Time magazine's cover story this week is a predictive look at how "the way Americans work" is going to change over the next 10 years. "Throw away the briefcase: you're not going to the office," it proclaims. "There's no longer a ladder, and you may never get to retire, but there's a world of opportunity if you figure out a new path." One essay within the piece even uses the virtual world online game "World of Warcraft" as a model for how intensely competitive company work teams will operate, 10 years from now.
First. Any time I read or hear anybody saying "this is how future events are going to play out," I instinctively backpeddle. Remember the new economy that wasn't ever going to end? wow gold Or the new world order of peace that was in ascendance ... right up until September 11, 2001, when suddenly it wasn't, anymore? Budget surpluses? Housing as a great and booming investment?
A few weeks ago, I found an old, hardcover book in an antique store in Foster, Rhode Island. It's a science book called Astronomy, published as part of the "Whitman World Library" in 1963, and I intend to keep it on my shelf as an entertaining, cautionary tale for anyone who's tempted to be too absolute about how the future will unfold. In a quick flip-read of the book, I found such predictive gems as: "the first man-made objects to explore the Moon will undoubtedly be automated tanks, radio-controlled from Earth or from an intermediate space station," and "rocket experts believe that [space] stations will orbit Earth in great numbers in a few years." The illustrations are a hoot.
By 1963, mind you, NASA had been in business for 5 years, and the Agency's Mercury/Geminii/Apollo program had been underway for at least two. We would actually land a man on the Moon a mere 6 years later. So these predictions weren't made years ahead of the fact, or in an informational vacuum.
And, to be fair, the astronomy book didn't get everything wrong. Eventually, we did send little robot "tanks" to explore another planetary body. It just wasn't the moon, and it wasn't until 1996. wow gold But "postal rockets" to provide communication between multiple space stations and Earth?" Yikes.
The point is, enthusiastic futurists and technology evangelists have been predicting revolutionary changes in our lives for the better part of the past century. And without question, our lives have changed. But rarely as quickly, or completely, or exactly in the ways, the predictions envisioned.
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