A video console not only for surveillance, but also for online shopping and e-mail, as predicted in 1967.
This video clip from 1967 displays incredible foresight about the future of on-line shopping and email on home computers. It’s easy to laugh at the primitive credit/debit displays on the home computer screens, but remember this video was made almost 20 years before the term “internet” became commonplace. And most consumers didn’t become comfortable with online shopping until 2000 or later.
In 1965, comic strips predicted that the human brain would soon be directly connected to computers. Will this become a reality?
Detail from the December 26, 1965 edition of the Sunday comic strip “Our New Age”
Athelstan Spilhaus’ predictions in a 1965 edition of the comic strip Our New Age may not be entirely serious, but they’re still laughably far off the mark today: the artist imagined that by 2016, we’d be able to improve our intelligence with magic smart pills and by hooking our brains directly to computers. Of course, the next prediction in that strip is that by 2056, our holiday dinners cooked by robots could be served to us by friendly, intelligent animals trained to be household helpers – including kangaroos.