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I saw this video before its public release circa 1993. Autotranslation, virtual agents, realtime video conferencing on handheld devices, virtual reality... all there. I was finishing my postdoc at Bell Labs where it was shown to us as a glimpse into the company's future plans. I didn't know where the bandwidth would come from and neither did the presenter when I asked except to say that "It will have to be built, won't it?." Needless to say I didn't have the foresight to invest in it, either

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFWCoeZjx8A&feature=emb_logo

"AT&T's vision of the future, circa 1993 - AT&T Archives"




Interestingly, 1993 is also the year a rather large research endeavor began in Europe, paving the way for the kind of on-the-fly speech translation technology that is now built into Google Assistant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noZBab-Lmss


2min in and you can see they also predicted NIMBYs


Oh, we've been around a lot longer than that.




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