Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Past Predictions of the Future Every Decade" video.

  1. The way I see it, most of those predictions from, say, the 1950s/1960s or so, were predicated on having large mounts of power available--personal jet packs, holidays on the Moon and so on. Where was this power going to come from? Obviously, nuclear energy. But we took a wrong turn on that, concentrating on nuclear reactors that could produce material for nuclear bombs and required complex safety systems, instead of investing in designs (e.g. thorium-based) that were primarily peaceful and inherently safer. And so, the promised power that was “too cheap to meter” never eventuated. What we got instead was improvements in technologies for handling information--which was something that hardly anybody predicted (except perhaps Vannevar Bush). Hence the whole range of computer-centric technologies, with lots of processing power, large amounts of storage, and also fast transmission of information around the world. These did not take much power to run. But as the computers get more and more powerful, their power requirements are also increasing. Already, the single largest expense in running a data centre is not the high-tech hardware, but the electricity bill. And so we are approaching the power limit that we previously dodged, and we will have to deal with it at some point.
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  2. Actually the “we’re all gonna die” started in 1963 with Dr Strangelove . Stanley Kubrick invented the first black comedy about nuclear war, and techno-optimism has never been the same since.
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  3. Occasionally, you do see concepts for futuristic clothing. Basically, the productions that had fashion designers involved looked pretty different from the ones that didn’t. One early example is the movie Things To Come from 1936. That has some characters wearing clothing styles that we would now recognize as stereotypically futuristic. Maybe that’s where that style originated ... For another example, some of us were fans from childhood of the TV series UFO , created by Gerry & Sylvia Anderson back in 1969/1970. Sylvia was responsible for the costumes, and as a result, the show looked like nothing else, before or since.
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  4. And yet, at the same time, the seeds of the future always lie in the present, and the past.
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  5. 8:18 Looks like somebody doesn’t understand how celsius/fahrenheit temperature conversions work. A change of 3°C is equivalent to 5.4°F, not 37.4°F!
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