disruptivetechthoughts

[disruptivetechthoughts]

Reflection on “A 30-Year History of the Future”

The Ted Talk discussed in this reflection can be accessed here.

My first takeaway from this Ted Talk is that our predictions for the technology of the future often aim either too high or too low. A commonly cited example of a futuristic technology prediction that never came to be is the flying car—this expectation was both too high and too off-base, as while the idea of a flying car is certainly exciting, it doesn’t fulfill a need that can’t be addressed more easily in a more practical way. The 1970s idea that touch screens would never be popular because our fingers would get the screens dirty is an example of an expectation set too low, as the advent of brighter backlit screens that are less easily obscured by smudges and advances in glass technology that make the screens less prone to getting smudged in the first place have nullified this concern.

My second takeaway is that we fail to predict the future because we fail to think outside the box and consider that some things may change while other things stay the same. The MIT patent officer’s instruction to Negroponte’s student not to patent their Backseat Driver technology seems like a foolish mistake in hindsight, since trust of technology and desire for convenience have changed so that the benefits of GPS navigation outweigh the liabilities. Newsweek’s 1995 derision of Negroponte’s prediction that we would buy books and newspapers online seems laughable today, since demand for print materials continues to exist and ordering online is more convenient than going to the store. However, we continue to make these mistakes today. Negroponte points out that we are so used to the “smart” in smart technology being a smartphone that our other “smart” appliances rely entirely on the smartphone and are not smart themselves—another failure to think outside of the box.

My third takeaway is that the roots of what we think of as recent innovations go back much farther than we think they do. GPS navigation, the Google Maps car, touch screens, wearable technology, and VR can all trace their origins back to somewhere between the 1960s and the 1990s. We tend to think of these technologies as recent because they recently became available to the consumer, but their much earlier origins indicate that we should predict the future by looking at current technological developments.