{"id":643,"date":"2008-03-13T08:16:42","date_gmt":"2008-03-13T12:16:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=643"},"modified":"2008-02-19T11:34:51","modified_gmt":"2008-02-19T15:34:51","slug":"the-future-aint-what-it-used-to-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=643","title":{"rendered":"The Future Ain&#8217;t What it Used to be"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.theendoftheuniverse.ca\">The Website at the End of the Universe<\/A> points to a couple of sites which examine books written a few decades ago to see how well their predictions about today hold up.  The results are definitely mixed.<\/p>\n<p>The Pointless Museum has pretty scans of <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.pointlessmuseum.com\/museum\/usbornebookofthefutureindex.php\">The Usborne Book of the Future<\/A>, written in 1979 about the year 2000.  Sadly, I don&#8217;t think that the 2020 Olympic games will be held on a lunar base.<\/p>\n<p>Crummy is doing an in-depth study called <A HREF=\"http:\/\/crummy.com\/writing\/TheFuture\/\">The Future, a Retrospective<\/A> about a book from 1989 called <I>Future Stuff<\/I>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This website is a 2007 audit of 1989&#8217;s future. I&#8217;ll find what happened to the predicted products, and to the people and companies who were going to bring them to you. I&#8217;ll dig up the appropriate patents and old articles about the products.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Some predictions are reasonably close, simply by dint of the book being written less than 20 years ago.  But most things didn&#8217;t turn out quite the way the authors expected, and a few are truly tone-deaf.<\/p>\n<p>(Also, don&#8217;t forget the <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.paleofuture.com\/\">Paleo-Future blog<\/A> for more &#8220;looks at a future that never was.&#8221;)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Website at the End of the Universe points to a couple of sites which examine books written a few decades ago to see how well their predictions about today hold up. The results are definitely mixed. The Pointless Museum has pretty scans of The Usborne Book of the Future, written in 1979 about the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}