Live data from Hacker News

What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

loc.gov

121–130 of 659 posts

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#121
post #84

" A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. For Jefferson knew nothing of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, gramophones, movies, radium, &c.; he did not even know hot and cold bathrooms." I wonder what we would show the girl of 1922? Space travel and obv…

I'd think somewhere like Times Square, the strip in Vegas, or Shinjuku in Tokyo at night would be mindblowing. Then probably show her VR, and a modern action movie in 3D.

VR still blows the minds of everyone I show it to. I can't imagine what kind of reaction someone from 1922 would give.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#122
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In none of the hard Sci-Fi I read as a child did they say "I needn't worry for light, as I had my portable cellphone" Will you have AR displays that hide the information an make a room otherwise appear devoid of technology? Yes...because normal people don't fetishize technology and HGTV tells me it should be hidden from sight. Will it be a display projected on your contact lenses, a mist excreted from a rod with lase…

70s and 80s scifi media frequently depict floppy disks being used well into the 22nd century and beyond, despite the fact that optical and solid state storage did exist in some form back then. Either is is done to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, or human beings really lack the abiltiy to imagine things they have no empirical experience with.

Do the details of the storage medium matter? It still stores ones and zeros - who cares how?

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#123

The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have predicted a moon landing only 66 years later? Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone, let alone 1922? Only one prediction is worthy of confidence - the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate...and the world will improve. We lament progress, but few of us would choose 1…

> Only one prediction is worthy of confidence - the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate...and the world will improve.

I'm not actually very confident about that last part...

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#124

It's interesting to compare this to the WEF future projections: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... Especially with regards to this passage:: "In 2022 [economic development] will be as finished as it is to-day in England. American wealth will then be either developed or known, and all of it will belong to somebody. There will be no more opportunity in America than there is in England to-da…

> Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better Let me translate “you are slaves and you rent everything. We base your ability to purchase on a social credit score. But we let you rent houses in our artificially limited VR world.” I don’t make much of predictions like these. It’s ALWAYS a safe bet to assume people will lose liberty. To the point the FED was created in 1913, research w…

Central Banking has been one of the most powerful and liberating achievements of civilization.

And you now have the 'freedom' to strike and sue your employer, women have the 'freedom' to actually have a job, you have the 'freedom' to attend college which only about 5% did at the time, you have the 'freedom' to do almost anything in life.

And what 'freedoms' have you lost?

Well, there's more taxation.

And you have to sell your car to a Black man if he wants to buy it from you.

And you have to prove drugs work before selling them.

You have to pay workers a minimum wage, and make sure they don't die on the job.

What other 'freedoms' were are you keen to regain?

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better Let me translate “you are slaves and you rent everything. We base your ability to purchase on a social credit score. But we let you rent houses in our artificially limited VR world.” I don’t make much of predictions like these. It’s ALWAYS a safe bet to assume people will lose liberty. To the point the FED was created in 1913, research w…

Any attempt to depict the US as a free country prior to 1920 is a nonstarter. There was slavery, Jim Crow, and women could not vote. Seriously, give me a break.

We also had one of the strongest eugenics movements in the world, under the same progressive flag as women's suffrage. It took the horrors of WWII to snap us out of it.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#126
post #104

> The people of 2022 will probably never see a wire outlined against the sky... Haha, so wrong. All I see is power lines everywhere, and I can't unsee them. SO ugly.

You always know when you see an American film because of all the powerlines, and I always wonder why they are not put underground.

I know, I grew up in the US, moved to Germany, and moved back. There are so many. It doesn't look like a modern country at all.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#127
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world economic forum is largely lead by former nazis and communists. They have openly called for the United States to decline as a power. I wouldn’t necessarily take anything they say as fact. Lol

Citation very much needed.

You can read the “Great Reset” book to get a wider view of their vision.

They’ve been talking about this for a long time

https://www.salon.com/2010/12/06/america_collapse_2025/

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#128
post #84

" A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. For Jefferson knew nothing of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, gramophones, movies, radium, &c.; he did not even know hot and cold bathrooms." I wonder what we would show the girl of 1922? Space travel and obv…

Internet and computers are the most different from what existed before 1922, but already then everybody was familiar with telegraphy, telephony and wireless communications and various fiction works about intelligent robots had existed for millennia (starting with the Iliad).

Space travel was also present in many fiction works, the best known being several novels of Jules Verne and of H. G. Wells.

Antibiotics were a huge progress, but the concept would not have been a surprise for anyone, because searching for substances that one would ingest to kill the parasites causing various diseases was already a well understood method in medicine, e.g. like using quinine against the protozoan that causes malaria or organo-arsenic compounds against the bacteria that cause syphilis.

Even if already in antiquity some have supposed that many diseases are caused by very small invisible parasites, only during the 19th century the causes for most common infectious diseases have been identified. So also in this domain the differences between 1922 and 1822 are much larger than between 1922 and 2022.

By 1922, genetics was much better understood than in 1822 even if it was not known yet that it is based on information encoded in the molecules of nucleic acids.

I cannot find any domain of science and technology where the difference between 1922 and 1822 is not much larger than between 2022 and 1922.

On the other hand, in 1922 there was still a very large part of the human population whose life had not been affected yet by the progresses of the 19th century, e.g. who had never used a telephone, an automobile or a train, much less an airplane or a computing machine or a washing machine.

The main difference between 1922 and 2022 is that all the technologies that in 1922 existed only in extremely expensive devices or in experimental devices now exist in cheap devices that are used by most people and such devices have sizes and energy consumptions that are many orders of magnitude less than what could have been done with the technologies from 100 years ago.

The main progress during the last 100 years has been in practical engineering, with much less progress in basic science.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better Let me translate “you are slaves and you rent everything. We base your ability to purchase on a social credit score. But we let you rent houses in our artificially limited VR world.” I don’t make much of predictions like these. It’s ALWAYS a safe bet to assume people will lose liberty. To the point the FED was created in 1913, research w…

Any attempt to depict the US as a free country prior to 1920 is a nonstarter. There was slavery, Jim Crow, and women could not vote. Seriously, give me a break.

Maybe you mean different things?

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#130
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress depends on people or, the economy in general, progressing. If everyone is happy where they are and want no more, there is no need to innovate and progress stops. That may be fine if we think we have achieved all we need to achieve as a society or species but most think we have a bit of a ways to go still before we can declare victory.

In the US a lot of people are very, very unhappy. The lack of real political and economic agency for most of the population is one of the defining features of US capitalism.

Citation needed. There are all sorts of measures of gross happiness out there.
Post reply on HN