I find it funny, complicated, and intersting how often narratives turn out to be wrong.
This is typically only obvious in hindsight. Often many years, decades, or generations after.
The best heuristic I have found to explain why this happens, is also the simplest.
Douglas Adams - Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy..the reactions to technologies.
- Anything that is in the world when you are born. Just works and is normal and ordinary - a natural part of the world.
- Anything that is invented 15 - 35 is new and exciting, and you can get a career in it.
- Anything invented after he 35 is horrible and a detriment to society.
The worst kind of argument about any new technology: “you don’t need [new thing], you can already do that with [old way]”
- You don’t need a car, you have a horse.
- You don’t need e-mail, we have mail !
- You don’t need e-commerce, you have stores !
- You don’t need Instagram, you have photo albums !
- You don’t need Google Maps, we have paper maps !
- You don’t need TikTok, we have cocaine !
Examples from around the internet of predictions going both ways. Please share any other good ones.
- Why the internet will fail - Newsweek in 1995.
- Worst tech predictions of all time by some of the most famous tech entrepreneurs
- Our brains won’t be able to keep up with them - “ In 1904, The New York Times reported on a debate in Paris between a brain specialist and a physician about the dangers of driving automobiles at high speeds—because the brain can’t keep up. “It remains to be proved how fast the brain is capable of traveling,” reads the article. “If it cannot acquire an eight-mile per hour speed, then an auto running at the rate of 80 miles per hour is running without the guidance of the brain, and the many disastrous results are not to be marveled at.”
- Recorded Music will destroy all musical ability - In 1906, composer John Philip Sousa warned the world about “The Menace of Mechanical Music ”in an article attacking machines that brought symphonies into people’s homes. He bemoaned the fact that fewer and fewer cheap lutes were being purchased “all because the automatic music devices are usurping their places.”
- Electricity is just a fad - Junius Morgan to his son JP Morgan.
- Telephones will never catch on - In 1876, the President of Western Union, William Orton, dismissed phones as a “toy” when Alexander Graham Bell offered to sell him the patent for $100,000. Orton wrote an internal memo stating, “The idea is idiotic on the face of it. Furthermore, why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States?”
- “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” That’s what Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft said in 2007
- The 20thCentury Fox kingpin Darryl Zanuck sniffed at the idea of idiot boxes keeping people out of the theater to see his company’s productions like How Green Was My Valley and The Grapes of Wrath. In 1946, he predicted, “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”
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