Dr. David Stork on Clarke & Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey

Stork opines that, despite herculean effort at researching up and coming technological innovations, the screenwriters don't do very well predicting the near future in terms of advancement of basic technologies. e.g., computers got smaller, not larger. AI is harder than putting a man on Mars, etc. The message here is that it is damn hard to predict the future.

Indeed, there is a long history of both optimistic and fatalist visions of the future which now appear pie-eyed, cynical or just plain quaint. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (pie-eyed) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (cynical) are important 19th and 20th century examples, respectively, that come to very different conclusions about the fate of humanity. Mid-20th-century World's Fairs promised bubble cars and robot servants. Disneyland offered utopian visions of Tomorrowland and the General Electric Carousel of Progress.

There also seems to be a trend for the inventors of new technologies to assume their creations will be an conduit to world peace, etc. The Wright Brothers are an interesting and ironic example. The improvement of their original inventions was subsidized by the US Army.

In the end, none of this surprises me. The activity of prognostication is, I think, by some compelling and universal force of human instinct, an act of hyperbole. We are impulsed to exaggerate future consequences. This is a good thing...we humans tend to think and dream big.