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>> No. 3813 Anonymous
11th February 2015
Wednesday 11:06 pm
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As some of you may know, this year marks 50 years since the first edition of Tomorrow's World. Celebrating 25 years in 1990, they had a stab at predicting the world of 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/v/kYCaGaXKgsU

So, how you do think they did?
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>> No. 3814 Anonymous
12th February 2015
Thursday 12:44 am
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I think they were remarkably accurate, all things considered. A few predictions were a bit on the pessimistic side, a few were slightly optimistic, but I didn't see much that was totally wide of the mark. I think the only complete blunder was that of machine translation - we're still a long way off having accurate and instantaneous translation of natural language.

We did get robot-assisted microsurgery, we did get a permanently crewed space station, we did get genetic diagnosis and therapy. Their predictions about cars were a bit premature, but not by a long way - electric cars and their charging infrastructure are now a practical (albeit niche) reality, and plenty of new cars feature adaptive cruise control and autonomous braking.

It's interesting to see just how much emphasis was placed on environmental issues. We forget about ozone depletion because the situation is now largely under control, but there's still a whacking great hole in the ozone layer that won't fully heal until at least 2060. The west coast of America isn't nearly as short on water as they predicted, but they're still in a full-scale crisis over water resources, especially in California. The major aquifers are almost completely empty, so unless the yanks sort their act out pronto they'll be staring down the barrel of water rationing.

Just as everyone else did, they were completely blindsided by the decentralisation of communications and the concomitant social changes. They accurately predicted hundreds of channels of broadcast television, but didn't imagine that the concept of broadcasting itself would be on the verge of obsolescence due to the internet. They also seemed remarkably naive about the more dystopian aspects of communications technology - mass surveillance, drone strikes etc.
>> No. 3815 Anonymous
12th February 2015
Thursday 2:14 pm
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Cheers OP, I enjoyed that.

What happened to all the amazing ideas they had with GM crops and fruits? Are there any undergrads or actual professorlads who can shed a bit of light on the situation. All I 'know' is that Monsanto = BAD, but that may be based on Mumsnet level pop-science rather than an informed opinion.

Also, thank fuck that the Space Station Freedom never came about / got renamed. I can imagine someone like Reagan announcing the name and everybody else cringing at the thought.
>> No. 3816 Anonymous
12th February 2015
Thursday 3:43 pm
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>>3814
>I think the only complete blunder was that of machine translation - we're still a long way off having accurate and instantaneous translation of natural language.
That's a bit uncharitable, there's been some pretty huge steps in the last 25 years, and things like this:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-01/14/google-translate-updated
would've seemed magical back then.

It was an entertaining video, thanks OP.
>> No. 3817 Anonymous
12th February 2015
Thursday 3:51 pm
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>>3816
It seemed magical two years ago when Microsoft's translator did it.
>> No. 3818 Anonymous
12th February 2015
Thursday 5:27 pm
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Anyone else catch the news at the end? It was just as reflective of the times as the show.
>> No. 3819 Anonymous
12th February 2015
Thursday 6:03 pm
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>>3815

GM has been extremely important in agriculture, but the immense cost of meeting regulatory requirements means that we only use a few GM varieties of important staple crops. About 90% of corn, rapeseed, soya and sugar beet grown in the US is genetically modified; In Europe, the proportion varies depending on legislation and local acceptance of GM farming.

I'm particularly excited by golden rice, which is due to be introduced to world markets this year. Vitamin A deficiency is a big problem in many parts of India and Africa, killing about a million and causing half a million cases of blindness; Golden rice has been modified to produce large amounts of beta-carotene, providing plenty of vitamin A. Efforts to introduce golden rice have been frustrated by the usual tree-hugging cretins, but Bill Gates has really moved the cause forwards.

>>3816

Optical character recognition and speech recognition work very well these days, but machine translation is still very poor indeed. Natural language is far more ambiguous and context-dependent than we previously thought, which makes machine translation a formidable task. I deal with a fair amount of internationalisation in software and web development, and machine translation is still of very limited use.
>> No. 3820 Anonymous
12th February 2015
Thursday 6:43 pm
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>>3819

GM does have a lot of potential for solving food and nutrition crisis issues, which I'm all for, but on occasions where the food introduces alien proteins to our systems I think caution is needed.

Testing is difficult though and whether or not there is significant risk to humans is hard to ascertain over, say, a 10 year study because people live such toxic lives anyway and you can't lock someone up for ten years to control their environment. I suppose we could test stuff on Cat A prisoners, but I don't know how I feel about that because I've become a bleeding heart liberal in my advancing years.
>> No. 3821 Anonymous
12th February 2015
Thursday 6:58 pm
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>>3820

>Testing is difficult though and whether or not there is significant risk to humans is hard to ascertain over, say, a 10 year study because people live such toxic lives anyway and you can't lock someone up for ten years to control their environment.

Religious weirdos to the rescue. Ironically, people who belong to odd religious sects are a gift to science, because you can nearly always find a group with a strict prohibition on whatever you're testing to use as a control. There are inevitably a lot of confounding variables, but you can get a lot of valuable data that would otherwise be incredibly difficult to gather.

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