- The home will double as a place of employment, with men and women conducting much of their work at the computer terminal. This will affect both the architecture and location of the home. It will also blur the distinction between places of residence and places of business, with uncertain effects on zoning, travel patterns and neighborhoods.
(This basically describes my life ;)
- Home-based shopping will permit consumers to control manufacturing directly, ordering exactly what they need for "production on demand."
(Kickstarter is a nice example.)
- There will be a shift away from conventional workplace and school socialization. Friends, peer groups and alliances will be determined electronically, creating classes of people based on interests and skills rather than age and social class.
(You're participating in one such peer group right now...)
- A new profession of information "brokers" and "managers" will emerge, serving as "gatekeepers," monitoring politicians and corporations and selectively releasing information to interested parties.
(Bloggers, obviously, but more interestingly, Wikileaks, Lulzsec, Anonymous...)
The overlapping of home and workplace appears to have been the primary pattern of human habitation since before the bronze age. It is the recent pattern of home and workplace segregation which has been facilitated by 20th century transportation technology which is the radical exception.
I would argue that it was industrialisation, not transport, that led to home/workplace segregation. Large mills, running on water or steam power, could not exist on a small scale or too near to residences.
Just as much, because large mills give the ability to monitor your workers. Getting people to clock on 8 hours per day (or, before the socialists changed it, 14+ hours per day) gives you much more ability to extract labour from them.
-The home does double as a place of employment, but this has had no discernible effect on the architecture and location of the home, or led to significant changes in zoning or travel patterns.
-Home-based shopping has indeed taken off, but manufacturing has not switched to a production-on-demand model (and Kickstarter has nothing to do with this whatsoever-- that's about seed funding.)
-Friends, peer groups and alliances are indeed determined electronically, but this has not (yet) led to "classes of people" akin to social class.
-Information brokers do serve as gatekeepers, but this has not become professionalized; bloggers (and groups like Wikileaks, Lulzsec, etc.) are amateurs, and have not developed professional standards or codes of ethics, etc.
In other words, Yogi Berra was right: prediction is hard, especially about the future.
Its hard for the fish to recognize the water. Seeing the whole transformation happen (having been alive in 1982) this has largeley happened.
Houses are built with home-office space, with network wiring throughout, with attention to where light will interfere with screens. TV/monitors in every room, phone wiring all but obsolete.
SO houses are not a totally different shape or anything, but they are different. And who would buy an old house with a parlor, a sleeping porch and summer kitchen?
Amazon started with a drop-ship model where books were ordered/printed on demand. Their volume outgrew this. So its been transformed twice.
And you don't think young people divide the world into 'those who text/twitter/facebook' and 'old people'? Maybe you don't select friends based on class, but its happening anyway.
I think bloggers are maturing right now. Traditional media is in decline yet we have hardly any way to select quality blog sources, there are few 'big names' that last long enough to become entrenched in society like WSJ or the Times.
I'm astonished by the article for an entirely different reason: how was it so easy to predict all this so well?
When my wife and I are looking for homes, we definitely take the needs of our two home offices into consideration. We don't care about formal living and dining room spaces.
A company like Dell has very tight supply lines made possible by online orders. They couldn't do what they do efficiently if they had to predict demand and stuff a retail sales channel with product six months to a year in advance. That's how you did it in 1982.
As far as manufacturing is concerned, print-on-demand is a good example of one sector that has gone into the production-on-demand direction. Springer has almost entirely to print-on-demand, for example.
But yeah, I'm with you that the extent of future changes is almost always either over- or underestimated.
That's a bit of an overstatement where Springer is concerned. Right now, they have 15,000 titles from the past 5 years available as print-on-demand, which is impressive enough, but they publish 6,500 titles per year, and have been for decades-- so they are still a long way from having even half of their titles available in that form. Not exactly "almost entirely".
You're right about architecture and location of homes.
But:
* there's a discernable trend in my social circles to locate well away from cities (and the first world) - but I can't find good statistics to back this up as more than just anecdote
* companies such as IBM claimed that due to the expansion of teleworking, they're able to save USD700m per year (but I keep finding secondary sources for this claim, and anyway they probably sell telecommuting solutions, so decreasing the trustworthiness of the numbers)
* growth in creatives filling my local cafe as their office makes it almost impossible to get a table to drink an espresso and have a slice of cake - again hopelessly anecdotal
It's actually maddening that there don't appear to be any good statistics (or even academic papers with theoretical models) on this.
Anyone with any national or urban statistics that correlate things like economic growth, percentage days worked from home, average growth in peak commute time traffic-kilometers in urban and suburban traffic systems versus actual? Extra points for urban transit ridership growth or shrinkage during peak commute time.
Nope. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying if you order a custom machine from Apple they build it to order. I have followed this process online from manufacture to delivery.
On a more general note…
Saying X does Y does not imply X only does Y.
However saying X was wrong in their prediction of Y doing Z can be disproven by one present example of Y doing Z.
We can argue how much the internet has been a cause of some companies adopting build-on-demand or the relative slow uptake of build-on-demand as a strategy (and whether the adoption of China as the de-facto mass-manufacturer for all modern goods and the subsequent need to bulk order in advance is a major factor in its uptake) .
However we cannot argue about whether some businesses do it. This is proven.
The "uncertain effects on zoning" seem to be just a way to money-grab around here. I had to pay my township for a zoning permit to have a home office... that is, a fee just to have a computer used for business inside a residence.
The township knows I work from home because the address for my business license is my home. A zoning permit is required for any home occupation, even if it involves no business use of the home beyond having a computer there. That's on top of the annual business privilege fee and gross receipts tax. Being self-employed means a lot of hands in your pocket around here...
- Copies of the report, titled ''Teletext and Videotex in the United States,'' were scheduled to be available after June 28 from McGraw-Hill Publications, 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020
When this was written the Internet hadn't really been developed very far and the report cited is talking about videotex services (like France's Minitel or the UK's Prestel). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex
These services tended to be centralized and look nothing like the current Internet (although France's Minitel network did use packet switching and some service providers ran their own data nodes).
I remember really well playing with Prestel and Minitel in the early 1980s using acoustic couplers and dedicated terminals. The feeling associated with the sudden access to unlimited information at incredible speeds (1200/75 baud) was really amazing (even just being able to look people's phone numbers up on white pages). Wikipedia has a nice example of French Minitel terminal from the year this report was written: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minitel1.jpg
What's most interesting is that there wasn't much 'future' in this report given that France already had a functioning viewdata system at that time and it was clear from the services that were being offered that the things mentioned in this report were actually available or easy extrapolations.
Also notable was that viewtex services used a subscriber pays model where access was metered by the minute and added to the phone bill. On Minitel some services were free (except for the per minute charge), e.g. white pages, other were premium (access to special databases, for example) and some were very expensive (access to Le Minitel Rose where pornographic chat etc. was available).
As William Gibson might have said: the future was already here, it just wasn't evenly distributed yet.
Amazing predictions, IMHO, except for the last one:
The study also predicted a much greater diversity in the American political power structure. ''Videotex might mean the end of the two party system, as networks of voters band together to support a variety of slates - maybe hundreds of them,'' it said.
Am I alone in thinking that it we're more polarized and entrenched in our two party system than ever, with internet aided confirmation bias being one of the primary causes? (I.e., political "filter bubbles.")
Keep in mind we're operating on a very small sample size (a few years where the internet has been a major component of news, communication, and debate). As such it's probably too simplistic to label every political development of the last 15 years as due solely to the rise of the internet, rather than to the development of political trends with entirely different roots and causes.
Obama gained the democratic nomination due in huge part to networks of voters band[ing] together
Am I alone in thinking that it we're more polarized and entrenched in our two party system than ever, with internet aided confirmation bias being one of the primary causes? (I.e., political "filter bubbles.")
Confirmation bias is a problem, but the two-party system isn't the same as it used to be.
Some would argue that the Tea Party is almost a third party, that the Republican party has attempted to swallow.
Look at what the internet did for Ron Paul. More people make individual small donations to candidates online. The more this grows, the less each candidate will rely on a formal party to get them elected. Hopefully this will allow them to splinter off into smaller political parties.
I'm reminded of Philip K. Dick's prediction that mankind would be networked together across nations and continents, making us into a super-efficient race of engineers.
SO CLOSE. (OK, I paraphrased the above).
In this case, this article represents some pretty awesome ideating. I bet that not many of the article authors invested in Google, Dejanews, Yahoo, or AOL, though.
I had a brilliant moment of ideating in 1993 when I realized "Domain Names are going to be huge. There will be a landrush."
I pooled my dollars with some friends, and we bought ... foo.net. Cha-ching! Shopping.com, tv.com, etc. didn't really cross my mind.
What's really super hard in my opinion is setting oneself up to benefit from these tectonic trends; at least, it's hard for me!
I had a brilliant moment of ideating in 1993 when I realized "Domain Names are going to be huge.[..] foo.net
Oh, ouch. I cluelessed my way through life during the late nineties Internet boom, and it's often in the back of my mind that I might be doing the same now and not know until hindsight kicks in in 5-10 years.
It's funny, I had just the opposite reaction. To my eyes it seems like we have technology that far exceeds what they envisioned but we haven't managed to be anywhere near as effective at the predicted at using it. To run down the list...
"The home will double as a place of employment" - We easily have the technology to do this and I'd guess 80% or more of jobs could be done from home yet the established pre-information technology culture keeps us driving into the office every day.
"Home-based shopping will permit consumers to control manufacturing directly" - Services like Amazon have made a lot more available but the products are largely the same. The technology exists for far greater customization but the profit margin would be lower so no one has done it.
"A new profession of information ''brokers'' and ''managers'' will emerge" - This has happened but rather than "monitor" politicians and corporations these brokers tend to work for them more often than not.
"The ''extended family'' might be recreated if the elderly can support themselves through electronic homework" - I'd concede e-mail has made it easier to keep in touch with my grandparents but beyond that technology hasn't done that much for me. Heck, one of my grandparents has an iPhone now and we don't even do the weepy video chats like you see in the Apple commercials.
I guess you could say it has created some diversity in politics by giving voice to the minority but the two biggest Political Internet phenomenons of the last decade (Howard Dean and Ron Paul) didn't get anywhere near being in actual power.
"The technology exists for far greater customization but the profit margin would be lower so no one has done it."
CafePress, Zazzle, Shapeways, etc. I'll agree that it isn't as wide-spread as you might have expected from the prediction, but per-order production does exist.
Also, Howard Dean and Ron Paul HAVE actual power. Sure, they aren't the president, but to imply that governors, senators and congresspersons don't have any "REAL" power undersells both the positions and the work involved.
"Home-based shopping will permit consumers to control manufacturing directly" - Services like Amazon have made a lot more available but the products are largely the same. The technology exists for far greater customization but the profit margin would be lower so no one has done it.
The technology to do that is 3D printing, but it's at a very early stage right now. I think they got this right in 1982 but underestimated how long it would take -- maybe because they didn't understand how much competitive manufacturing depends on scale and offshoring.
What's also interesting is that almost any other predictions they could have made would have become partially true. There's virtually every service and idea imaginable online now to at least some degree. I'd be shocked if most of the prediction didn't become at least a bit true since they're extrapolated from the non-internet world.
I think the tea party has been driven mostly by traditional media, namely talk radio and cable news (Rick Santelli's original rant was broadcast on CNBC). Of course there has been a lot of online organization but I think the main promotion occurred over traditional channels.
Santelli's rant occurred on CNBC, but it was watched and shared on YouTube. Mainstream media totally missed the Tea Party movement, which got rolling during the bailouts in late 2008 but wasn't really covered until after Scott Brown's surprise election win in the winter of 2010.
I wonder if the accuracy of this report was just base on some lucky guesses.
Right now, there are probably hundreds of such predictions about the future. Look at them again in 20 years, most of them will probably be incorrect. Yet there is always this one report (like this one from 1982) that will be shockingly accurate. The problem is that by then, it won't provide any useful information. We need is to know this is correct in 1982, not 2011.
Line from the article, "But for all the potential benefits the new technology may bring, the report said, there will be unpleasant ''trade offs'' in ''control."
That surely came about in ways they could not have imagined.
Another great prediction of the rise of electronic commerce way back in 1967 from the Harvard Business Review archives.
Including an amazing illustration.
I'm sure there is some bias in terms of picking the articles with predictions that, to some degree, panned out. But, if this author has a track record of accurate predictions, he is worth following.
- The home will double as a place of employment, with men and women conducting much of their work at the computer terminal. This will affect both the architecture and location of the home. It will also blur the distinction between places of residence and places of business, with uncertain effects on zoning, travel patterns and neighborhoods.
(This basically describes my life ;)
- Home-based shopping will permit consumers to control manufacturing directly, ordering exactly what they need for "production on demand."
(Kickstarter is a nice example.)
- There will be a shift away from conventional workplace and school socialization. Friends, peer groups and alliances will be determined electronically, creating classes of people based on interests and skills rather than age and social class.
(You're participating in one such peer group right now...)
- A new profession of information "brokers" and "managers" will emerge, serving as "gatekeepers," monitoring politicians and corporations and selectively releasing information to interested parties.
(Bloggers, obviously, but more interestingly, Wikileaks, Lulzsec, Anonymous...)