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

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

#221

Post by cm2012 »

lettergram wrote: post #99
overthemoon wrote: post #35

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…

This is one of the wrongest comments I've ever seen on HN, hah.

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

#222

Post by Robotbeat »

evancoop wrote: post #38

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…

> 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?

I mean, Jules Verne suggested trips to the Moon earlier than that in 1965 via cannon (from the coast of Florida!). Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, rejecting cannons on technical grounds (the speed of gunpowder's gases too slow to break from Earth's gravity as well as the impractical extremes in acceleration), proposed using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen in a multistage rocket for reaching the Moon... Which is what 2 of the 3 stages of the Saturn V used, so he was pretty accurate. He also suggested the need for oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, automatic machine guidance, thrust vector control using both external fins and fins in the flow of the gases (both methods became used on rockets for early spaceflight) as well as suggesting the use of a sun sensor (star tracker) and gyroscopes for guidance. It's remarkable how many critical features of spaceflight were invented by Tsiolkovsky in that document. Granted, I don't remember an actual forecasted date for these predictions, but he foresaw most of the technical features of spaceflight correctly.

https://spacemedicineassociation.org/download/history/histor...

Projections from Nikola Tesla suggested similar things to the smartphone around that timeline.

If you look at technical pioneers using logical consequences of actual known physics and engineering, they can make pretty remarkably prescient predictions.

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

#223

Post by georgeecollins »

SantalBlush wrote: post #103
lettergram wrote: post #99

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.

You can't completely discount the past because it doesn't meet a modern standard. It's certain that something many are doing today will be considered abhorrent in one hundred years. So are we all today too evil to bother with? Are you no worse than a murderer because you live in our flawed times? I doubt it. There were people and institutions before 1920 that were terrible and some that should be celebrated.

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

#224

Post by Ostrogodsky »

hwers wrote: post #8
krapp wrote: post #6

I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago. 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. Hubris... hubris never changes.

I kinda feel like this will be true in the next 100 years though (2122).

Yep, bet on an unchanging human nature,keeping things from the past around, some social progress in certain areas but not as fast as you would like it and that the world of 2122 will be less alien to a 2022 person than the 2022 world to a 1922 person.

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

#225

Post by md_ »

MR4D wrote: post #219
md_ wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused. If you mean public debt, doesn’t central banking free the public from meeting debt obligations when those obligations are denominated in the national currency? Countries can and do issue public debt in other currencies. If we all used gold or bitcoin, there’s no reason to think public debt would be lower. But the obligation to pay it back would, in a sense, be harder to dodge. It’s worth noting, as an a…

> If we all used gold or bitcoin, there’s no reason to think public debt would be lower. For reference, public debt tends to be higher when based in currencies that can be more easily debased. This was true in Roman times as it is now. I’m on my phone, so I’d have to look up the book, but it’s well documented.

Entirely possible, but defaults tend to be higher when debt is in a currency that cannot be debased, for somewhat obvious reasons.

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

#226

Post by zionic »

Spooky23 wrote: post #166
lettergram wrote: post #99

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…

It’s probably a waste of time to argue this, but the arguments for central banking were the same as the arguments put forth by Alexander Hamilton. More stability, greater resilience, etc. The arguments against it were vague references to tyranny, orchestrated by people whose wealth is generated from resource extraction and inherited wealth.

Central banks and their role in tyranny is hardly “vague”.

They can siphon off the wealth of an entire nation by printing money. It’s an irresistible temptation that I don’t trust any man to resist long term. That kind of power shouldn’t be in the hands of any one person or organization.

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

#227

Post by arcade79 »

nottorp wrote: post #57

He got a lot of things right but, like everyone else, they didn't predict the internet and its consequences. Does anyone know of a proper prediction of the internet? And I don't mean predicting handheld devices or wireless networking. Predicting the decentralized communication part that makes distance irellevant and upgrades point to point communication to group. And its consequence that it's very easy now to find a…

Not necessarily what you're looking for, but I always found The Shockwave Rider to be impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider

1975 though, so quite recent.

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

#228

Post by sangnoir »

eganist wrote: post #176
jollybean wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"United States does rank below the UK in terms of social mobility." It always did, because the US had slaves, and ex-slaves who had no much opportunity to 'climb'. The US now also has a giant class of a specific kind of migrant - Latinos from Central America, who are completely different than those from Spain or Cuba and the rest of the world. They exist in a kind of 'separate' USA and while technically might have th…

I'm still amazed the first and last times nukes were used against people were in 1945.

I'm convinced that's because of M.A.D. had nukes bwwn on only one side, they'd have bwwn used more often.

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

#229

Post by nottorp »

arcade79 wrote: post #227
nottorp wrote: post #57

He got a lot of things right but, like everyone else, they didn't predict the internet and its consequences. Does anyone know of a proper prediction of the internet? And I don't mean predicting handheld devices or wireless networking. Predicting the decentralized communication part that makes distance irellevant and upgrades point to point communication to group. And its consequence that it's very easy now to find a…

Not necessarily what you're looking for, but I always found The Shockwave Rider to be impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider 1975 though, so quite recent.

If we're talking Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar is even more prescient socially. Not 100 years ago though.

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

#230

Post by sovnade »

Nbox9 wrote: post #192
sovnade wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only seems relevant if the author of this had a vast number of predictions. Overall, yeah, there were tons. That doesn't detract from how accurate this particular piece was.

I’m unsure, unless the author is of especially high renown. If there was two dozen “What life will be like in 100 years” articles published per year in decently sized newspapers we will have 240 such articles to choose from this decade. Surely we would only see the most accurate of these predictions, and that is survival bias. Of course, maybe there was not a large variance between predictions, or everyone is accurat…

It depends if we're judging the overall predictions of everyone, or this specific author's predictions. I always tend to look at it at the author-level, because otherwise the infinite monkeys theorem applies anyway.

I think this author should be given credit for the accuracy. He can't control what everyone else is writing and how accurate or inaccurate they were. He can only control his own predictions, and they were very good.

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