By Siobhan O’Leary
Bravo Arthur C. Clarke!
It’s hard enough to visualize how our lives will be altered by technology in the next 12 months, let alone more than 40 years into the future. Somehow it seems appropriate that social media brought us in touch with the following footage of British science fiction icon and futurist Arthur C. Clarke from a 1964 BBC Horizon program. His statements about how we would communicate in the 21st century are eerily prescient, though some would argue that even though just about everything can be done remotely these days, the face-to-face meeting is as important as ever.
And in case you weren’t aware already, Clarke also predicted the iPad.
shaun
1 year ago
E. M. Forster predicted this decades earlier.
Theresa M. Moore
1 year ago
In fact, in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”, directed by Stanley Kubrick, the iPad was featured and played a BBC “video” of the interview with HAL 9000, the most sophisticated interactive computer of its day, with an AI which blows most current programming accomplishments away. It also featured the microwave oven, velcro shoes and many other inventions which were just in their infancy in terms of their development. Yes, Arthur C. Clarke had it right, to a certain degree. But he did not figure in the political logjam and the migration of labor to foreign countries to make up the shortfall for corporations focused only on the bottom line; and he did not realize that the telecommuting feature would only be confined to developed countries. As far as technology is concerned, half the world is still living in the stone age. Therefore, his prediction is made in a perfect world, proving that prediction of the future is patently impossible.
Adam
1 year ago
Not so prescient if you look at what he says about cities. More http://futuresavvy.net/2010/09/arthur-c-clarke-1964/