The Future is Now, Science Man!

Reason recently linked to this page that posts a column from 1950 by the science editor of the New York Times. He speculates about what life will be like for Americans in the year 2000. Some of his predictions are a bit… off:

This Dobson house is not as highly mechanized as you may suppose, chiefly because of the progress made by the synthetic chemists. There are no dish washing machines, for example, because dishes are thrown away after they have been used once, or rather put into a sink where they are dissolved by superheated water….

When Jane Dobson cleans house she simply turns the hose on everything. Why not? Furniture (upholstery included), rugs, draperies, unscratchable floors — all are made of synthetic fabric or waterproof plastic….

Cooking as an art is only a memory in the minds of old people. A few die-hards still broil a chicken or roast a leg of lamb, but the experts have developed ways of deep-freezing partially baked cuts of meat. Even soup and milk are delivered in the form of frozen bricks….

…[S]torms are more or less under control. It is easy enough to spot a budding hurricane in the doldrums off the coast of Africa. Before it has a chance to gather much strength and speed as it travels westward toward Florida, oil is spread over the sea and ignited. There is an updraft. Air from the surrounding region, which includes the developing hurricane, rushes in to fill the void. The rising air condenses so that some of the water in the whirling mass falls as rain.

On the other hand, he got pretty close on a couple other predictions, such as this one:

Of course the Dobsons have a television set. But it is connected with the telephones as well as with the radio receiver, so that when Joe Dobson and a friend in a distant city talk over the telephone they also see each other. Businessmen have television conferences. Each man is surrounded by half a dozen television screens on which he sees those taking part in the discussion. Documents are held up for examination; samples of goods are displayed. In fact, Jane Dobson does much of her shopping by television. Department stores obligingly hold up for her inspection bolts of fabric or show her new styles of clothing.

And this one isn’t too far off, either:

Fast jet and rocket-propelled mail planes made it so hard for telegraph companies all over the world to compete with the postal service that dormant facsimile-transmission systems had to be revived. It takes no more than a minute to transmit and receive in facsimile a five-page letter on paper of the usual business size. Cost? Five cents. In Tottenville the clerks in telegraph offices no longer print out illegible words. Everything is transmitted by phototelegraphy exactly as it is written—illegible spelling, blots, smudges and all.

My predictions for the year 2050 are as follows, in no particular order:

1. A bottle of Coke at a convenience store will cost around $5.00. Average starting salary for a recent college graduate will be well into six-digit figures. New York, San Francisco, and possibly even Seattle and Boston will have become too expensive for everyone except the fairly wealthy or people who have inherited their homes. We will still use cash, but pennies will have been phased out of currency, and we’ll be talking about doing the same with nickels and maybe dimes.
2. The South’s population will exceed the Northeast’s. This will be due partly to two kinds of economic refugees: those coming from Mexico to look for jobs (and finding them), and those fleeing the prohibitive cost of living on the two coasts. However, the influx of Mexicans into the U. S. will have greatly reduced as the Mexican economy improves.
3. The entertainment industry will be completely transformed. The major industry players (movie studios, television networks, and recording studios) will continue to try—and fail—to control user-generated content and file sharing. They are already worried about profitability in the digital age, but there is just too much demand for entertainment for me to believe there’s no profit potential. Many of them (especially record labels) will play an even larger role at signaling quality for savvy consumers than they do today. The single will increase in importance while the album will decrease; however, there will be new ways to generate revenue through music sales, perhaps by bundling a physical copy of an album with features like unique cover art. The transformed market will make it easier for local bands to enlarge their exposure, but will make it harder for musicians to become super-rich superstars. More of their wealth will come from playing concerts, which will likely look (and sound) a lot different than they do today. FM radio will continue to suck, but satellite and internet-based broadcasts will be widely available and used.
4. There will be more people reading books in electronic form as readers improve, but the majority of books will still be published and read as hard copies.
5. There will not have been a successful manned mission to any other planet. The major players in space will be the U.S. and China, and to a lesser extent, the E. U. Russia will focus its efforts elsewhere. We will return to the moon, and there will be talk of private firms developing lunar-based industrial ventures (such as mining), but no one will seriously think about living anywhere but Earth. Space tourism will be a small industry, and people will come up with a lot more fun things to do up there over a weekend than float around.
6. There will be a playoff system for Div. I college football, although it will take a long time to develop it. It will use many of the bowls as the preliminary games. The SEC will continue to dominate, and at least four of its teams will have won national championships, some of them multiple times. The U.S. will become more competitive in soccer and will make it to the World Cup finals. We will also win a few more gold medals in Olympic basketball, but not many more than that. Baseball will continue to be as exciting as watching paint dry. Los Angeles will get an NFL franchise. Birmingham will not.
7. Fewer gifted students will go to college, but slightly more people in the lower parts of the intelligence distribution will. As a result, the value of a college degree will be devalued, giving an incentive for many to pursue graduate degrees.
8. We will still use cars, but they will not fly. They will be cleaner and quieter, however. A number of cities will regret having placed so much faith in commuter rail, although few people in power will admit it publicly. Still, traffic congestion will be worse in many places, even though lots more people will be telecommuting. There will still be plenty of oil, but we will still not have an economical alternative energy source for transportation.
9. The earth’s average surface temperature will be higher, but we won’t mind it too much.
10. The Koreas will reunite, and they’ll do it peacefully. Cuba will become a democracy, also peacefully. The U.S. will not be in Iraq, because Iraq will not exist—it will split into two or three states, and it won’t occur without strife. Ultimately, Turkey will accept a Kurdish state due to a combination of pressure and incentives from the E.U. Parts of Africa will show political and economic improvement, but the continent as a whole will be far behind the rest of the world.
11. Everything will be largely different from what we imagined, and largely for the better.