“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” – Peter Thiel
During the late 60’s, the future of computing was going to be massive centralization. Companies such as IBM were building massive computer centres in a centralized locations (Zimmermann, 2017). These computers could only be afforded by large corporations, governmental agencies and universities. Furthermore, the market was also centralised and in the hands of a few large companies (IBM) (Zimmermann, 2017). However, the dreaming of the future was extravagant. In the 1960’s the comic Closer Than We Think! written by Arthur Radebaugh and published in 1958 a wild future consisting of solar-powered cars, crops the size of school buses, global weather control, space hospitals, moon bases were depicted. But the 60’s didn’t just have large computers and comics fantasising about the future, humans also managed to land the first time on the moon in 1969. In combination, this led to an exciting and rightful vision for the future full of technological advancements.
Contrary as it seems, in 2020 it seems like we are back to a similar Zeitgeist as the 1960’s. Although the personal computers have gotten smaller and decentralised over the globe, computing processing power still seems to be more centralised via Amazon AWS. Additionally, there seem to be a few large corporations (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook), similar to the market environment in the 1960’s. The people are getting excited again for space travel through companies such as SpaceX and are making wild predictions about what the future of AI, VR, crypto, etc. hold.
Similar to what happened in the 1960’s, will happen again in the next decades. Many of the dreamt-up versions of future technology will cease to exist. However, on the contrary many of these technologies will also be developed even though they still sound crazy in today’s time. In the aforementioned comic Closer Than We Think! 42 wild visions of future technology are shown, yet in 2020 around 21 of them (electric cars, speech recognition, etc.) have become reality. Thus, although future technological predictions can sound crazy and borderline insane, they often tend to become reality given enough time.
Novak, M., 2020. 42 Visions For Tomorrow From The Golden Age Of Futurism. [online] Gizmodo. Available at: [Accessed 8 October 2015].
Thiel, P., n.d. Peter Thiel At Yale: We Wanted Flying Cars, Instead We Got 140 Characters. [online] Yale School of Management. Available at: [Accessed 8 October 2020].
Zimmermann, K., 2017. History Of Computers: A Brief Timeline. [online] livescience.com. Available at: [Accessed 7 October 2020].
