Friends and cow-orkers alike have heard me make the now clichéd quip about being disappointed not to have a jetpack yet, living as we do in the year 2000. Jetpack has in fact become a sort of shorthand for some awesome feature that probably won’t get included in a final design.
I still remember some of the sci-fi and futurist inspired visions of where we’d be in the year 2000. Remember George Jetson’s complaint? (“These three-day work weeks are killing me!”). So this article projecting life in the year 2,000 AD from a July 22, 1961 issue of Weekend Magazine mixes the sublime with the absurd, and a handful of things that aren’t entirely off the mark.
Some excerpts:
looks as if everything will be so easy that people will probably die from sheer boredom.
You will be whisked around in monorail vehicles at 200 miles an hour and you will think nothing of taking a fortnight’s holiday in outer space.
Monorail!
You’ll have a home control room - an electronics centre, where messages will be recorded when you’re away from home. This will play back when you return, and also give you up-to-the minute world news, and transcribe your latest mail.
You’ll have wall-to-wall global TV, an indoor swimming pool, TV-telephones and room-to-room TV. Press a button and you can change the décor of a room.
The status symbol of the year 2000 will be the home computer help, which will help mother tend the children, cook the meals and issue reminders of appointments.
(But apparently gender relations will revert to the postwar norm.)
At work, Dad will operate on a 24 hour week. The office will be air-conditioned with stimulating scents and extra oxygen - to give a physical and psychological lift.
Mail and newspapers will be reproduced instantly anywhere in the world by facsimile.
There will be machines doing the work of clerks, shorthand writers and translators. Machines will “talk” to each other.
(Using XML, no doubt.)
It will be the age of press-button transportation. Rocket belts will increase a man’s stride to 30 feet, and bus-type helicopters will travel along crowded air skyways. There will be moving plastic-covered pavements, individual hoppicopters, and 200 m.p.h. monorail trains operating in all large cities.
Rocketbelts? Where’s my jetpack?
Our children will learn from TV, recorders and teaching machines. They will get pills to make them learn faster.
…and to palliate their ADD. (via Reddit)
One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small And the ones that mother gives you Don’t do anything at all
Hmmmm, maybe they were on to something back there in 1961