expert systems that will drive several professions out of business."
That prediction is more wrong than it is right:
1. You don't buy access to a computer, you own one outright.
2. Most of the intelligent expert systems it predicts don't exist.
3. Most of the professions purported to be obsolete are not. Travel planner is about the only counterexample I can think of, but that's not because computers are doing the planning. I'm not even sure if the 2000 deadline was met for that one.
4. The closest service to what it predicts would exist is Watson. Which debuted in 2011, wasn't commercially available until 2013, and certainly isn't commonplace or even easily accessible even to corporate users.
About the only thing it got right was that computers would move from batch mode to interactive mode. The expert system model has completely failed--note this article would have been written before automatic machine translation of natural languages was declared a failure (and it still is, 50 years later). Even with the rise of Big Data, most of the goals of computers in that article still seem difficult or impossible to achieve. I personally believe that Big Data is going to lead to the fourth (fifth? I've lost track) big AI crash. Impressive, really, that people still have high hopes for AI when it has failed to live up to those promises for over 60 years.
Not sure if it is as wrong as it sounds. In many ways the computing world today isn't that different. We sit at home with fairly simple terminals like iPads or laptops while computers filling entire rooms at google, facebook etc are performing a large part of our calculations. The web is in a way just an evolved or advance form of teletyper terminal that allows us to connect to more powerful clusters of computers offering us different services.
In 1964, the idea that computers would largely be small devices that sit on your disk or even in your pocket was unimaginable. The microcomputer--the forerunner of today's computers--wouldn't be developed for another decade. The term computer back then meant the big room-filling mainframes, and it would certainly have been infeasible that home users could own those computers.
When you look at the context of the article, it's clearly describing the future where you have access to time-shared resources on a large, central computer. On-line and interactive are meant as a reference in contrast to batch systems: in the days of punch cards, you typically operated by submitting your punch cards to be run and waiting for the results to come back--sometimes hours.
In effect, to use more modern terminology, the article is predicting: "By 2000, you'll be able to purchase from Comcast (or other friendly telco) access to a computer that runs a suite of intelligent expert systems that will drive several professions out of business."
That prediction is more wrong than it is right: 1. You don't buy access to a computer, you own one outright. 2. Most of the intelligent expert systems it predicts don't exist. 3. Most of the professions purported to be obsolete are not. Travel planner is about the only counterexample I can think of, but that's not because computers are doing the planning. I'm not even sure if the 2000 deadline was met for that one. 4. The closest service to what it predicts would exist is Watson. Which debuted in 2011, wasn't commercially available until 2013, and certainly isn't commonplace or even easily accessible even to corporate users.
About the only thing it got right was that computers would move from batch mode to interactive mode. The expert system model has completely failed--note this article would have been written before automatic machine translation of natural languages was declared a failure (and it still is, 50 years later). Even with the rise of Big Data, most of the goals of computers in that article still seem difficult or impossible to achieve. I personally believe that Big Data is going to lead to the fourth (fifth? I've lost track) big AI crash. Impressive, really, that people still have high hopes for AI when it has failed to live up to those promises for over 60 years.