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Have you ever been way off on your technical predictions?

dougw
  • Were you one of the many who thought the computer mouse would never catch on because it was slower and less precise than a keyboard?
  • Did you really expect a 2 TB microSD card to be available this year for $4 ?
  • Did you expect digital cameras to completely make film and videotape obsolete?
  • Did you expect an 85 inch UHD TV to be available weighing just 41 kg?
  • Did you ever expect to see PCBs fabricated in low volume for less than $1?
  • Did you ever expect a 3D printer to be available and cost less than $150?
  • Did you ever expect to see a smart phone with a 100 mpixel camera?
  • Did you find GPS to be a mind-altering revolution in navigation?
  • Did you predict that Apple's iphone would unseat all the big phone companies and make Apple the largest company in the world?

Some of these things simply blow my mind.

What technology blows your mind or surprises you?

  1. When do you expect to see dwellings built with automated enclosed landing ports that have security beacons for drone deliveries?
  2. When do you expect driverless aerial Uber drones to be legalized?
  3. When do you expect most people to have an AI as their family physician?
  4. When do you expect the majority of people to spend more time in the metaverse than they do in the real world?
  5. When will you have a digital ID that allows you to vote with your phone? (some places already have this)

Would you bet money that your predictions of any of these 5 dates are accurate?

  • in reply to kmikemoo

    There were also the modified laptop devices that were more like electronic clipboards. I think they were more successful in industrial applications where they had proprietary wireless comms throughout the factory, hot-swap battery stations, along with bespoke software applications to run on them. Some manufacturers tried to bring them into education as "digital slates".

    There was also the attempt at a laptop with rotatable screen that you could use open as a laptop or closed as a clipboard/tablet.

  • I think the better question for me was when haven't I been way off.

    I thought DEC stock had nowhere to go but up after the VAX came out.

    In the 70s, I decided to go to grad school and get into AI (and start investing in it) about 40 years too soon, apparently.

               I also thought we'd be commuting with helicopters by the 2000s saving a lot of real estate for highways

    in the 80s, I thought Lisp would take over the programming universe (invested in Symbolics both in terms of $ for stock and time learning to use their products)

               I also thought management jobs, and particularly government bureaucrats would disappear by this point (i.e. early 21st century) as AI would replace management (it's just resource optimization!).

    I could go on, but it's too depressing.

  • in reply to bradfordmiller

    Yes, DEC's demise was hard hard to understand and to take. In some ways it was unfortunate that they were so far ahead in microcomputer development - they had launched the LSI-11 micro in 1975, 6 years before the IBM PC was launched. They already had much better operating systems in RT-11 and RSX-11 which were fully developed, but had been pricing them to be competitive with mainframe and mini-computer operating systems. When the IBM PC launched with an el-cheapo PC-DOS, nobody understood that DEC had to compete on price regardless of whether they had a better OS.

    If they had sold LSI-11 computers with operating systems at the same price as IBM PCs, the market would have been very interesting and I'm sure they would have eventually put the VAX on a chip. 

  • in reply to beacon_dave

     And now, many folks at my company use a Microsoft Surface because is does something similar.

  • in reply to dougw

    They kind of did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroVAX_78032

    While that was a subset of the VAX instruction set, they did have a whole-hog single board implementation of the VAX as well around the same time:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_V-11

    Had they actually sold these separately from their own systems, or incorporated it into something PC priced (remember the Rainbow?) it likely would have been a different world.

  • in reply to BigG

    In the early 90s there were the likes of the Dauphin 'desktop replacement', Samsung 'pen master', IBM ThinkPad tablet, NCR Safari tablet, GridPad...

    https://oldcomputers.net/ibm-thinkpad-tablet.html

    https://oldcomputers.net/dauphin-dtr-1.html

    https://oldcomputers.net/ncr-3125.html

    https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/18733/Samsung-PenMaster-Tablet/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRiDPad

    The PDAs followed hot on their heels with more success.

  • I've thought about this one a lot.  I'm almost never accurate with my "future predictions".  My Mom, however, was definitely an "early adopter" when it came to tech.  She was on Vontage before VoIP was mainstream.  She made us all Skype when it first came out.  If she was still with us, she would be in the Metaverse - or at least have all the VR stuff needed to make the move.

  • I have never been very good at predictions.  I have work hard to stay far away from the bleeding edge of technology. I have always rallied away from the next great thing, when we have hardly explored or optimized the last great thing. We don't always need what companies are trying to sell us.  Most of these things don't really improve our lives, but rather have us move further down the path away from nature and our values.

  • I remember one of my expectations failing badly, it sort-of fits in with the first project question too. In my early teens I took the guts out of a small transistor radio and fitted them into a bigger box with a bigger speaker. I expected the sound to be better and that it would receive more stations. It wasn't, and it didn't. Two failures in one go.

    I'm expecting the Warp Drive to be a common feature of the 23rd Century, maybe even the 22nd. Developement will be speeded up by a successful rich businessperson with a background in science and engineering who will be fed up with what this planet will have become by then. Make it so.

  • Basically, the only tech I've been right about in the last fifty years was the Raspberry Pi. 
    My KayPro was worthless, my DEC Pro350 would not stay running for more than a day at best, My Apple IIc was too expensive and severely underpowered. My Amiga 2000 cost too much for many people to buy and Commodore choked on itself. The "best" PCs I bought into were eMachines, which were solid and cheap, but they went away, probably because of marketing issues.