Peering into the future

Thanks for the good discussion on health care. By the way, I don’t know how many of you noticed, but if you click on the words “health care bill” in the first sentence of my last post, it gives you the text of the Senate bill. One of you commented on how no one had read the bill. There’s your chance.

The Wall Street Journal carried an interesting “Information Age” column Monday by L. Gordon Crovitz. (Read it here.) He argues that most predictions about what technology will be like in the future “won’t come true.”

Then he follows with some of those great “prediction” quotes many of us have heard from the past. My favorite: “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.” Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century Fox said that in 1946.

He may have been right. We don’t have plywood TVs any more.

It reminds me of an artist’s prediction of the future I once saw in a Collier’s Weekly from 1900. It depicts Broadway in New York in 2001, “when modern inventions have been carried to the point of highest development.” The picture was reproduced in a book titled, “America 1900, The Turning Point,” published by Henry Holt and Co. Inc. It shows strange-looking trolleys carrying people on cables in the sky between buildings so tall they rise above the clouds. Passengers stand on precarious platforms waiting for the next car. Other commuters can be seen floating through the air in carriages attached to large balloons. One sign advertises, “Wireless telephone, local and European.” Another sign says, “Quick lunch: compressed food tablet,” and yet another says, “Youth restored by electricity while you wait.” A large building is ominously labeled, “Babel Building.”

Even in an attempt to make the world look as futuristic as possible, the artist couldn’t escape the clothing, carriage and lamp-post styles of the year 1900. It’s kind of like watching the first Star Wars movie and noticing how everyone in the galaxy far, far away has hairstyles from the 1970s.

He scored with the wireless telephone thing, though.

But just because predictions usually look stupid in retrospect doesn’t mean I won’t give you some of my own. I believe television will be much more Internet-focused in the future, and 2010 will carry us a ways down that road. If the current networks exist in a few years, it will be as Internet content providers. You will subscribe to databases that can give you news and entertainment. Already, one company offers a box that will hook your Internet to your TV and give you subscription services from, for example, Netflix or Major League Baseball.

Newspapers will find a way to provide content on new devices that cleverly combine technology with an old-fashioned newspaper feel, attracting advertisers and saving the industry (I can always dream).

Stepping outside of politics, I believe the Democrats will lose big in mid-term elections next fall. Republicans will fall just short of regaining a Senate majority, however.

I want to hear your predictions. As this is a holiday week, I’ll leave this post up for awhile.