▲ 55 points
back
39 comments
I wonder what people in 67 thought was more unlikely, to have a computer that does all that we see computers do in that movie but in a size that fits in your pocket or a machine that makes your lunch. I bet the food making kitchen looked much more likely, sadly, we got pocket super computers, but still doing our own cooking pretty much the same way we did in 67, except microwave ovens perhaps... (well, I saw there is a kickstarter that plans to change that... but still...)
Except that, it's pretty amazing how they got a lot of these things right (except the notion that people of the future will know to press random buttons to get what they want, UX was not envisioned as an issue back then...)
> I bet the food making kitchen looked much more likely, sadly, we got pocket super computers, but still doing our own cooking pretty much the same way we did in 67, except microwave ovens perhaps...
Actually, microwave ovens were commercially available from 1947 and the first popular home microwave oven was released in 1967.
There's a lot that's gone in more-automatic cooking devices -- both commercial and home -- since then, though the popularity of some of them for the home has been limited by the fact that people with a strong preference for convenience go for the wider array of prepackaged prepared foods available now rather than automated home cooking.
Microwave ovens were absurdly expensive in the early days though, even up until the early 80s.
Yep. My family first got one in 1985, and IIRC it was one of the cheaper models at around $350 (1985 dollars)
$300? That's cheap. If I recall correctly I remember my mom telling me her first microwave was $800 (1982). That is over $2,000 adjusted for inflation.
The one in my kitchen costs $30 or $40 and I bought it a decade ago.
They also assumed the computer would be monolithic and expensive (automatically contacting a repairperson, for example) when they have ended up cheap and disposable.
Terminals have ended up cheap and disposable.
I'm sure Google and Facebook employ a lot of repair people. But mostly no one knows about them.
The food point is interesting. It turns out that over time, it's much easier to downscale bit processing systems than physical machines.
Given Moore's Law, this possibly shouldn't have been a surprise.
I guess at some point we'll have another revolution when it becomes just as easy to downscale, domesticate, and add intelligence to physical machines too.
IoT is not that revolution. Nano and bio might be, but they're a good 25-50 years away.
Google famously ran on commodity hardware. They likely still do (although today's commodity is different than 15-20 years ago). If a piece fails, you just swap in a new piece.
Of course, there are lots of pieces, many interconnections, and many different failure modes. Some may be repairable, but you won't be repairing a HDD platter (if you're even using them), you'll just replace it with a functional piece and (hopefully) recycle the bad piece.
The 1956 movie Forbidden Planet had a computer system with no instrumentality. That means no buttons, levers, not even a voice command - it was telepathic!
Aaaand, it killed them all. Let's keep the omnipotent computers out of my id, please...
Hey, the computer just did what it was told. In fact that guy (whose subconscious told the computer to kill people) first made a robot which would refuse to kill people, even if ordered to. Too bad he didn't backport that feature to the more dangerous one.
Around 1988, I got to see a >$40M Cray 2 in person, and wondered what could be done with all that power thrown at a single user interface. [pats iPhone 5]
Shocking to think the Cray 2 was cutting edge at 1.9 GFLOPS in 1985. The A7 processors in your iphone? Around 75 GFLOPS or so.
Still blows my mind we've come that far, that fast.
That doesn't look very tasty. The crust isn't edged properly, it's really light on the sauce, they used sheet cheese instead of shredded or buffalo mozzarella...the list goes on.
The automatic home cooking is ordering prepackaged (heat and serve) food off of Amazon.com or delivery.
Turns out that mass manufactured food is just as bland as mass market anything else
This is your chance to go on the record. What will the food making kitchen of 2063 look like?
Clearly some dystopian horror. I wonder why they were so optimistic in 67.
I don't think you will make significantly more money with an automated kitchen, as the number of customers you will have isn't really influenced that much by it. But faster computers? In every pocket?
This was a concept film from Philco/Ford:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philco
That's Wink Martindale (US TV game show host) in the husband role in the film. A few years back he was interviewed about the project:
In 1967 we imagined a future in which everything has been automated so that preexisting roles could be carried out as before. Wife will cook, buy clothes; husband will shake his head at all the money wife is spending and be the spending decision maker.
Film is interesting from a technology perspective but also for what it says about society.
It's very interesting to note how futurists always nail the technological changes but ignore or otherwise turn a blind eye to sweeping societal upheavals that are far more difficult to predict. The archetypal patriarchal, white nuclear family is far less common than it was in the 60s, and use cases for appliances are typically genderless. Sure, there are still disproportionately more women in ads for cleaning products than men, but the growth of residential technology isn't centred around the sexist assumption that women are exclusively full-time homemakers as presented in the video. Instead, it's more or less adapted to the relatively egalitarian standards we live by today.
The movie also had the computer telling the boy that he flunked. Back in 1967, they didn't predict that by 1999, every child would get a trophy just for showing up.
Yep, it's so lucky for you that you just happened to have been born into the last generation that was really, truly human, isn't it?
Or rather it didn't predict that in 1999 there would be more provisions for people with learning difficulties and special needs? Don't be so knee-jerk, there's a damned good reason for why we try not to harm kids' self-esteem anymore-- it doesn't work.
I doubt pumping up children's self-esteem without developing their self-worth is going to work either.
If you think that's what's happening, you haven't been paying attention.
The Jetsons is a fantastic example of this, it's literally 60's White Suburban America, but in space!
Here is one from 1972 about the year 2000 (in German, but funny pictures nevertheless):
https://youtu.be/kaGnBNhE2xI
On the menu screen the date was Tuesday, June 2nd. June 2 was a Wednesday in 1999. Seems computers were having date issues even before Y2K had arrived. :)
I find it interesting how so many devices in the video used analog inputs (namely dials). I guess they were easier to mock up though by then I would have expected the keyboard concept to be more common.
Many of the broad concepts are pretty close. Like when I ignore the recommendations of my fitness / diet tracking software. :)
Foreboding music that plays as she scratches out the year: 1999.
Heh, I was just about to comment on that. If it then cut to Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone intro it wouldn't have surprised me in the least.
I was howling at that. I half-expected apes on horses and a half-buried Statue of Liberty in the next scene. They could ride off with the kid whose outfit looked like it was something out of Dune.
"Mike, how about chicken salad?" "Urgh".
some things never change!
Wow scrolled to about minute 11 and saw this great image:
http://i.imgur.com/m3M0pZD.png
I love seeing them make an attempt of what modern technology would look like.
No matter what they do, it still screams 1960's style.
The "household monitor screen" was spot on. This is definitely happening as well as the "central bank computer." Wow, really impressive.
Oh, I made a song based on that movie, a few weeks ago:
Here is another thing the video almost got right- super high pitched falsetto singing. The only problem is the genre that used it was hair metal and pop, not salsa.
Given the predictions of "2001", made at the same time, the ones in this movie aren't particularly insightful.