how hard do you think it is to predict the future? science fiction authors for the most part have done a remarkable job of it and for the most part, have hit the button right on the money. everyone from orwell to verne, swift to shelley, huxley to clarke, roddenberry to asimov are in a league all on their own and they recieve almost no credit when a new technology is developed which could have been very easily have been inspired by them. when they wrote the literature that they did, people thought they were fools to begin with and for having written the nonsense they did, they were considered even bigger fools.
for example, jules verne in 1865 wrote from the earth to the moon. read that date again if you missed it the first time. 1865! just the notion would have sounded prepostorous. there was not even a concept of an airplane back then.
five years later he came up with 20,000 leagues under the sea. then again around the world in 80 days two years later. all these feats are easily accomplished by common technology today.
similarly, orwellian societies are propping up everywhere (not necessarily on a large government level scale - with some exceptions - but definitely in corporate environments and other forms of institutions) it seems and with orwell, aldous huxley hit the nail as well in thinking of a brave new world.
roddenberry’s concepts and technologies are so commonplace today that i won’t even bother getting into them. the idea of a computer everywhere with monitors, two way wireless communication, floppy disks, space travel itself, shuttlecrafts, speech recognition etc. were far beyond their time.
which is why, knowing all of this, it boggles the mind that people, the same people who we consider our technological heroes and innovators of today would say things like this. they should just sit and read or watch sci-fi all day long.
‘I think there is a world market for maybe five computers’ - Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943
‘While a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 10000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers of the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons.’ - Popular mechanics, 1949
‘I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year’ - Editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957
‘But what… is it good for?’ - Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems division of IBM, commenting on the microchip, 1968
‘There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in the home’ - Ken Olson, Present, Chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977
‘640K should be enough for anybody’ - Bill Gates, 1981
Now, who can tell me what’s happening in the year 2080?
September 22nd, 2005 by 
Abbas Halai
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