X-Message-Number: 32256
From: Mark Plus <>
Subject: "It's 2010"
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 12:48:13 -0800

Introductory paragraphs:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/12/27/its_2010?mode=PF

It's 2010


Ready to communicate with dolphins? Take a spin in your flying car? 
Unfortunately, the future doesn't always turn out as predicted.

By Paul Milo  |  December 27, 2009


With just days left in the year, you might be trying out a few cool things you 
expect to use in 2010 - an e-reader, a talking GPS system, mittens wired to run 
your iPod. But it's a fair bet that there are some things you won't have. You 
won't have an electric butler to rouse you on New Year's Day. You won't climb 
into your flying car that morning. You won't be chowing down on your food pill 
for a recuperative breakfast. It's likely to be chilly - miserable, even - 
thanks to the lack of a climate-controlled geodesic dome over your town. And 
while you may be planning a Vermont ski trip for February, you're not going to 
be jetting to a Malaysian beach for the day, or relaxing at an orbiting space 
hotel.


If you had told this to an audience in 1930, or even 1970, they would have been 
shocked. Decades ago, it was virtually taken for granted that average people 
would regularly be traveling to space, robots would be doing all the household 
chores, and our steaks would be in capsule form. Even the most pessimistic folks
would have guessed that by now we would be able to fly from Los Angeles to 
Tokyo in two hours.


The world we're about to enter, in 2010, may be radically more advanced, 
technologically, than a generation ago - just this month, a British firm began 
selling the first prosthetic bionic fingers, for instance - but it is still a 
far cry from the future as it was once imagined. And the reasons why we didn't 
get that future - why we have pocket phones that hold a thousand books, but 
can't buy a simple jetpack no matter how hard we look - suggest some important 
insights about why we predict the things we do and why when we try to predict 
tomorrow, we sometimes get things so laughably wrong.

[the rest at the link]

Mark Plus

 		 	   		  
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