Re: The Train Wreck is Proceeding Nicely

[Tim May]

On Tuesday, February 18, 2003, at 12:34  AM, Eric Cordian wrote:

Neil Johnson wrote:

However, for you new subscribers, I'd like to point out Tim's record for
predicting the coming revolution.

April 1995
Tim predicts the coming revolution as a result of the bombing of the Murrah
Federal building in Oklahoma City.

December 1999
  Tim predicts the coming revolution due to the "Y2K bug".

Being a futurist is a unrewarding profession.  Bright futurists don't
predict the future.  They look at what's possible, what's probable, and
what's desirable.

And I don't even have any recollection of this "Neil Johnson" person, showing how well he's kept his unoriginal thinking from escaping to where we might have seen it.

Anyone who read my 1999 stuff on Y2K could not have missed my frequent "Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it" comments. I wrote several long articles on how I didn't "know" what the implications might be, but that the costs of preparing were low enough to make me choose to prepare and face the chance of having unused supplies rather than betting that nothing would happen and being wrong.

As for silly comments like "Tim predicts the coming revolution...Oklahoma City," I have no such recollection of making such a clear prediction. I am sure I called for the death of those involved, and hoped it would happen.

And so on. When one writes tens of thousands of commentaries on news items, trends, happenings, etc., one will, perforce, end up commenting on lots of possible developments which may happen, which even _should_ happen, but which actually won't.

If I were being paid to be a careful futurist (whatever they are in this fin-de-siecel era where a much-interviewed futurist is the self-named "Faith Popcorn"), I would hedge my comments and predictions with Rand Corp. and Hudson Institute sorts of vacillations.

But I'm not being paid. You're getting what you paid for. And some of you, like this Neil Johnson person, are giving nothing back in return.

I predicted that PL/I and APL would obsolete the need for all other
computer languages.

I got excited by APL around 1976-7, and even thought about buying myself an IBM 5100. I later became enamored of LISP, bought several LISP machines for my group, and invested in Symbolics. I never thought the simple workstation with a primitive language like C as being successful. (Even in the mid-80s, engineers cost more than a workstation cost.)

Ah, I see you made the same prediction:

I predicted that someday, all computers would be Lisp Machines.

I predicted Sparc would not become a dominant architecture.

And now that is finally coming true...

I predicted the 5th Generation project under Admiral Bobby Inman would in
fact produce a machine as smart as a man.

I started Intel's AI program in 1984, but even I never believed this for a nanosecond. Perhaps because I knew many of the players.

I predicted we'd have cities on the moon and Mars by now.

I predicted the Shuttle program would never succeed. I never expected cities on either body, because there was no economic reason to have them. (I used to hear the stuff about growing ultra-pure crystals in space, but I had seen Wacker's CZ crystal pullers, and I knew that $50K/pound into orbit wasn't going to compete with crystal pullers the size of a basketball court. I knew by 1980 that the Space Shuttle and Space Station would be doing g-job "effects of zero-g on ant colonies" crappy science.)

I predicted Networking would never beat the bandwidth of a 9-track tape in
a Fedex pouch.

I saw by 1978 our buildings in Santa Clara linked by lasers, and our designs being sent up to Oregon on the then-fastest modems, and I saw us leasing channels on satellites, so I knew networking would be big.

I predicted only Geeks would have their own computers.

I had my own computer in 1978 (a Processor Tecnology SOL, which I soldered myself...I knew Lee Felsenstein, Bob Marsh, Steve Wozniak, etc., from the Homebrew Computer Club). But inasmuch as I thought the term "geek" was an insult term like "nigger," I didn't think of myself as either a geek or a nigger. I read Nelson's "Computer Lib" in 1976 and was convinced computers would be ubiquitous.

I also worked with Gordon Moore on scaling trends, so it was pretty clear that milion-transistor chips would be cheap enough to go into t.v. sets in the near future (of 1978).

Well, you get the idea.

As I cruise into crotchety middle-aged engineering, mathematical, and
metaphysical wizardhood, I can only say I have been completely cured of
the urge to predict anything.

I haven't listed all of my _wrong_ predictions, as they are harder to remember than is saying what I thought about each of the issues you raised. I suppose I expected more use of ultra high level languages (some call it AI) instead of the low-level C and C++ we've seen so much of. And I suppose I expected VR to come on stronger than it has.

(Being in the Bay Area, in Silicon Valley, and connected with the Usual Crowd of Hackers/PenSFA/Extropians/Cypherpunks/etc., I saw a lot of Jaron Lanier and Ted Nelson in the late 1980s. I knew a lot of the VR and Habitat/True Names sorts of people at Autodesk and the other VR companies. Each time I bought a new computer I said to my friends, "This will probably be my last major computer purchase before immersive VR becomes the dominant approach." Well, that was a few generations ago, and I just a week ago bought a new flat screen iMac to replace my aging G4 Tower from 1999.)

"Predicting the future is like teaching a pig to sing. You'll never do it,
it's a frustrating experience, and it's not much fun for the pig either."

Advice Tim and other prognosticators should take to heart.

Fuck that. Why should I be like this anonymous "Neil Johnson" character, secure in his non-presence?

Fuck that idea dead.

--Tim May