6 People Who Predicted the Future With Stunning Accuracy

hi welcome to another ColdFusion video as everyone knows from the perspective of humans time only moves in one direction and it's incredibly hard to predict the future but over the years there's been a select few who have managed to do this and some managed to predict up to a hundred years in the future with chilling accuracy I wanted to do something fun for today's episode so today we'll take a look at some of these fascinating cases our first visionary needs no introduction it's Nikola Tesla a Serbian American inventor electrical engineer mechanical engineer and futurist was instrumental in the development of AC power motors wireless communication and too much to mention without bogging down this video he stated the following as early as 1898 I proposed to representatives of a large manufacturing concern the construction and public exhibition of an automobile carriage which left to itself would perform a great variety of operations involving something akin to judgment this description does sound something like a self-driving car when they're navigating a road they do have to make split-second decisions and how to proceed which very well could be likened to a form of judgement in 1926 Tesla also described wireless devices that would incorporate video and telephone technology and work over a network very much like the Internet quote when Wireless is perfectly applied to the whole earth we shall be able to communicate with one another instantly irrespective of distance not only this but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face despite distances of thousands of miles and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared to our present telephone a man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket in quote this sounds a lot like video calling and smartphone communication of course a hundred years ago a simple long distance calling didn't even exist Tesla once again proved to be far ahead of his time but he wasn't the only one a lesser-known man by the name of John Watkins also made some startling predictions in 1907 engineer John Watkins wrote a piece titled what may happen in the next hundred years within the article Watkins made lots of predictions for the next century and some ended up being amazingly accurate man will see around the world persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of the circuits thousands of miles at a span this really could be likened to the internet and video sharing ready cooked meals will be bought from an establishment similar to our bakeries today in 1900 bakeries and butchers were some of the most common ways to get your food there's no such thing as keeping it for a long time freeze dried and packaged foods didn't exist and neither did electric refrigerators and one last one wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world a husband in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her bedroom in Chicago we will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we can now talk from New York to Brooklyn so surprisingly what concept' the same thinking as Tesla here unfortunately he would die in 1983 before he saw a single one of his visions come to fruition unlike any of the other people in this episode the next visionary actually inspired true inventions that affected all of our lives American inventor and engineer Vannevar Bush designed influential analog computers during the 1920s and 30s in 1922 he was one of the founders of the Raytheon Company by the early 1940s he was the most influential scientist in America directing thousands of researchers and military generals only answering to the President himself he was even in charge of the atomic bomb after the war he wanted to turn all of the scientific efforts from destruction to peace in this he could force the academic knowledge being lost as time went on with 1940s technology there was simply no way to collect organize and access at all his solution was nothing short of prophetic in a 1945 article entitled as we may think published in the Atlantic Monthly Bush proposed a device that he called a mimics mimics being short for memory extension this device could store and connect information and thus work as an artificial aid to memory he came to the conclusion that current systems of organizing information by alphabetical order would be inadequate a new system was needed a system that was more flexible and should also work like the human brain it would be a loose web of information connected by links between them quote wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them ready to be dropped into the Memex and they're amplified Bush went on to describe the ability to retrieve several articles or pictures on a screen he believed that people would create links between related articles each user saving it fathers to experience in other words people would create what we'd call websites today where you can click on links and it takes you from one page to another the mimics machine itself is what we'd call a desktop computer there was much more in these writings but I'm weary of this video's length so I'll leave you with the sheer impact and the influence of Bush's writings these writings directly inspired some of the co-creators of the internet in the 1960s it also inspired the Maus the Xerox Alto desktop computer in the 70s that inspired Steve Jobs it also inspired the graphical user interface and not to mention hyperlinks the very backbone of the web it truly had all the core ideas of the modern Information Age all the way back in 1945 if there was a visionary to fame ratio bushes would be sky high he was one of the most influential people ever to have lived but hardly anyone knows his name of course apart from those who have read my book new thinking shameless plug in which his contributions and threads of influence throughout history and all of our lives was heavily focused on in the art of predicting the future there were also some companies that tried their hand fuoco was an early pioneer in electronics and were known for their radios in 1967 for their 75th anniversary they produced a short film speculating on life in the distant future the film's title the year 1999 ad fingertip shopping will be one of the many homemakers conveniences this video console will be channeled into the store of her choice there a camera will scan a display of wares which she will select by push button another part of this console is a household monitor screen which maintains a watch on critical areas in the house swimming pool or yard what the wife selects on her console will be paid for by the husband at his counterpart console all bills and transactions will be carried out electronically oh how about some golf at Pebble Beach Saturday afternoon great anything to get out of here all right hold on a minute I don't know the coast looks little dow coolers are low moving in let me check Mexico City it's interesting to see the 1960s conceptions of online shopping and paying bills electronic funds and transfers and even communication between individuals anywhere in the world and there's even some smart home elements in there too our next prediction has a strange twist the only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic so if what I say now seems to you to be very reasonable then I would fail completely only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable having any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen flamed science fiction author arthur c clarke teamed up with stanley kubrick to make the film adaptation of the novel 2001 a space odyssey in the 1968 film two astronauts can be seen reading a newspaper on something that looks a little something like an ipad the description of the device is especially amusing quote when he had tired of official reports he would plug his news pad into the ship's information circuit and scanned the latest reports from earth one by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers which she could read with comfort when he finished he could flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the new satellites it kind of sounds like someone reading Twitter on an iPad now he is the twist this description was so astonishingly accurate that Samsung used it to legally defend its Galaxy Tablet when Apple sued for patent infringement [Music] Isaac Asimov was one of the world's most prolific science fiction writers having written or edited 500 books over his four decade career the Russian born writer was famous for books such as I Robot naturally his work contained many predictions about the future of science and technology after visiting the World's Fair in 1964 he predicted the rise of cars with robot brains quote much effort will be put into designing vehicles with robot brains vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without any interference by the slow reflexes of the human driver more than 50 years later companies like way mo Tesla and others are testing self-driving cars some of his other predictions from 1983 include quote a mobile computerized object that will penetrate the home and the increasing complexity of society will make it impossible to live without this technology in quote I think that last point is especially insightful many people today think that society is indeed too complex to get by without it he goes on to predict that computers will disrupt work habits and replace old jobs with ones that are radically different this happened heavily from the 1980s into the end of the 20th century during a 1988 interview Isaac envisions the education of the future he stays that three computers we'd have access to connected libraries which would act as a teacher in the form of access to the gathered knowledge of the human species once we have outlets computer outlets in every home each of them hooked up to enormous libraries where anyone can ask any question and be given answers be given reference material be something you're interested in knowing from an early age however silly it might seem to someone else with your interesting and you ask and you can find out and you can follow it up and you can do it in your own home in your at drone speed zero direction and your own time then everyone will enjoy learning still SMF was wrong or at least slightly wrong on one thing though he predicted that technology would revolutionize education and this is arguably correct but he did go on to say that traditional schooling would become outdated as kids would be able to learn everything they needed to know from computers at home that might be technically possible but it also assumes that kids will spend all of their time using this technology to watch pointless videos or play for night up next we have a company that predicted their own future in 1987 Apple made a promotional video entitled to knowledge navigator and look to the future let's take a look their party next Sunday today you have a faculty lunch of 12 o'clock you need to take Kathy to the airport by 2:00 you have a lecture at 4:15 on deforestation in the Amazon rainforest right excuse me Jill Gilbert is calling back great put her through I'm Mike what's up aha is this one of your typical last-minute panics for a lecture material no no no that's not until um 4:15 the tablet device that is talking to you could be seen as an early imagination of an iPad the interaction itself with the talking head is like Siri or Google assistant the command show me my appointments would do mostly the same thing show me my appointment [Music] you have 18 upcoming appointments here in the first three all day Monday during his work the professor takes a video call from a colleague it appears in a separate window on the device this could be Skype in a nutshell okay so we have one more predictor of the future before we finish off Raymond curse world's life and Korea is pretty amazing so you want to see a full episode on him let me know in the comment section below in 1963 at age 15 he wrote his first computer program it was pattern recognition software to analyze the works of classical composers and then synthesized its own songs in a similar style admirable even today but absolutely unheard of in the 1960s his inventions are numerous text reading software speech recognition devices and five of his novels have been bestsellers just imagine if you were not here how I know what it says and be lost but because of the technology because of the interfacing of speech synthesizers with these instruments I can push the button know what it's saying by listening to it's a hit record button to start and stop record sequencer activated record low speed one he's currently the director of engineering at Google in all of this he's made dozens of predictions over the decades with a pretty good track record in the 80s Kurzweil extrapolated improvements of computer software performance to predict that computers would beat a human chess player by the year 2000 in 1997 chess world champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's deep blue computer in a well-publicized chess match during the late 80s he predicted that the wireless internet will become practical for mainstream use in the early 21st century in one of his books in 1999 he predicted ebooks face recognition software and nanotechnology and these are just a handful of examples an evaluation in 2012 determined that curse walls predictions have been correct and astonishing 86% of the time interestingly in 2008 he told an expert engineering panel that solar power will scale up to produce all of the earth energies needs in 20 years according to him we only need to capture one ten thousandth the energy from the Sun that reaches the Earth's surface and that apparently should supply all of our needs we'll be waiting for this one he did get some things wrong there Ray Kurzweil thought that the economy would continue to boom from the 1998 dot-com frenzy all the way through to 2009 he didn't see the dot-com crash coming evidently he also stated that by 2009 the majority of text would be created using continuous speech recognition this is clearly not the case but hey an 86 percent success rate isn't too bad so with that it brings us to the end of the visionaries who correctly saw the future it seems that to some of the greatest minds there were some common threads self-driving cars and all-in-one pocketable communication device and worldwide instant communication it's almost like these things are inevitable it's very interesting to think about I'm sure a few of you out there would be thinking so what all of these predictions were easy well in hindsight definitely but not so fast in 1899 Charles dill the Commissioner of the United States Patent Office famously said everything that can be invented has been invented so it really takes some insight to get this right so who was your favorite predictor of the future Nikola Tesla predicting smartphones John Watkins predicting Modern Life Vannevar Bush conceptualizing the web and most of our modern life in 1945 the Philco company predicting online shopping in 1967 2001 a Space Odyssey predicting iPads in 1968 Isaac Asimov predicting computerization and robotics or rakers wells many predictions during his life let me know in the comment section below it's just amazing what the human mind can envision when imagination is combined with wisdom so thanks for watching if you did enjoy this video and want to see anything on science technology business and history feel free to subscribe to this channel there's heaps of interesting episodes on you so my name is to go go and you've been watching cold fusion now I'll catch you again soon for the next video cheers guys have a good one [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: ColdFusion

Views: 2,530,518

Rating: 4.8642168 out of 5

Keywords: Coldfusion, TV, Dagogo, Altraide, Technology, Apple, Google, Samsung, Facebook, Tesla

Id: oNnlmq05hGc

Length: 19min 0sec (1140 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2020