People often don't think about what would happen if some things got legalized EVEN IF they were possible. (No offense to 2nd grade you, by the way. Adults are also like this.) There are so many cars, and there would be traffic jams in the air. (Being that we don't have any technology for perpetually hovering in place...helicopters are the closest, but they require refueling...you can imagine the problems involved.) You could not fly anywhere, due to airspace restrictions. (You'd be surprised how few places you can even fly drones.) And there's another problem it would share with being able to teleport anywhere - meaning you get in a machine and there doesn't have to be a machine on the other side that allows you passage. With both flying cars and "anywhere" teleportation, we are one Allahu Akbar, Punch-A-Nazi, BLM, Q, or other incident away from where the White House goes bye-bye. Fences and walls won't matter. Of course borders wouldn't matter, but they barely matter now. Just looking into these things shows that there are a lot of changes stemming from a new technology. I bet the Wright Brothers weren't thinking of firebombings of London, Dresden, and Tokyo when they were taking off over Kill Devil Hills...
@@Windrake101 I meant in terms of things us human have control over. Unless you have the power of anime on your side an asteroid seems a little out reach for us.
Not exactly. Random dipshits are. But people in the business of predicting what shit'll be like in 20 years all got really close. As a web dev, I got pretty damn close to predicting what 2020 internet would be like when I was projecting in 2000. I didn't get anything else right, but the thing I knew the most about I got pretty good. Usually, things will end up being a lot more mundane than you'd expect. Mundane doesn't get clicks and doesn't sell magazines, though.
I love how they predicted the 2020s would be full of quantum computers using gene splicing to create clones of Data from Star Trek that could cure cancer and break encryption, but nobody saw AIs synthesizing Phil Collins singing "Never Gonna Give You Up" coming.
@@axel665 I mean it wouldn't really matter. Children would still grow up and mature the same way. It's not like you're a terminator because you have a copy of someone else's genome.
Especially now that quantum computers achieved quantum supremacy 2 years ago. Once that takes off it's going to flip everything on its head because the power potential of them is absolutely staggering.
Turns out it still doesn't matter. Advertisement is still trash, governments are still shit at taking decisions, security is lackluster but hey now we have less freedom pr privacy.
it will, just never in the way you expect who would have thought in 2000 that in 20 years, more students would be learning from home, than at a school, for example
Sometimes I drive through rural German villages and remember that it's 2020. The only thing that has seemed to changed since 1970 are the cars in the driveways.
Since it's "what the 2000s thought the 2020s would be: computers" does that mean we're getting other videos talking about other stuff we've expected of the '20s?
I wander how much the space "episode(?)" will be just compering and contrasting Constellation and the Artemis program? (As well laughing on the fear of commercialization of space)
This might sound like over-idealistic dreameryism or whatever the kids call it these days, but lend me your eyes for a moment just so I can explain why the optimism from the 1990s and 2000s wasn't entirely off base but failed to anticipate the slump that occurred. Very much a "Sir, this is a Wendy's" tier comment coming up. 1: Let me explain *_foundational futurism_* which is my personal term for all the little things that build up to give us the fun, big things that we identify as The Future™ (there's likely an actual professional term for it that'll allow everyone to disregard my term). The idea is that you can't get a rocket ship without the Chemical Revolution, advances in metallurgy, and breakthroughs in ICBM tech. Likewise, you can't get the internet without massive infrastructural projects, fiber optic advancements, and the existence of computers to begin with. We expect loads of advanced tech to just fall into our lap because "It's Current Sci-Fi Year, Where's My Jetpack?" The chief problem with foundational futurism is just how _agonizingly boring it is_ to discuss. The Future™ turned out to be enterprise portals, business-rules management, wikis, and smartphones when everyone wanted interstellar portals, bioaugmentation, and sexbots. But when you really break it down, how exactly do you get to things like advanced AI? The "good ol' fashioned" idea is that you just punch in loads of rules and a map of the brain into a sufficiently powerful computer and voila. The latest SOTA (state-of-the-art) AIs show glimmers of generality (mainly the likes of GPT-3 and DALL-E), and they're only possible with big data and extreme compute. Crunching petabytes of data in a day just to connect words to meanings. Try making something like GPT-3 when there's only a few thousand computers worldwide and they all have 3600-baud connections and a collective total of 500 megabytes of data on all of them at any one time. So you need advancements in computers, but you also need things like smartphone proliferation, mass documenting of the world, mass uploads of documents like books and conversations, and much much more. It's a constellation of developments just to create one thing that's futuristic. Or, in other words, laying down the foundation to build a starscraper. Perhaps _the_ single most infamous example of this is fusion power. We all know the meme "fusion is always 50 years away," but have you ever stopped to ask _why_ it's always 50 years away? The plainest answer is that it's not funded well enough, but even that doesn't sum up the whole picture. The cold fact is just that in order to build fusion power plants, we need to develop the technology needed to develop the technology needed to develop fusion power plants, and that alone involves a wider array of things to create. Directly funding fusion is a misunderstanding; we're really funding the research labs that develop the disparate innovations that'll ultimately culminate in fusion power. Or, in other words, we're currently stuck building the technological foundations of the future." Foundational futurism, if you will. But that's not as easy to remember as "fusion is always 50 years away." 2: Pop hype and forgetting the "fiction" in science fiction. These magazines dumb a lot of the bigger, loftier concepts down to the layman so they can be easily understood, but the fundamental issue is that some of these developments, innovations, and technologies really can ONLY be properly understood with a scholarly level of knowledge; you can certainly dumb them down to understand them, but you invariably wind up comparing them to science fiction concepts that are much more advanced and often never intended to actually be feasible. Science fiction is usually a cautionary tale of present trends, but it's also FICTION. Even the hardest of science fiction has to follow narrative conventions and plot beats that all but forces events to happen for some dramatic stake (literary and maybe kishotenketsu-based sci-fi can get around this, but those aren't common in the West). So combine an over-generalized understanding of technology with a need to fit it all into pop cultural tropes and cliches, and then couple that with a desire to catch readers' eyes and you have all those magazines' fanciful tales of why 2020 would be on the verge of Star Trek. Think of flying cars. We have passenger drones now that serve the same purpose; they're actively being tested. Drone taxis resolve the biggest issue flying cars always had: the horrifying prospect of a human pilot. Imagine a drunk or depressed teenager flying their car around; we'd be looking at megadeaths within a year just in singular countries. Autonomous vehicle technology is necessary for true flying cars (see: foundational futurism above), but popular sci-fi seems to hate the idea of a computer controlling your flying car, supposedly the ultimate machine of freedom. And even when the concept of flying cars is brought up, you're lucky if anyone mentions the possibility of autonomous vehicle tech overcoming that limitation because repeating how crappy humans are at navigating 2D space, let alone 3D space, is funnier and appeals to more people and dominates the discussion. 3: Revolutionary curves. If you've ever discussed AI and the various esoteric concepts around it, you've probably heard about "S-curves" at some point. This is basically true for technological developments in general. We've actually been here before, disillusioned with a sudden lack of progress after decades of extreme innovation. Heck, we've been here TWICE. We've already had three industrial revolutions before now, which were roughly 50 to 60-year long bouts of rapid technological improvement and the social/political/economic changes that resulted. But what isn't often taught are the slumps in between, which usually last 15 to 25 years, where the change slows and become more or less iterative improvements over what was developed while the next generation is created in the background, yet to explode. The end of the first industrial revolution back in the 1830s caused an economic depression! However, there wasn't much angst about "technological stagnation" because most of the changes never reached the hands of the common people and the idea of technological progress was an alien concept to people back then to begin with, who considered society to scarcely be different from that of the Ancient Greeks other than grander empires and some extra steam power. The end of the second was around world war 1's end, and there was definitely a sense around 1940 that all the great technological innovations had ceased a generation prior in the killing fields of France in lieu of everyone reloading for another pointless war. But in retrospect, this is bogus because of things like the aforementioned Chemical Revolution, discovery of penicillin, birth of rocketry, birth of modern computing, birth of televised media, and much more. At the same time, it's easy to forget that this didn't just pop into existence and become accepted overnight; heck, penicillin was still experimental up until World War 2, well over a decade after it was discovered. And it was after WWII that the Digital Revolution started and continued up until around 2000. However, the sheer hype over the year 2000 and the turn of the millennium (think back to how many movies and video games hyped up the year 2000 before it happened) kept a lot of that optimism going for several years until it became plainly obvious that we weren't in the throes of a cyberpunk age just yet and that the third industrial revolution ended right as 2000s-mania was getting started. All the pieces for the fourth are in place right now, and especially in the world of artificial intelligence some of the first hammers have even dropped, but it's definitely going to take a few more years before that recognition of technological acceleration returns. *TLDR: I reject your reality and substitute my own.*
Keeping to the video's topic alone, a lot of the developments in computer science fall heavily under that "foundational futurism" thing I mentioned. The pop-sci magazines were dreaming of the final product and putting years on them when the lab-rats and boffins were still just trying to figure out what the hell a "gene" was and whether quantum physical _could_ behave well-enough for computing at all. Recent developments in things like the first-ever room-temperature superconductors may make quantum computers much easier to keep stable and error-correct (as this is what a lot of qubits are used up for), but at the same time they may also supercharge existing computing paradigms. We just need to manufacture room-temperature superconductors at pressures that don't nearly invoke a black hole. And there were other issues too, things that no one could have foreseen like the Thailand floods of 2011 permanently setting back hard drive progress (areal density is also an issue, but it's the floods that explain why HDDs haven't gotten much cheaper in a decade) or COVID-19 causing the near-total breakdown of global supply lines, bottlenecking GPUs and silicon manufacturing. But with new paradigms that are still under development, these might not be a problem for much longer. The issue is entirely "but how long will they remain under development?
I've thinking about this kind of concept for a couple of years now, but could never articulate it as well as you've done! Glad to see a less depressing outlook in the comments
There really hasn't been anything new invented since the 90's. All advances in technology and science are just improvements on older stuff. The principles of genetic engineering are the same as in the 80's. Smartphones are just a mix of old fashioned computer and mobile phone parts. The most popular algorithms for neural networks were developed in the 70's. Private rocket companies are just reiterating what the Soviets and Americans did in the 60's, etc.
@@ixian_technocrat Innovation is an integral part of progress. If not more important than invention. Sure maybe our planes were invented in the 19th century but buddy an F-35 really shows how innovation plays out. Or even, a spitfire compared to an old F-14 tomcat. Technology can only ever go up. Unless some catastrophic invent annihilates society, and human stores of information and professionals altogether. Which is highly unlikely, even in the invent of nuclear war it wouldn't even scratch the surface of the destruction required to kill us off like that. Hell, new problems lead to new adaptations and technologies required to solve them. Think of COVID-19, and think about how quickly society adapted to continue producing and expanding even with the pandemic. Thing is, it's just impossible to predict what's going to change things drastically versus what we think is going to change things drastically. For example, this guy really undersold the importance and even (very recent) developments of quantum computers. They're not some singularity creating magnum opus, but they really help out in fields like physics especially when you get on the theoretical side of things. Maybe our computers aren't 10,000 times faster but they are 1000 times faster and that's a lot of goddamn improvement.
I have a book, borrowed from my father, about "predictions" for the future. I find funny how they imagined 2020s computers to become enormous box-like white monitors (the book was wrote in the 1970s).
Have expectations, but don't expect them to all be met. Most of the time that faith is in people who have to operate through some kind of system and against many other factors beyond just what you want.
Laser weapons have been a thing for a while. Navy’s been fucking around with them since the early 2000’s. The military is generally ahead of the curve in that regard.
@@manuelredgrave8348 2020 Pandemic, Nationwide riots, Economic crisis, 3 million deaths, international tensions, and splintering of America among many other things: *WASSUUUUUUUP*
Hey if the internet could go back to its decentralized, more wild west state it was back then, before every sharp corner was rounded down and everything became a sanitized, advertiser-friendly place I would be down.
I once saw a sign on a train in Britain saying they planned to cut all homeless people in half by 2025. Either a sentence error or homeless people better start running.
Man, all that hope and optimism of the 00s. The idea that just around the corner was a better world. That technology was going to improve our lives, and that the coming years would be full of wonders. Naïve? Yes. Over optimistic? Of course. We, in our more cynical age, can jeer at those wild predictions. But I'd rather have a world of wild hopes and naïve optimism than this current age of ennui and despair.
Past predictions of the future are always extremely *fascinating*. It'll be interesting to see what current predictions are off or not, and to what extent.
My dad was usually smart enough to dash apart any pop-sci that would get me excited as a kid. I admit, I still get a little dreamy about optical computers, and that only grew when I fell into a job that got heavy into fiber-optic theory after college. But, yeah, we keep on solving problems with copper and silicon semiconductors, so it keeps on being a waste to reinvent the wheel. Doesn't mean I don't still want one though. Fun video, I'd enjoy watching this premise on other topics beyond computing.
I’m so glad you discussed quantum computers in terms of their calculations, rather than the misunderstanding that it would increase our storage. And also that only certain calculations even run on them.
The quantum computing section was even funnier with you struggling to explain quantum mechanics in simple terms. I am currently taking the class in college, funny thing is the textbook we use says on the first page that no physicist know “what” quantum mechanics “is”, they just know how to do the math.
Although I was born in 2007 I do remember hearing about robot teachers that said they were going to be a normal thing by 2020, but instead they went defunct in 2013.
i love how you jump into 'Dolly' when you're talking about computers. It was truely a craze, people were losing their minds back then. Even the movies made about 'cloned people going mad after they reach the age when their donors died', tons of them.
...and landing a rover on Mars, sending humans to the ISS with a commercial partner, working to solve climate change, and being able to watch videos and past predictions of the future, among other things.
@@albertjackinson hey don't ruin other ppl ranting about the present with facts and grounded optimism this time-line deserves every single ounce of rant
My wife worked on part of the human genome project when she worked at LLNL in Pleasanton, ca. The 'miraculous "life saving" 'covid 'vaccine' features the same geneome hacking tool used by the lab; Crispr.
In 1998 I was in 7th grade and I had to write a little prediction for the future of computers. I said that laptops would get smaller and less heavy so they were the size and weight of a notebook, and would have some alternate kind of input instead of a keyboard or mouse (too unwieldy). Maybe there'd be a way to draw on the screen with a pen? Just cuz, you know, that was what *I* wanted.
There was a TV show I loved as a kid called "Beyond 2000" I'd like to watch it again and see what they got right and how wrong they were on other things. Edit: I just looked, some episodes are here on RU-vid. I know what I'm watching next. Last time I looked they weren't uploaded yet.
@@TheBarracuda ah k, it seems the show was in other countries and there was a few versions.. it started in Australia and ran here for about 20 years all up..
I was born in 1999 and had my first conscious thought in 2004, and throughout the mid 00’s to the early 10’s, technology was evolving so fast that I sincerely thought the future that we predicted would happen.
Yeah I can understand that. I was 12 in 1999 so it really seemed the future was evolving at lightning speed for me after that point. It just kinda tapered off around ... idk 2013ish? Especially with video games
I still remember those future shows from the 2000s. A lot of things from those shows didn't happen, so it's no wonder why they aren't around anymore. But it's probably not as bad as how the 80s thought the 2000s would be, or even just the year 2000 in general!
For anyone who may be interested in these type of speculations of the past, it's called "retro-futurism", and series such as Fallout draw upon that in a very interesting way
There are publicly available quantum computers you can used over the internet. It was a few years ago, but I remember a five Qbit quantum computer being available for running programs on. IBM I think. Blue Wave or something like that. Edit: "We could craft life in our living rooms." Pretty sure people have been doing that for as long as there have been living rooms.
I love the intro, watch it over and over again, and its so funny how you say "I mean its a magazine, it comes through the mail, it gotta be legit" 😂 fantastic video, good job
I had at least 50-60 PopSci and PopMechanics magazines that I collected over the years as a child, starting around 2003. All stacked in a big Tupperware bin. Agree 100% with his description. Was my best way of seeing what the future might look like, before the internet got big. Then I turned 27, was moving into my first place with my new wife. Had to be selective with stuff I brought during the move. Magazines had to go. ;_;
I found this video really good because I remember as well people talking about all these developments in computers but since nobody has talked about them in so long I had forgotten about them. It was fun to learn about why they didn't work out. Also thanks for mentioning your new channel as I do enjoy hearing you talk about stuff and your video style so I am going to go check it out.
We already have the tech to have flying cars. Aviation has come a long way. It's just that they aren't confident enough that the common person could fly without extensive pilot training.
@@roastedpinots947 The problem is that into a bus you just quickly go in and to an airplane you have to arrive much earlier, do stuff and wait. The preparation can take longer than the actual flight.
I feel like a kid asking this but if flying cars become a standardized thing in the far future wouldn't people need a pilot licence to fly one? Those things don't even *sound* safe and I can only imagine all the safety protocols and ridiculously strict laws there'd be, hell they would probably even be banned in some countries. You've heard of drunk drivers but what about drunk pilots
I'm an optical engineer in R&D, and I'll share a saying we've got: if the tech is 5 years away, it can work in RL; if its 10 years away, it still needs lab time, but it might work in RL; 20 years aways is gonna stay that way for a while (the typical example: nuclear fusion). Cool to see a mention of optical computing. It has some potential for doing certain specific calculations very fast (biggest example: fourier transforms), but we are ages away from a miniature optical transistor that are stable.
You don't even realize how old it makes me feel to hear someone say that the year 2020 was their idea of the future when they were a kid. Raise your hand for 1999 being the distant future. 😅
Oddly we do have flying cars. We have managed to make the flying cars work fine. They are about as fuel efficient as an SUV which should mostly tell you a lot about SUV. However, people forgot something REALLY important about these things. People have to use them. You have seen people drive, you know how they drive. Do you really think there is a safe way to have a flying car? Basically until we figure out a way to have these things fully autonomous with NO human controls we can't have them because humans suck.
@@Immudzen people can be trained to fly helicopters safely, so if everything is simplified I think it could /maybe/ work for flying cars. Probably a more realistic option would be having them be self-driving. With that said, I don't expect flying cars to go mainstream anytime soon
@@blartversenwaldiii Some people can be trained to fly helicopters safely. Do you really think most people can? On a day to day basis? When they are late and trying to get their toddler to daycare and a kid to school and late for work?
@@Immudzen yeah that's why I'm doubtful, but I was thinking if the controls are simplified or something, and a computer handles the complex bits. Idk how helicopter controls work though lol.
I had a weird moment where when it went into quantum computing, an ad about quantum computing popped up, it took a moment for me to realize I wasn't listening to the video at that point. That was odd.
Speed may not have truly gone up as much as they predicted but in terms of sheer transistors it certainly did. In 1971 the Intel 4004 processor was released and held 2,300 transistors whereas in 2019 the AMD Ryzen 9 3900x housed 9.89 billion transistors which is an estimated 430000000% increase when compared to the Intel 4004 processor.
Think an important thing to add about the state of genetics research is that we may have the human genome mapped but we still don’t know what most of it actually does. It’s like having an instruction manual that’s written in an ancient, dead language that no one can read. We have an idea of what bits and pieces of it say. But we’re nowhere near fully understanding it.
I remember watching a NOVA episode on PBS about the 2020s back in 2001. They said we’d have nanotechnology and would be back on Mars and the Moon. They also said Cancer and HIV would be cured.
I didn't fall for the hype; I knew it would take longer to reach the expected thresholds than the predictions all said, because the real world never, ever, _ever_ works that way. Manufacturing, cost, marketing, markets, circumstance, human limitations, unexpected hurdles and limiters, backwards compatibility with existing infrastructure, cost of new infrastructure, black swan events - all kinds of things get in the way of technology reaching its hypothetical apex at maximum speed, and it takes even longer to reach markets, then become affordable. Why observing interferes is, last I can be, caused by _how_ we observe it. In order to observe a thing, as humans, we need to send _something_ at it, which is then reflected back to be seen or "seen" - aka detected - aka observed. This is usually light. Regardless though the signal or thing makes contact with the observed object and directly influences it, causing it to do something or react somehow, and it's that exact state we then observe. For example, if a particle is spinning randomly but you hit it with a photon, the photon's contact may impart a specific spin onto it before bouncing back into the detector, whereupon it is calculated to have measured that spin.
