2024... in 1974

In 1974, Saturday Review celebrated 50 years of publication by inviting top thinkers to imagine what the next 50 years would bring.

  • Isaac Asimov saw computers divining sports outcomes and injury forecasts.
  • Andrei Sakharov and Wernher von Braun predicted, basically, the internet.
  • Neil Armstrong envisioned thriving colonies on the moon after 50 years of exploring “every crater, rill, nook, and cranny…”

The things they miss are often also revealing.

I recall a Tomorrow’s World programme showing a family in 2000, witht he boys going upstairs to get their lessons off the tv (PCs were still in the future) rather than to school. A panel member got very sniffy about that, insisting it could never happen because “Education is a group activity.” He may have been right for the majority of the population (even if for the wrong reason) but there are enough homeschoolers around today to go a long way toward refuting him.

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Homeschooling probably dates to the dawn of humanity, and education via the internet is a more recent development. But I wonder if this Tomorrow’s World (1965–2003) panel member was discounting even the existing educational TV programming of the time… like Sesame Street (1969–) and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom (1963–).

I doubt it. As I recall (Iirc this was in the 1970s) it was the idea of physical attendance not being required to which he seemed to object.