Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
I just finished reading "In the Year 2889," one of Jules Verne's lesser-known works (actually co-written with his son, Michel). It's short, but if you like old visions of the future, it's great. Here is Verne's prediction of a news podcast that could be listened to on first release or downloaded (though Verne doesn't use that word) to a "phonograph" for later listening.
Instead of being printed, the Earth Chronicle is every morning spoken to subscribers, who, in interesting conversations with reporters, statesmen, and scientists, learn the news of the day. Furthermore, each subscriber owns a phonograph, and to this instrument he leaves the task of gathering the news whenever he happens not to be in a mood to listen directly himself. As for purchasers of single copies, they can at a very trifling cost learn all that is in the paper of the day at any of the innumerable phonographs set up nearly everywhere.
And here's Verne on the videophone; or as he called it, the phonotelephote.
The first thing Mr. Smith does is activate his phonotelephote, the wires of which communicate with his Paris mansion. The telephote! Here is another great triumph of modern science. The transmission of speech is an old story; the transmission of images by means of sensitive mirrors connected by wires is a thing but of yesterday. A valuable invention indeed; Mr. Smith this morning is full of blessings for the inventor, when by its aid he is able distinctly to see his wife despite her great distance.
Okay, it's your turn. What technologies will be commonplace 1,000 years from now?
- Comment (23)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (5)
- Pages:
- 1
- 2
Comments:
Jun '10
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
Adam Freedman
Okay, it's your turn. What technologies will be commonplace 1,000 years from now? · · 1 minute ago
Stone tools, warning grunts, and fire.
Aug '10
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
Adam Freedman
Okay, it's your turn. What technologies will be commonplace 1,000 years from now?
Have-a-hart(tm) non-lethal human traps.
May '11
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
Replication, need a new "X" replicate one from the atoms up.
Teleportation, between large centers and off planet for sure.
Space Elevator, this is the high-speed highway out of our gravity well
Limitless energy sources, a small power pack in a device would last several lifetimes.
Mustangs, Ford comes out with a retro 2864 designed by a cloned Carroll Shelby 2000 Hp and gets 400 mpg.
Feb '12
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
Sorry, but I can't resist.
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pill you took today
In the year 4545
Ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing chew
Nobody's gonna look at you
In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got not nothing to do
Some machine is doing that for you
In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube
In the year 7510
If God's a-comin' he ought to make it by then
Maybe he'll look around himself and say
Guess it's time for the Judgement day
In the year 8510
God is gonna shake his mighty head
He'll either say I'm pleased where man has been
Or tear it down and start again
Feb '12
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
In the year 9595
I'm kinda wondering if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing
Now it's been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man's reign is through
But through the eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it's only yesterday
Oct '10
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
MindFlash/5/27/3012: MegaMedia giant Ricochet.com has just announced the release of a new history pill that may soon replace the multi-injection history series offered by their only serious media rival, Reason.com. This new SEP (Synapse-Embedded-Protein) supplement includes a detailed look at Leftists political theory and (no surprise here) Ricochet's own rather prominent role in discrediting the movement in the early years of the previous millennium.
May '10
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
Mel Foil
Adam Freedman
Okay, it's your turn. What technologies will be commonplace 1,000 years from now?
Stone tools, warning grunts, and fire.
Agreed. But assuming otherwise...
Aesthetic implants and prosthetics. Like teenagers today get tattoos and piercings, future teenagers will get tails, wings, scales, and Mr Gadget-style tools.
Human beings will acquire new senses through sensory implants. Soldiers and many professionals will regularly acquire ocular implants which augment normal vision with infrared and other kinds of vision. Others will acquire electroreceptors or olfactory enhancements.
Memories will be accessible by computers and stored on hard drives. They will be shared (and stolen) with mild side effects for some and severe side effects for others. The latter will occur due to inextricable traces of the source's self conflicting with one's own sense of self. Pseudo-theologies will arise to say human beings are destined to be psychologically united into a single organism via such technology.
TVs and monitors will be replaced by display technologies which cover entire walls, floors and ceilings. Many buildings will substitute virtual scenery for windows. These displays will be interactive.
Technologies in general will become more interactive and interdependent.
Apr '11
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
I had a thought about 2525 when I saw this post. randykat did not disappoint. hehehe.
It's always interesting seeing what future predictions say when they are as old as the one mentioned here. I remember this phonograph vision of the future being touted as his forecasting of FAX machines. Now, it sounds more like podcasts, but its still the same prediction. What is fascinating about this is the biases of the writer and the readers. At some point in the future, someone will bring up his book again and compare it to some other technology ... perhaps electronic paper or inter-eye-video or something else we don't even have a clue is coming.
What I'm interested in is what doesn't change. The core functionality need that is common between all people. The one here is the need to learn and share information about what is going on outside of the person's immediate experience. These needs are roadmaps to products and services that have been created, are created and will be created in the future. I'm lucky enough to be working on one now.
Have a great weekend and enjoy your phonographs.
Jun '11
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
Some pol will promise us "hope and change" and we'll fall for.it again.
Oct '10
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
My guess (which I've consistently held for the last 20 years) is there will be a bifurcation sometime in the next 100 to 150 years. On one path, human civilisation and technological progress continues to the point where we achieve atomic-precision mass-production of anything which can be made of atoms (molecular nanotechnology) and human-level artificial intelligence capable of designing subsequent generations of intelligent entities. If this happens, we'll pass through the kind of singularity Ray Kurzweil has described, and just like a mathematical singularity, it is impossible for beings such as ourselves to forecast beyond that point. It's like asking a yeast cell to imagine what motivated Beethoven to compose the Ninth Symphony.
If we don't make it to the singularity, I'll concur with Mel Foil's “Stone tools, warning grunts, and fire”. Well, maybe not the fire—that may be deemed insufficiently “green”.
This is assuming we aren't living in a simulation, which a number of nagging little discrepancies in physics lead me to conclude is as likely as not.
Edited on May 27, 2012 at 10:07pmNov '11
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
Yeah. I consider 1,000 years in the future too far to predict.
May '10
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
Aaron Miller
Aesthetic implants and prosthetics. Like teenagers today get tattoos and piercings, future teenagers will get tails, wings, scales, and Mr Gadget-style tools.
That's Inspector Gadget, to you, pal.
To expand on your ocular implants, I think people will live with significantly augmented reality given to them by these visual implants along with direct retinal projection. Most things they see will be identified by a computer and then enhanced with virtual labels containing with all kinds of relevant information.
For example, you walk down the street and each person you see will have a little label above him with information from his Facekindle account (as "kindle" will replace "book").
Each restaurant you see will have a small list of menu highlights along with user reviews from something like Yelp.com.
Subway stations will have a bubble showing the next couple trains in the timetable as well as system status. (You'll be able to purchase a ticket by voice command or maybe by just thinking about it.)
Of course, you'll be able to use these implants to sit around all day and watch Youtube videos, if you want. On the weekends.
Mar '11
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
I don't even know what's for supper -- and I'm making it.
Aaron Miller
Aesthetic implants and prosthetics. Like teenagers today get tattoos and piercings, future teenagers will get tails, wings, scales, and Mr Gadget-style tools.
Ooooh! Swiss Army Finger™!
Jan '11
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
I'm supposed to have one of these within the next couple of years or so…
Apr '12
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
Mel Foil
Adam Freedman
Okay, it's your turn. What technologies will be commonplace 1,000 years from now? · · 1 minute ago
Stone tools, warning grunts, and fire. · 7 hours ago
Zambian joke - what was there before fire? Answer: electricity.
1,000 years from now, we will be mining asteroids for energy and the current government will be warning of coming energy crunch and need to downsize space ships and stop space travel.
Dec '11
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
I don't support the singularity theory. True AI is not a matter of scale, but design. Seems to me that artificial sentience will be based on ours, which means that once we can create it, we can also improve it. At that point humans and AIs will go into an intellectual arms race (note, not necessarily a competitive one).
I also agree with Fred Cole: no idea what to expect. Would an Englishman from the year 1012 have predicted any modern technological inventions?
Apr '11
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
Mark Wilson
Aaron Miller
Aesthetic implants and prosthetics. Like teenagers today get tattoos and piercings, future teenagers will get tails, wings, scales, and Mr Gadget-style tools.
That'sInspectorGadget, to you, pal.
That's right, Inspector Gadget worked VERY HARD for that title!
May '10
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
Forgive me. I knew better.
Mar '12
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
We will all be downloads into a virtual reality. Just an app in a computer.
Hmmm, maybe that's all we are now?
Jun '11
Re: Jules Verne and Predicting the Future
Facekindle? Actually Facebook and Barnes & Noble will merge and come out with the Facenook. Probably in the next few years.