7 tech solutions for human productivity that are older than you think
Sometimes, to understand the future you need to stop and look back. We present a list of 7 times when forecasters predicted it right. The innovative solutions they presented not only made us faster but more productive.
The technological evolution seems not to stop or even slow down. It means that futurists have plenty of things for inspiration and predicting the possibilities we might explore very soon.
The news of tech solutions appears on daily basis and it ranges from transportation and introducing self-driving vehicles to entertainment and earning money on hologram performance of the dead stars.
Sometimes, to understand the future you need to stop and look back. Below there is a list of 7 times when forecasters predicted it right. The innovative solutions they presented not only made us faster but more productive as well.
Wearable technologies
The fans of Back to the Future series will confirm that the Back to Future II (released in 1989) offered the audience the amazingly precise picture of what 2015 would look like. The movie creators showed us some the futuristic technologies that are not futuristic any more (TV screens everywhere, video-supported calls, digital payments in a click and wearable technologies, to name a few). Still waiting for self-flying cars predicted by the time travel adventure.
Global Position System
In 1993, the company AT&T stunned the audience with the ads that actually presented the concept of GPS. Having been directed by David Fincher, the commercials were to be a success. The featured voice of Tom Selleck went on: “Crossed the country … without stopping for directions?”
Soon the GPS was fully operational for military use and a few years later it was available for commercial use as well.
The Internet evolvement
Isaac Asimov, a great sci-fi writer described what we now know as the Internet in 1988. His vision was to connect to libraries of information. He imagined that the libraries would be in some way a substitution for the teachers. He practically described online education as a powerful learning tool. Though he did not fully predict the universal scale of the internet, his futuristic vision of this phenomenon is stunning.
Wireless technologies
Nicola Tesla (1856 - 1943) was a genius whose inventions greatly benefited his contemporaries but what amazes more is his works that contain the direct predictions of faraway future that came true not that long ago, for example, the wireless technologies that he had described: ‘The wireless transmission of power across the ocean, for instance, obviously opens up an entirely new era in mechanical developments ...it will be a simple matter to keep the uttermost parts of the world in instant touch with each other’.
‘Time tracking’ literally on hand
Long before it became the universal fashion, the French mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), was the first person to wear a watch on his wrist (to be precise, on his left wrist). His ultimate interest in numbers and an idea of accurate calculations greatly contributed to the further evolvement of watches for tracking the time.
Social networking
Bill Gates wrote his book ‘The Road Ahead’ in 1985 when we did not hear of Facebook yet. But being a genius, Bill Gates predicted in his work that the communication and human interaction would go through a huge transformation because the computers would combine the functions of telephones, post offices, banks, and libraries. People would not only be able to communicate with their friends and families but also meet new people online. Hello, new (social media) world.
Face recognition software
This list would not be complete without Ray Kurzweil’s name, director of engineering at Google, whose recent idea of humans’ digital immortality became very popular.
Almost all Ray Kurzweil’s predictions draw a lot of attention because they did come true so often that it seemed that he had the crystal ball in which he could call up the future.
His prediction of face recognition was really important as it opened up a new era of artificial intelligence exploration.
The innovative solutions presented in this list are based on expanding human capabilities to reach a greater number of people and improve connectivity, to increase memory storage so that a person could achieve more in a shorter time, and to take control of the environment to enhance the personal awareness. It seems that our civilization won’t cease to expand in a technological sense, which means that we, as predicted, get digitized. Be well-equipped to meet the incredible future.