Technology helps us in our day to day, but throughout our lives we have seen many examples of the chaos that occurs when something does not work.That is when someone usually comments on that of «this did not happen when it was done with paper and pencil ».
The truth is that our technological dependence is growing, and that despite the catastrophists who predicted (and continue to do so) that " millenarianism will come ".That is why we have decided to review the best unfulfilled predictions about the chaos (or not) that the technology was going to bring .
It is clear that not all of them will be negative, some of course we love that they have not been fulfilled, while others are a tremendous annoyance that they have not come true.We will see some of them.
The 2000 effect that would cause the world to collapse
Fernado Arrabal already predicted it in 1989: millenarianism, the arrival of the year 2000 (as it happened a thousand years before), would bring an endless number of disasters, among them, one of the prophecies that formed the most uproar at the time was that of the Effect 2000, also known as Y2K .The theory was very simple and was based on the fact that with the change of millennium the computers would count again the year 00, returning to the date of 1900 .This was due to the fact that in older computer systems, computers with little memory and little space, the programmers designed the date keeping only the last two digits, of course none of them thought that the systems they were designing would still be in use in 2000.
It is predicted that the consequences would be catastrophic. Power and nuclear power stations that would not work , the stock market could not operate, emergency systems would be compromised, etc.It was created a global psychosis, which caused a total of 93,379 million euros to be spent in the United States for the 67,595 losses that would have been recorded in the worst case scenario.Globally, the difference was even greater: total spending reached 214,634 million euros for the potential loss of 165,156 million.The real effects were minimal.
A huge space storm will bring us back to the Middle Ages
Lately, many of the catastrophic predictions have space as their protagonist.If we were small, we were already impacted by the fact that dinosaurs disappeared due to the impact of a comet, in recent years, the Earth has also "dodged" several celestial bodies with (fortunately) bad aim.
However, other times the predicted impact was not against our planet, but against the satellites that gravitate around it.Yes, Nasa itself has on occasion warned of the damage that telecommunication systems may suffer from around the world in the wake of space storms or other impacts.For example, in 2011, he was alerted to "a worldwide catastrophe due to the arrival of a huge space storm" in 2013, which would damage emergency systems, equipment hospitals, banking systems, computers, GPS and a long etc.that would return us to the Middle Ages.
Moore's law of computer processors
We go with another one for the moment if it is met.It is known as Moore's law of processors , which states that approximately every two years the number of transistors in a microprocessor doubles.This implies that every two years we have more powerful machines than the previous ones and their price drops exponentially.
It is an empirical law formulated by Gordon E.Moore, Intel's co-founder , in 1965.It is also true that Moore himself put a limit on his theory, since it would not last beyond 20 or 30 years, with the emergence of a new technology that replaces the current one.
640 KB should be enough for anyone
Erroneously attributed to Bill Gates , it is a phrase that was pronounced in the 80s, during the height of the first IBM PCs.640 KB of storage space today seem insignificant and any PDF will occupy more than this amount.However, in the 80s, where the documents that were sent were mainly text and spreadsheets, it seemed like a huge space.
Then, we have seen how hard drives grew nonstop and, what until recently seemed immense (1 TB), today is the storage standard of any domestic computer or we They offer free in the cloud.At this rate it may not take long to see computers with 1 Petabyte of space.
In two years the spam will end
This one is from Bill Gates and the truth is that it is one of those that we would like to have been fulfilled.There is nothing more annoying than the unwanted emails that reach our mailbox.for the domestic user, but a problem in companies, in which, in addition to a security risk, represents a ballast for the productivity of employees that makes them spend millions to try to solve this The phrase was pronounced in 2004, so it is clear that I underestimate the problem of spam.
So Apple imagined the future of computer science in 1987
Apple has always had the reputation of seeing the future of computer science more clearly than its competitors.In this 1987 video, from this company, he imagined how some devices would be in 2011. A rudimentary iPad appears , with a personal assistant type Siri, with whom they have a conversation in natural language, something that they have not yet managed to polish at all.They also make videoconferences and Siri shows data that he has on different aspects, all with a tactile handling of the device.
What did not imagine was an Internet search engine like Google , the amount of information we would have at our disposal or how the hardware would evolve to have a much finer, lighter and more manageable device than the computer book that appears in the video.Not even they could imagine the evolution of the hardware that would allow today's tablets.
The iPod will never succeed
This was what Alan Sugar predicted in 2005 and it is clear that the tycoon did not calibrate well the scope of the new device presented by Apple that came to replace the MP3 that we had then and end with other proposals such as the miniDisc.He not only said that he would not succeed, but that the prediction made in February of that year he considered dead for Christmas of that same year.The truth is that the smell he had at the time of founding in 1968 Amstrad and enter the 80s as one of the main actors of home computing failed in this case.
The phone is for the Yankies
But when it comes to technology, the bullies have been predicting for many years that they don't need new machines.An example is the prediction of Sir William Preece, director of the British Post Office, who in 1878 predicted that:
Americans need the phone.We don't.We have leftover mail carriers
Today it is very easy to see your mistake, but different technology companies have not been able to adapt to the changes that have arisen.An example, Nokia and BlackBerry, which dominated the mobile phone before the arrival of the iPhone and did not know how to adapt to the new rules that were imposed.
In the future we will only work 15 hours a week
And this is perhaps the prediction that many expect to be fulfilled at some point.Not made by someone related to technology, but the prestigious English economist John Maynard Keynes , who published an essay in 1931 where he predicted that in the next 100 years productivity and income would multiply thanks to technology, and, thanks to that, we could meet our basic needs working only fifteen hours a week , freeing up free time for leisure.
More than 80 years later we are still working 40 hours a week and it does not seem that it will diminish in the future, but rather the opposite.We hope that this time the one who is wrong is me.
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