The Future! - circa 1993

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Tom Selleck did the voice-over for a series of AT&T ads predicting...well, 2011, pretty much.

Except that in several cases they're rather conservative - tablets do a little better than "faxing."

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TZb0avfQme8[/yt]

 

[Robert Maxwell]

To be fair, everyone seemed to think faxing would become ubiquitous. I always fucking hated it and I'm glad it died. Though what they're calling a "fax" in that video is more like sending email from an iPad, so close enough.

 

[Campe]

I work in legal. Unfortunately, faxing is not dead.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

But it has been marginalized and "normal people" don't really use it. Everyone sends email now.

 

[Squiggy]

With the exception of Jenna Elfman using the pay phone, it all looks eerily spot on.

Thank you Tom Selleck for predicting the future.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

One can nitpick - most of us don't unlock doors by voice-recognition...but that may almost be laid to vagaries of the marketplace rather than what's technologically feasible at this point. An awful lot of people do unlock their car doors from thirty feet away.

The one that strikes me as most dead-on is the little matter of purchasing tickets at at an ATM. That's exactly what's offered at my local multiplex - of course, usually I just buy the tickets online and pick them up at the dedicated kiosk already paid for, but if I want to get money out for popcorn sometimes I stand in the ATM line to do both.

With the exception of Jenna Elfman using the pay phone, it all looks eerily spot on.

They didn't quite predict the death of the pay phone, did they? Probably not in AT&T's interest at the time. That said, with 4G can't I tuck someone in via Skype video calling or something? I don't know, since I'm still stuck (sob) at 3G...troglodyte that I am.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Yeah, they were pretty close on a lot of that, even if they didn't quite get the terminology or exact mechanism right.

Personally, I'm glad videophones never took off. There is no way I want to have to look at someone every time I use the phone. I'll Skype when I feel like it, that's it.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

In his introduction to the twentieth anniversary edition of Neuromancer, Gibson chided himself for completely failing to see the ubiquity of cell phones on the horizon. A pivotal early sequence in the novel has the protagonist searching desperately for a pay phone installation.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Yeah, I think everybody missed the boat on that one. Back when cell phones were bulky and irritating to use I was sure they would never take off. It was once they really built out the digital networks and got them to be small and affordable that they really started to spread like wildfire.

I think most of us just expected big telecom to smother that technology in the cradle.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

That's actually some good predictive skill there.

I mean, I saw all of the following:

eReaders (though that looked like Adobe Digital Editions), GPS, the iPad, EZPass, e-ticket kiosks, Skype (though they missed the fact that it would be on your computer and that phone booths would die off), voice recognition (though I'm thinking more of Dragon software), smart cards (though in that particular instance, we'd probably use a flash drive), GoToMeeting, DVR, and online classes.

Not ONE technology that did not come to pass. That's way better than most futurists do.

 

[B.J.]

I remember those commercials! Great, now I'm feeling old.

 

[I Grok Spock]

^Same here. I've always remembered the on-demand sci-fi movie one, and I was thinking of that not too long ago when I was scrolling through my Netflix queue on my Sony Bravia.

 

[Psion]

In his introduction to the twentieth anniversary edition of Neuromancer, Gibson chided himself for completely failing to see the ubiquity of cell phones on the horizon. A pivotal early sequence in the novel has the protagonist searching desperately for a pay phone installation.

I think Isaac Asimov pointed out that lots of futurists/science fiction writers predicted wide-spread use of television. And lots predicted men landing on the moon. But no one predicted watching men land on the moon on television!

 

[Samurai8472]

Buying concert/movie tickets on the spot was correct.

 

[RoJoHen]

But it has been marginalized and "normal people" don't really use it. Everyone sends email now.

Eh, not quite. Faxing is still a pretty convenient way to send/receive certain kinds of documents.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

But it has been marginalized and "normal people" don't really use it. Everyone sends email now.

Eh, not quite. Faxing is still a pretty convenient way to send/receive certain kinds of documents.

But do most people do it daily? No. It has a few very specific uses where it's the right tool for the job. "Faxing" as shown in the commercial is basically just email. Were it not for email perhaps (electronic?) faxing would've taken off for everyday, casual use.

 

[RoJoHen]

I think I should get a fax pal. It's like a pen pal, but we just fax each other all day.

 

[David cgc]

The electronic toll booths there looked so, so much cooler than the real thing I drive through. Though I would kick a puppy if I had to swipe my credit card in my dash before I went through every one. I suppose that was probably more to communicate the message than because they actually thought such an enormous ergonomic fail would come to pass.

And the video conferencing into a University class worked way better than the real thing. They'll work the kinks out soon enough, but it's funny how you watch that sort of Star Trek stuff and you don't think about all the little practical things, like volume calibration, that would have to be perfected to make them so slick.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

In his introduction to the twentieth anniversary edition of Neuromancer, Gibson chided himself for completely failing to see the ubiquity of cell phones on the horizon. A pivotal early sequence in the novel has the protagonist searching desperately for a pay phone installation.

I think Isaac Asimov pointed out that lots of futurists/science fiction writers predicted wide-spread use of television. And lots predicted men landing on the moon. But no one predicted watching men land on the moon on television!

Yeah, I remember that.

But it has been marginalized and "normal people" don't really use it. Everyone sends email now.

Eh, not quite. Faxing is still a pretty convenient way to send/receive certain kinds of documents.

Yeah, I fax something or another for work-related reasons maybe about once a month...but the gadget had its moment as an almost mass-technology and was overrun by other avenues of communication. There are still professional uses for pocket pagers too, aren't there? And I discovered on a film shoot that walkie-talkies are a lot more reliable in certain situations than cell phones.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Yeah, they were pretty close on a lot of that, even if they didn't quite get the terminology or exact mechanism right.

Personally, I'm glad videophones never took off. There is no way I want to have to look at someone every time I use the phone. I'll Skype when I feel like it, that's it.

Videophones are a sci-fi conceit that isn't really based on any real need in the market or technology. They've been feasible for decades, but the market doesn't exist because nobody has any particular desire or need to sit there and stare at an image on a video screen while they're talking to them. If you WANT to see who you're talking to, you talk face to face anyway; if you just want to exchange information conveniently without having to arrange a meeting, most people would prefer to text each other.

Here's a question: how come nobody predicted the municipal/social menace that is texting while driving? Could it be that science fiction writers the world over never imagined that their fellow human beings could possibly be that stupid?