5 People Who Predicted The Future With Stunning Accuracy

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HARISH DANU March 29,

2020

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.

NIKOLA TESLA

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Our first visionary needs no introduction, it’s Nikola Tesla, a Serbian American inventor
electrical engineer, mechanical engineer and futurist who was instrumental in the
development of AC power motors, wireless communication and too much to mention
without bogging. 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 the 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.

JOHN WATKINS

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In 1907, civil 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
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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.

VANNEVAR BUSH

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
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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 Mimics 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 others
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 like 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 Mouse, 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.

In the art of predicting the future, there were also some companies that tried their hands.
Philco 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”. 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. 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 i-pad. 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 the earth. One by one he would
conjure up the world’s major electronic papers which she could read with comfort. When he

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finished he could flashback 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 here 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.

ISAAC ASIMOV

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
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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 Waymo, 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. 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 the1980s 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 being given answers, being given reference material, being 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 Asimov 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 PUBG.

RAYMOND KURZWEIL

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 Image Source- Google | Image By- Creative Commons Licence

RaymondKurzweil in 1963 at the age 15 wrote his first computer program. It was pattern
recognition software that 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. He is 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.

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In one of his books in 1999 he predicted e-books, face recognition software and
nanotechnology and these are just a handful of examples. An evaluation in 2012
determined that Kurzweil’s predictions have been correct an 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 energy needs in 20 years. According to him, we only need to capture
one tenth-thousandth of 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 86 percent success rate isn’t
too bad.

CONCLUSIONS
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 devices 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 Duell, 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.

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