Revisiting The Future
Nothing like going back to an old theme to see if it has anything I hadn't discovered the first (or second, or third) time.
In this Previous Commentary I did a look through of the 1981 Book of Predictions to see where we had been in the turn of the 21st Century as opposed to how things looked to happen back then.
Today I found the library's copy to look at predictions for 2010. What I saw in those pages:
* Nationalist "identities" being eroded by the emerging globalized culture. The cyberati/globalati find new ways to define themselves beyond where they live or local social class (or political affiliation).
* Terrorists obtain a nuclear warhead and use it on a major city. The death toll is in the millions and it prompts a global ban on weapons of mass destruction.
* Fusion energy becomes safe and reliable enough for companies to build large-scale fusion powerplants. The order of magnitude of the grid's capacity must be raised by a factor of twenty to thirty to make full use of the advance.
* Artificial Intelligence technology finds its "killer application" and is advanced to the point where AI systems frequently pass Turing Tests.
* The first segment of the first long-term space habitat is launched into orbit. Suborbital spaceflights become available for wealthy space tourists.
* Regional Economic Unions between Third-World nations proliferate as they are seen as a way out of the "continental poverty cycle". Dozens of national currencies get phased out world-wide in favor of regional ones. Where regions come together, some nations adopt two or more as official currencies as a way to reinforce global trading through their territory.
* The Kingdom of Jordan and the Palestinian Authority are merged as the end result of a constitutional crisis in Jordan. The new nation is ceded land from Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq, and this makes a political solution with the State of Israel possible.
* "Superstructures"--massive truss-like building systems--will become the next trend in urban construction.
While there is a lot more in the book, I think more than half of it is "obsolete" because it was either predicted to happen in the years between publication and 2000, or has come to pass/been disproven by events of recent history. And much of the other material is too trivial or silly to bother with.
Just the same, I think I'm having a craving for Convenience Store Pie about now.
FP
In this Previous Commentary I did a look through of the 1981 Book of Predictions to see where we had been in the turn of the 21st Century as opposed to how things looked to happen back then.
Today I found the library's copy to look at predictions for 2010. What I saw in those pages:
* Nationalist "identities" being eroded by the emerging globalized culture. The cyberati/globalati find new ways to define themselves beyond where they live or local social class (or political affiliation).
* Terrorists obtain a nuclear warhead and use it on a major city. The death toll is in the millions and it prompts a global ban on weapons of mass destruction.
* Fusion energy becomes safe and reliable enough for companies to build large-scale fusion powerplants. The order of magnitude of the grid's capacity must be raised by a factor of twenty to thirty to make full use of the advance.
* Artificial Intelligence technology finds its "killer application" and is advanced to the point where AI systems frequently pass Turing Tests.
* The first segment of the first long-term space habitat is launched into orbit. Suborbital spaceflights become available for wealthy space tourists.
* Regional Economic Unions between Third-World nations proliferate as they are seen as a way out of the "continental poverty cycle". Dozens of national currencies get phased out world-wide in favor of regional ones. Where regions come together, some nations adopt two or more as official currencies as a way to reinforce global trading through their territory.
* The Kingdom of Jordan and the Palestinian Authority are merged as the end result of a constitutional crisis in Jordan. The new nation is ceded land from Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq, and this makes a political solution with the State of Israel possible.
* "Superstructures"--massive truss-like building systems--will become the next trend in urban construction.
While there is a lot more in the book, I think more than half of it is "obsolete" because it was either predicted to happen in the years between publication and 2000, or has come to pass/been disproven by events of recent history. And much of the other material is too trivial or silly to bother with.
Just the same, I think I'm having a craving for Convenience Store Pie about now.
FP