Do You Have Any Predictions for 2008?
Just make sure they are better than these:
- “Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments.” —Roman engineer Julius Sextus Frontinus, A.D. 100
- “The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.” —John Eric Ericksen, surgeon to Queen Victoria, 1873
- “Law will be simplified [over the next century]. Lawyers will have diminished, and their fees will have been vastly curtailed.” —journalist Junius Henri Browne, 1893
- “It doesn’t matter what he does, he will never amount to anything.” —Albert Einstein’s teacher to Einstein’s father, 1895
- “It would appear we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology.” —computer scientist John von Neumann, 1949
- “The Japanese don’t make anything the people in the U.S. would want.” —Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, 1954
- “Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within 10 years.” —Alex Lewyt, president of the Lewyt Vacuum Cleaner Company, quoted in the New York Times, June 10, 1955
- “Before man reaches the moon, your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.” —Arthur Summerfield, U.S. Postmaster General under Eisenhower, 1959
- “By the turn of the century, we will live in a paperless society.” —Roger Smith, chairman of General Motors, 1986
- “I predict the internet … will go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” —Bob Metcalfe, InfoWorld, 1995
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Comments
Ian,
the rocket mail one’s really funny! Almost can’t take it seriously that he said that meaning it!
The GM guy is probably not bad with his prediction, just about a couple of decades to quick. Otherwise his prediction is stil realistic. Consider rocket mail, it will never happen - we have Email instead. It’s like those huge floating round TV-sets in Space Odyssey - Kubrick didn’t see LCD screens coming 
I predict that by 2020 we will be mostly paperless and productive.
I myself am almost paperless right now. Scanners haven’t reached their golden age yet.
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Roger Smith died last yeat (2007, RIP) and can no longer defend his predictions, but I’m still here.
Dear Ian,
Many of my predictions can be found, in context, in my book, INTERNET COLLAPSES, still available, cheap, on paper but not by rocket, at Amazon.com.
Thanks for including me on your list.
HAPPY 2008!
/Bob Metcalfe