Frank Znidarsic <[email protected]> wrote: Look at the picture. They predicted tug boat airplanes, painted floating > signs, boies as flight path markers. They knew that air travel was coming > but they could only extend the existing technology to explain it.
That is a great picture. But the person who painted it knew nothing about aviation. If you had asked aviators experienced with airplanes and dirigibles how the future might have looked, they would have given you a much more accurate description. In the 1950s many books and cartoons portrayed robots of the future as being similar to people, walking on two legs with faces and hands. John Bockris, who was a superb scientist and who know a lot about technology once ridiculed the notion of household robots dressed in tuxedos pouring wine. Why they would be dressed in tuxedos I do not know. Anyway, as everyone now knows most robots even in the 1950s and 60s did not look like people. We may eventually have mobile robots that resemble people or animals but the next ones to emerge will look like automobiles, because that is what they will be. Isaac Asimov once described a robot used to spelling and grammatical errors in manuscripts, in one of his I Robot stories. The robot looked like a person -- they all did. It used a red pencil to mark up a paper manuscript. The ability to use a pencil and do this would be far more advanced than any robot or personal computer. Yet Microsoft Word and other programs have been checking spelling and grammar effectively for over 20 years. That task is easier than Asimov imagined it would be. In 1978 I was working with minicomputers. I got a list of 120,000 correctly spelled English. I wrote an effective spell checking program with it, along with a WYSIWYG text editor. I haven't had to worry about spelling since then. Some thing are harder to automate than we anticipated, but others are easier. - Jed
