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How close are we to a vision for 2010?

70 points by ColinWright

by rob74

2 subcomments

> she is able to stroll through immigration without stopping because her P-Comm is dealing with the ID checks as she walks.
We're getting closer to digital ID. But outside of a few experiments, there's no international consensus. However, every modern passport has an NFC chip which can be read by most airports. You still need to hold your passport on the reader, but it's usually quicker than queuing for a human.
As far as immigration to the US is concerned (and I guess it is, because I haven't heard of the term "immigration" applied to business travelers or tourists anywhere else in the world), expecting to be able to "stroll through" it sounds increasingly naive after reports of various unsuspecting travelers being detained for weeks and then deported (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton...), and the current to-and-fro around TSA PreCheck and Global Entry (https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/22/politics/shutdonw-tsa-pre...).

by techdmn

4 subcomments

> but no one wants to use a pay-phone when they have their own mobile!
I have a hobby-level interest in avoiding pervasive surveillance, and have been thinking about ditching my phone more often. Something like no-cell Tuesdays.
What if I have a family emergency? I don't have a desk phone, but I could pay more attention to my work email.
What if my car breaks down? I could use a payphone, except those don't really exist these days. I could walk to the nearest gas station and ask to use their phone, but they would probably think I was crazy.
The other thing payphones used to have (at least here and there) was an attached phone book with Yellow Pages where I could find a tow company. Lets say I do manage to beg access to a phone, how do I know who to call?
Now that everyone carries all these things in their pocket, other systems for handling these problems have atrophied.

by mister_mort

0 subcomment

For a similar fun set of reviews of past predictions of future tech, I recommend looking through Youtube channel "KnowledgeHusk"
Selected videos:
"People in the 80s Making Fun of Predictions From the 60s" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-B6zeAKAEQ
"2002 Tried To Predict 2025" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMZ9odjhOnU
"Terrible Predictions About The Future From 2005" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH9kf9KLVVQ
(and many more can be found in their Retrofuturism playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZkkImzuw5q9Kk5KIq1yw... )

by xp84

1 subcomments

This was really fun - it's interesting how many of the scenarios involve public internet terminals. I can see how at the turn of the millennium it would have sounded absurd that we'd be able to hold in our hand a mobile terminal that would allow any serious business to be accomplished, what with text entry being painfully slow, mobile screens being low-resolution, and mobile data being incredibly slow and just rolling out in most places. Indeed, "logging on" from someone else's computer out of necessity was quite common, even in the mid 00s. Of course, the login processes of some websites are still operating on the same assumptions. Gotta love the whole "Keep me logged in? Don't check this on public or shared devices." Like I'm doing my banking at an Internet cafe or something.

by randallsquared

0 subcomment

> Do you want an always-on Alexa in your hotel room?
I encountered literally this for the first time a couple weeks ago. At one point we noticed it was doing the "listening for command" thing during an unrelated conversation, and my wife said, "Alexa, stop listening!", whereupon it told us to use the physical switch for the mic on the device if we didn't want it listening.

by spaqin

0 subcomment

It's interesting to see, a happy, albeit a naive hope for the future. Things we wished for maybe, but in some cases what we have now is the monkey paw version; automatic synchronization of everything with personal data is in reality a privacy nightmare full of sensitive data that's about to leak or already has been used against you by the advertisers.
Reducing mental load and reliance on other people or more primitive technology also skips losing interpersonal relationships, making us more susceptible for even more technological dependence...

by ddxv

1 subcomments

This is quite fun. I've always enjoyed looking at past predictions of the future. This one seemed quite spot on most of the time as well which is quite interesting. In 2010 it might have looked a bit off, but as the author notes now with LLMs a lot more of these predictions have come true.
And yeah, it's always fun seeing the ones that don't come true, ie the connected fridge that orders food for you, and not for lack of trying.

by xtiansimon

1 subcomments

Back in my undergrad years c1994 a professor brought a new assignment to our special topics course in design thinking. It was a report from a NY telecommunications firm.
I can’t recall the details. Only that I “predicted” a dark vision of your refrigerator competing in a foods market to buy your staple products at the best price whenever your stock became low. And then, of course it all goes awry when you end up with 6 cases of milk.
I tried searching for some hint of the telecom project that was the start of our class assignment. No luck. But I did find this viddy on YouTube with a great intro with interviews of the “person on the street”.
https://youtu.be/waQy2WKHiwY

by xp84

1 subcomments

The "agent" stuff was a fascinating vision. It seems like an alternate history more than a future, as I'm sure if we all let our claws talk amongst themselves they won't be finding ways to collectively help us -- they'll probably be scamming crypto from each other or something.

by randallsquared

0 subcomment

> Ah! The dream of personal agents. Not even close.
Not close in terms of ubiquity, but perhaps pretty close in terms of time.

by Paianni

0 subcomment

I suspect the end of Dennard Scaling scuppered this sort of utopia.

by nstart

2 subcomments

One piece that I find interesting is how hopeful people sounded about tech that had access to your data. Folks higher up in the tech world often complain about how the media complains about them too much. And while the media definitely has issues in how they report, it's easier to see how we got to this point where tech is vilified. You compare the hope of the past and match it to the exploitation of the present, and you can't help but feel sometimes that in a game of picking straws, the current timeline picked dystopian over utopian.

by aib

0 subcomment

That work like this often predicts a good portion of the technological advancements, but usually completely misses the mark on the execution and the enshittified commodification is why I like reading cyberpunk and other dystopian sci-fi.

by Razengan

2 subcomments

With current AI computers are finally starting to do what people in the 1980s thought computers would be doing in 2000.

by fragmede

0 subcomment

So the work being judged is a piece from 2000 theorizing about 2010, or 10 years hence. If we were to make similar guesses about the future from here, the question is: what does 2036 look like?
At the cost of looking dumb in 10 years, and also today, here are some vague notions of mine. The big one of course is where will AI be in 10 years. My prediction is we're still going to be arguing about AGI, except no one cares anymore because it's good enough, just like the Turing test isn't as interesting either. There will be several AI religions/cults. Expect to see insular communes/communities of high-trust that are xenophobic and only interact with outsiders as necessary.
Robotics will have advanced to a point where some level of society has a robot maid to "go get me a beer" that also folds and puts away clothes.
Biology will have advanced so men are no longer necessary to provide DNA for offspring (this already works in mice). Artificial wombs will mean women aren't necessary for offspring either. This will reshape society even more than AI did.
Capitalism won't have fallen. UBI will be tried in some places and result in a tide of depression and suicide, but linking the two won't be politically viable.
Anyway, I'm sure I'm way off the mark, but my time machine's just as good as yours, so :p