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Bob Rhubart's Blog | January 7, 2008  11:23 AM | Comments (0)

Reading Joe McKendrick's post, An uncanny 1960s view of the future World Wide Web, I was reminded yet again of a book that continues to pop up as a point of reference when I ponder how the world has changed since I was a teenage SciFi fan.

Joe's post focuses on a 1967 Philco-Ford promotional video that presents an uncannily prescient view of e-commerce.

The book in question is Gerard K. O'Neill's 1981 work 2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future. The book offers a reasoned prediction, based on technology available in 1981, of life a hundred years in the future.  O'Neill devotes the first half of the book to an analysis of the future as depicted in classic science fiction novels. O'Neill found that SciFi authors typically underestimated technological change, and overestimated sociological change.

Of course, a work of speculative fiction and an corporate promotional video have different objectives, which offers some explanation of why this video misses the mark somewhat on both the technological and sociological aspects of what is now a future nearly a decade old. As Joe observes:

Only a few missed predictions stand out — as noted . . . women were still relegated to roles as homemakers. And the home computer equipment and monitors were large and clunky looking — laptops and handheld devices were not foreseen. Online shopping products were displayed in analog video mode.
And, the end users in the video were not having their online experience ruined by spam, spyware and viruses. That stuff wasn’t even a gleam in evildoers’ eyes in 1967.

Things have changed. Things will continue to change. How will today's corporate promo videos hold up forty years from now?  What will the Web look like in 2048? Any guesses?

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