This Saturday Night Live sketch from (1976?) is chock full of Walter Mondale, Fran Tarkenton, and a slew of other references sure to sail over the youngsters' heads. The sketch stars Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman and Chevy Chase.
Bob MacKenzie wrote a relatively balanced and thoughtful piece about the future of television in the February 3, 1974 Oakland Tribune titled, "A 'Tomorrow' Look At World Of TV." Even articles about television were shaped by the energy fears of the 1970s.
"It now seems possible that we won't keep getting richer," MacKenzie writes. "The energy to run those room-size television screens and 3-D telecasts may have to be used for something more mundane.... like heating the joint or getting the old man to work and back."
Later in the article, MacKenzie explains what made movie theaters unique in an era before HBO and VHS tapes, "At present the movie theaters are offering patrons what they can't get on their home screens - bloody violence, nudity, sex, naughty words. But even those never-failing attractions will be available on television in the future...."
The piece in its entirety appears below.
Malcolm Muggeridge, the ancient, acidic book critic writing in Esquire, likes to refer to "future historians . . . if there are any."
We must now consider the case of future television watchers, if there are any.
What will they watch, and on what?
Every era rewrites the future; visionaries of the 1960s told us about all the fantastic electronic gear that would doubtless bring the world into the living rooms of future Americans - not only in sounds and pictures, but in odors too; specials about pollution would come complete with stink. The images would likely be three-dimensional and life size. Some of the more fervent prognosticators even looked forward to feelevision.
Video screens, it was said with what seemed optimism at the time, would cover entire walls in our homes. Channels would be unlimited; the viewer would be able to tune in on a Russian news program or a course in Latvian cooking at the touch of a button, or rather, a wave of the hand over a sensory node.
Banking and shopping would be done at home through two-way television communications. Voting would be done directly through the video system. Local town meetings would be conducted through television, with the participants all sitting home.
Three-dimensional television, technically feasible through ionization of alpha particles in the air that fills the living room, would bring life-size actors walking around in the room. Viewers would be able to enter into the drama, play roles, with computerized dialogue responding to the home player's improvised lines.
It all sounded wonderful. Or did it?
All those dreams of endless fun and self-improvement through the magic of super-television depended in part of the reigning ideology of the time which was: everything is always going to keep getting bigger and better.
Suddenly the doctrine of eternal abundance as a basic American right is seen as not so certain any more. We are running out of things. And the inevitability of progress can't be taken quite so readily for granted.
It now seems possible that we won't keep getting richer. The energy to run those room-size television screens and 3-D telecasts may have to be used for something more mundane.... like heating the joint or getting the old man to work and back.
The supersize television screens postulated a complete changeover in television technology; in other words, the scrapping of every piece of television equipment now in use - every home set, every camera and videotape machine. For, to increase the size of the screen considerably, we would have to increase the numbers of lines of transmission. That means new machines.
This could happen in 100 years. Almost anything could. But it probably won't happen for a long while, so finish paying off that color set.
Does the energy crunch and all its attendant melancholy side-effects mean that television technology isn't going anywhere?
Not at all. In the near future we'll be receiving new messages new waves on new equipment - not in life-size tri-dimensional smellovision, but in conventional television with improvements.
Like miniaturization, for instance. This branch of the electronic sciences has boomed in the past few decades. The tiny transistors which replaced the cumbersome vacuum tubes have themselves been replaced by even tinier, miraculously encoded bits of metal called MOS chips. One chip the size of a nailhead replaces hundreds of transistors. Not only are they littler, they're cheaper.
What does this mean for you and me? How about a perfectly flat television set that can be hung on the wall like a picture? Perfectly feasible in the near future. And the wrist television set, a la Dick Tracy, is now a practicable machine. Within a decade or so, you may be carrying a tiny walkie-talkie-like device in your shirt pocket. We may all be in instant audial and visual touch with one another.
Once the technology of miniature television receivers is worked out, they will be inexpensive to construct. And they will use less energy than present set, the pocket TV set will be as handy as a pocket calculator - and probably less expensive, since everyone will have one.
Every technological advance has its darker side, of course. If everyone is immediately reachable by two-way television, your boss will always be able to find you - not to mention your wife and your friendly local loan company.
Cassette TV is really on the way, too. A home library of cassettes will be a normal middle-class acquisition long before the Tribune Tower weathers its second centennial. But don't expect home cassettes to arrive immediately, or to be inexpensive when they do arrive. It will be a long time before cassettes reach the mass-distribution economics of the music recording industry. even when it does, a taped television program will cost at least twice what you will pay for an LP music tape.
Since, as mentioned before, it's just possible we won't all be richer then, how will the average family buy TV cassettes of the movies, instruction courses, plays, etc, that will be offered?
Probably by renting cassettes, or borrowing them from public libraries. Cassette TV, when it arrives, will bring the convenience of books and magazines: the viewer will watch a program of his choice, at a time of his choosing.
Full-scale home cassette television should arrive within 10 years, provided we do not develop air shortage in the meantime, and provided the Japanese continue to improve in what used to be called American knowhow.
What about television programs? How will they change?
100 years in the future is very far ahead to peer; if there are still television programs then, they will be about things of interest to a people who will be as unlike us as we are unlike the steerage passengers in the Mayflower. Perhaps their programs will be instructional "How to Eat Plastic," or "I Breathed in Los Angeles and Lived."
Who knows? We will leave these matters to future television columnists, if any. But we can look into the immediate future and make some educated guesses about programs in 10 and 20 years, based on the ways programs are changing now.
The most immediately obvious evolution in television is toward bigger and better movies for television. In a very few years, features produced for TV have moved from skimpily budgeted trash (Z-pictures, one critic called them) to a healthy form that often supplies good entertainment and occasionally brings memorable drama.
TV-movies still supply plenty of trash (perhaps trash is a needed commodity; the world has never been without it), and budgets are still small. But changes are coming, and very soon.
Small budgets and high aspirations have managed fine television movies like "Brian's Song"; but in the future producers may not be so confined in the money department. Ways are being found to produce full-scale motion pictures for television.
"The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" might be considered the first of anew generation of television movies. Produced with scope and size, this fine picture was budgeted at $900,000 - still a low expense for a theatrical movie, but double or triple the cost of most TV-movies. A network contract for four showings, plus planned revenue for European theatrical bookings, will pay for the film and bring a profit.
Another venture, on NBC, is called International World Premiere. By this plan, new movies for television will be seen on NBC the same night they open in theaters in other countries - so the producers, with revenues from both TV and theaters, can hire major stars and deliver full-scale production.
Eventually, as other ways of financing television films are found, movies for television will become the equal of theatrical movies - in quality if not in sensationalism.
At present the movie theaters are offering patrons what they can't get on their home screens - bloody violence, nudity, sex, naughty words.
But even those never-failing attractions will be available on television in the future - if not in the regularly scheduled programs, then in cassette television. And, needless to say, Cassettes will bring the era of readily-available TV pornography. Whether that constitutes an advance for the civilized world the reader must decide for himself.
And as long as people persist in being human, television drama will concern the same subjects that drama has always treated: the timeless issues of love and faith and valor and ambition and loss, the yearnings of the heart and itchings of the glands.
People will always be interested in these things. And television, or whatever replaces it in the incalculable, unpredictable future, will still be staging the stories about the good guys versus the bad guys.
With any luck, the good guys will still be winning.
I can't believe it's been a year since we last looked at the book, The Tricentennial Report: Letters from America. Published by the Atlantic Richfield Company in 1977, the book collects the hopes and fears of common people looking forward 100 years to the United States Tricentennial.
The advertisement below appeared in the June 16, 1976 Oakland Tribune (Oakland, CA) and asked for submissions from the general public.
While we here at the Paleo-Future blog usually abhor input from readers, this seems like as good a time as any to open up the floor to discussion. What do you think the year 2076 A.D. will look like? Remember, you have 32 years on these people. Your predictions should then be 32 years smarter. Right, smarty-pants? Right? 
When you're done with your prediction, mail it to:
The Mayor of Blog
10101 Blogosphere Lane
Internet, California 95041
Stanley F. Yolles, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Mental Health wrote a piece which was published in the March 4, 1970 New Castle News (New Castle, PA) titled, "Drugs in 2000 A.D." An excerpt appears below.
At the turn of the century then, which is only 30 years from now, a nurse visiting a 75-year-old person may be engaged as part of her job in making sure that he is taking regularly several kinds of vitamin doses, a painkiller, a hypnotic dream regulator, an anti-depressant, a sedative or psychostimulant, and so on.
The March 30, 1978 Titusville Herald (Titusville, PA) ran a story about Honeywell's Man-Made Sciences Group titled, "Between Man and Machine." An excerpt which quotes Arnold Kanarick appears below.
"Human-computer interaction is the real growth area," Kanarick says. "I don't think it's too blue-sky to say that you'll find a computer in the American home by the year 2000. They're getting smaller and less expensive every year. One day computers will be running our houses, ordering our groceries, doing a thousand things we now do for ourselves.
"Interacting with them will be a common and casual thing, like using the telephone is today. No matter how automated the world becomes the machines will still be working for our convenience, and not the other way around."
Carl T. Rowan wrote a piece which appeared in the July 3, 1976 Stevens Point Daily Journal (Stevens Point, WI) titled, "Sees hatred yet a century hence."
Rowan covers issues of racism, eugenics and elitism in the century leading up to the United States tricentennial. The piece appears below in its entirety.
GALAXY SPACE STATION (July 4, 2076) - At least 120 children and a spaceship driver were laser-beamed to death yesterday when Galaxians resorted to violence to try to prevent the spaceshipping of school children here from the predominantly black Stardust Space Station a few thousand miles away.
The above may strike you as a highly unlikely news story to mark the celebration of America's tricentennial. But it sums up what I see as I honor a request from Portland, Ore., that I look into my crystal ball and peek at human relations a century from now.
The people of 2076 (if any survive) will have made scientific progress so incredible that millions will have liberated themselves from Mother Earth and her finite resources such as water, food, petroleum, coal. But they will only prove that while humans get smarter they don't grow wiser.
Those who become the new pioneers, seeking a richer life on space stations beyond our polluted atmosphere, will be burdened by hatreds, prejudices and fears as old-fashioned as those that bedeviled Americans in the days of Jefferson Davis and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Racism, chauvinism, snobbery, greed will still dominate human affairs despite incredible developments in genetic engineering - plus chemicals and new surgical techniques designed to control the intellect, and modify the behavior, personality and mood of 21st century man and woman.
The truth is that, in seeking to alter genes, chromosomes and every other basic element of human life so as to create a super race - and who is superior intellectually, morally, physically. Those deemed inferior will find their families doomed to vanish in one generation. By 2076 only the elite will be permitted to procreate, and even then under carefully monitored circumstances.
Blacks wound up predominant on the Stardust Space Station, in fact, having escaped to this outer-space refuge when rumors spread that genetic engineers had ordered the extinction of all the "inferior blacks." According to the descendants of a couple of 20th century "scholars," William Shockley and Arthur Jensen, blacks and other "minorities" were pulling down the intellectual quality of the whole human race.
Remember, now, this is the crystal ball reporting.
Believe me, if I could influence the crystal ball I'd show you a 2076 society in which people ranging in color from goat's milk to double chocolate finally find mutuality of respect and a sense of love that gives them a kind of security no cruise missiles and B-1 bombers will ever provide.
But every time I shake my crystal ball and say, "Don't be absurd! Even a species as dumb as homo sapiens will find a way to free itself from bigotry in 100 years," that crystal ball flashes backwards two or three centuries to prove otherwise. I see Christians and Moslems killing each other, as now. And Germans and Frenchmen in conflict generation after generation. And Catholics and Protestants in brutal conflict that no passage of time erases in places like Northern Ireland. The Jew-haters of a millennium ago sounding just like Spiro Agnew. Racial violence in Boston in 1976 arising from passions of bigotry no less intense than those that spawned a riot in Wilmington, N.C., 78 years earlier, or in Atlanta 70 years before.
That crystal ball keeps contradicting all sorts of things that I have written. More than 24 years ago, in my preface to "South of Freedom," I wrote; "I do not believe that man was born to hate and be hated; I cannot believe that the race problem is an inevitable concomitant of democratic life."
That crystal ball flashes into 2076 and tells me that in 1951, or is it that I [now] have an old crystal ball which is disillusioned, clouded with pessimism, unable to see man's potential for rising up next to the angels?
The November 8, 1970 Chronicle-Telegram (Elyria, OH) ran an article titled, "Computersville is almost here." The entire piece appears below.
NEW YORK (UPI) - In Computersville this day, Jane Doe presses buttons on the mini-computer in her kitchen.
She orders up a week's worth of low-calorie menus. Within micro-seconds, the machine devises such meal plans. Then it prints them.
Before she entered the kitchen, Mrs. Doe stopped briefly in the living room to admire the family's newest possession - a huge geometric print, drawn by computer.
As she goes about her chores, she is relaxed by the sounds of her favorite record, Computer Concerto. This features a musical score created by computer and orchestrated by computer. The sounds are electronic. There are blips and beeps and modulated static.
At times the sounds blend noises of a dozen jets waiting on the runway to takeoff. Altogether, it is a pleasant record.
In the afternoon, Mrs. Doe goes to her small town's medical center for her annual physical. Among other things, she has an electrocardiogram - administered by technicians, processed by computer and read, of course, by computer.
The printout on her eletrocardiogram: "Non specific T-wave changes. Possibly borderline gram. Probably within normal limits."
All of these things from the world of computers were seen at an unconventional convention in New York - the 25th National Conference of the Association for Computing Machinery.
They will come home to roost in the not-too-distant future. You probably won't have to wait until the year 2,000, for example, to have computer art and music in your home. Hospitals of the land already are experimenting with diagnosis by computer.
The menu - planning computer for the kitchen, while a bit expensive around $10,000, is available. It is designed to help keep track of financial records, lend a hand with the children's homework - and perform many other tasks.
Matt Chapman, co-creator of Homestar Runner, sent me this great image from the 1978 book Exploring the World of Robots.
While I've never had a maid, I didn't know that they were always on the verge of crying! As Matt notes, "the 'Maid Without Tears' does not appear to have been made without cords as she has two of them coming out of her, dragging dangerously on the ground." Text from the image appears below.
Stay tuned, because I've found some great newspaper articles about the "Quasar, robot of the future." With headlines like, "Take out your trash, laugh at your jokes," and "R2D2? You ain't seen nothin' yet!" just scratch the paleo-futuristic surface.
Today we have many different gadgets in our homes. They make housework and gardening easier. In [the] future we may have robot servants to do all the jobs in the home.
In charge of tomorrow's servants will be a robot brain. It will run the house. It will control other machines electronically. The brain will work vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, washing machines, food mixers, automatic cookers and other gadgets.
We will be able to give the brain its orders, telling it what jobs to do and when to do them. If we forget to mow the lawn, the robot brain will remind us. Then we can tell the robot to get on with the job.
There may be walking robots to do the dusting, and to lay and clear the table. The robots in the picture are real. One is called Quasar. Quasar can vacuum carpets, mow lawns, carry trays of food, and even take the dog for a walk! At the door is another robot, called the Maid Without Tears.
One day people may not go out to work at all. They will work from home, using television and robots. The robot brain will suggest meals for the day. It will order our shopping, finding out from other robots in the local shops where the best buys are. The goods will be packed and delivered to our home by robots.
The photo above ran in the August 6, 1970 Daily Courier (Connellsville, PA). The last sentence of the picture's caption appears to believe that the telephone was "discovered" rather than invented. Start digging and you may discover some brand new technology, in your own backyard!
Lee Klingensmith (left), son of Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Klingensmith of New Salem Road, and Joseph Lucas (right), son of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lucas of New Salem, look at the new videophone on display at the Fayette County Fair.
The exhibit is sponsored by Bell Telephone and is entitled "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow". It shows the progress made in communications since the phone was first discovered.
The August 3, 1970 issue of Time magazine profiles Alvin Toffler and his book Future Shock. An excerpt appears below but you can read the entire article here.
What brings on future shock, according to Toffler, is a rate of social change that has become so fast as to be impossible for most human beings to assimilate. "The malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality and free-floating violence already apparent in contemporary life are merely a foretaste of what may lie ahead unless we come to understand and treat this disease," Toffler argues. "Future shock arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one's own society. But its impact is far worse. For most travelers have the comforting knowledge that the culture they left behind will be there to return to. The victim of future shock does not."
The introduction to the book Technology and Man's Future has a tone appropriate for 1972. The words seem to offer a first glimpse into true disillusionment with early 20th century futurism. And yet, the book nurtures remnants of optimism; of hope that the future may hold some version, however imperfect, of that shiny, happy future.
Below is an excerpt from the introduction to the book.
I grew up believing in a technological future. The picture of tomorrow's world that I carried around in my head throughout childhood years corresponded, more or less, to that which one might have acquired from any number of science-fiction movies or from such monuments to technology as the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It was characterized mainly by neatness and order, miles of gleaming chrome, millions of buttons to push, and endless gadgets to do all the work. All of our "old-fashioned" ways of doing things were, I believed, to be replaced by new, modern, better ones. Automated highways would take the place of conventional roads; one nourishment pill in the morning would save us consuming three meals during the day. In retrospect, what I find to be particularly interesting in this childhood image is the fact that the technological future always seemed to be an end in itself. When adults in my life spoke of it, they implied its inevitability - with some interest and some, but not much, enthusiasm. No one seemed to care very much for the prospect, but it was "progress," and only a fool would try to resist its tide.
Similar notions were apparently the main themes of the Century of Progress International Exposition held in Chicago in 1933. In the great world's fair tradition, this extravagant celebration aimed to demonstrate what technology was capable of doing for humanity. In the process, it brought out dramatically what one author has called "technology's triumph over man." Upon entering the Hall of Science, one was confronted by a large sculptural group featuring a life-sized man and woman, their "hands outstretched as if in fear or ignorance." Between this couple stood a giant angular robot almost twice their size, bending down, with a metallic arm "thrown reassuringly around each." The visitor to the fair need not have searched far for the meaning of this image. It could be found in the Exposition motto: SCIENCE FINDS - INDUSTRY APPLIES - MAN CONFORMS.
As I grew older, I naturally began to question my childhood vision, putting aside a fascination with gadgets to ask myself what was lacking in this future. Why, despite all good intentions, did this image of the future always come out looking more like Brave New World or 1984 than Utopia? What was the meaning of "progress" in these terms, if no one ever asked whether it serves to make people happier?
This image appears in the 1979 book Future Cities: Homes and Living into the 21st Century.
The magic of laser-holography, a new technique which creates 3-D pictures apparently out of thin air, could result in business conferences like the one shown above. On the left the heads of a branch office have just come in to their boardroom, first thing in the morning. Across their table is their boss. He is in the head office of the company in the centre of a major city thousands of miles away. It is night-time and is the end of his day. 3-D cameras hanging from the ceilings of each room create the illusion of a [complete] room with the two sides present (this picture has been split down the middle to avoid confusion). Electronic conferences like this would save enormous amounts of time, money and energy.
The July 31, 1970 Honolulu Advertiser ran an article by Jane Evinger about Hawaii becoming a destination for education rather than just recreation. The piece quotes heavily from the preliminary report of the Governor's Conference on the Year 2000.
Both the article and the report work under some interesting assumptions about the future, such as a guaranteed income whether you work or not. An excerpt appears below.
Within the coming 30 years, the report assumes, technology will provide far more leisure and everyone, whether he works or not, will receive guaranteed annual income.
As a result, says the task force, "since there will be plenty of time to learn, there wil be no need for compulsion."
The November 24, 1975 Middlesboro Daily News (Middlesboro, Kentucky) ran an editorial countering the "catastrophe theory" predictions made by the Club of Rome. Per usual, neither party got everything right. Excerpts appear below, along with the piece in its entirety.
In health care, for example, a cure for cancer will be found by 1995 and will be generally available in the early 21st Century.
Closer to the present, it's felt that within two years doctors should be able to detect most genetic defects before birth and be able to prevent them by the 1990s.
In transportation, an all plastic car, except for engine and drive train, will be common by 1990. So will the electric car. The service-free, accident-proof automobile is expected to be in widespread use by the year 2000.
Ditto for automated urban transit, after becoming technologically possible in 1985 and economically feasible 10 years later.
Also by 1995, aerospace experts predict an economic alternative to petroleum fuel and full use of it by 2010.
This image appears in the 1979 book Future Cities: Homes and Living into the 21st Century and illustrates the living room of the (paleo)future.
This living room has many electronic gadgets which are either in use already or are being developed for people to buy in the 1980s.
1. Giant-size TV. Based on the designs already available, this one has a super-bright screen for daylight viewing and stereo sound system.
2. Electronic video movie camera, requires no film, just a spool of tape. Within ten years video cameras like this could be replaced by 3-D holographic recorders.
3. Flat screen TV. No longer a bulky box, TV has shrunk to a thickness of less than five centimetres. This one is used to order shopping via a computerised shopping centre a few kilometres away. The system takes orders and indicates if any items are not in stock.
4. Video disc player used for recording off the TV and for replaying favourite films.
5. Domestic robot rolls in with drinks. One robot, the Quasar, is already on sale in the USA. Reports indicate that it may be little more than a toy however, so it will be a few years before 'Star Wars' robots tramp through our homes.
6. Mail slot. By 1990, most mail will be sent in electronic form. Posting a letter will consist of placing it in front of a copier in your home or at the post office. The electronic read-out will be flashed up to a satellite, to be beamed to its destination. Like many other electronic ideas, the savings in time and energy could be enormous.
This image appears in the 1979 book Future Cities: Homes and Living into the 21st Century and describes the 3D copier of the future.
See also:
Sea City 2000 (1979)
Future Cities: Homes and Living into the 21st Century (1979)
The April, 1978 issue of The Futurist magazine ran an incredibly forward-thinking piece about the future of newspapers.
If we think of a newspaper as being a printed object delivered to our homes, we may be talking about replacing newspaper with an electronic signal. But if we think (as I do) of newspapers as organizations which disseminate news and information by the most efficient methods available - then we are thinking in terms of applying a new technology to an existing institution.
The 1972 book Futures Conditional contains essays and lists from many different futurists of the era. This list of headlines of the near future, by Billy Rojas, presents readers with events that will "probably happen - in some cases undoubtedly happen - although not necessarily in the order presented."
1972
February
Chiang Kai-shek dead in Taiwan; new regime is created that seeks to "modernize" Formosa. Ten year plan to replace most ideographs with Roman letters is announced. Major effort is made to organize "overseas" Chinese - the millions is southeast Asia, the tens of thousands in America - into a series of formalized trade associations.
Safe cigarettes invented: Lorillard stock advances 20 points in one day.
Chicago firm begins marketing robot "housekeepers": mechanical mice to vacuum rugs and clean floors, automated kitchens that prepare hot meals according to consumer specifications, etc.
Team of Muskie and Adlai Stevenson III defeats Republicans for Presidency.
J.Edgar Hoover resigns post as head of FBI.
Astronauts find evidence of sub-cellular life on the moon - two billion years ago.
Jackie divorces Ari; she plans to marry David Brinkley.
New Jersey becomes first state to legalize marijuana.
Stones break up. New music stirs U.S.; Cheyenne native rock-and-tom-tom group tops charts.
Peace settlement reached in Middle East; version of Allon plan adopted on a "phase-out" basis; Israel-Jordan to become joint secular state.
Mao-Tse-tung suffers heart attack in China. Succeeded by Chou En-Lai. Red Guard "party" forms to challenge authority of the government, cultural revolution becomes an underground movement.
Hovercraft "grass highway" bonds approved by Congress: Boston-Richmond route.
Haile Selassie dies in Washington hospital. His death removes last obstacle to United States in East Africa, a new nation made up of the former states of Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda.
South Sudan secedes from Arab Federation; civil war erupts as rebels receive encouragement and aid from Addis Ababa.
Houston doctor discloses discovery of selective memory-erasing drug.
Reagan defeated by 350,000 votes.
Rescue in space; Russians save Americans endangered on orbiting space platform.
U. of Oklahoma student disorders reach insurrection proportions; social science building destroyed, 4 police, 18 students killed.
"Electro-pop," completely synthetic beverage starts a new food craze: Electro-snax, Electro-suppers are marketed.
First space hospital (4 "beds") established by U.S.S.R.
Socialists return to power in Britain.
Cabinet restructure in U.S., new secretaries of Education, Environment.
Sex-selection industry booms. Chemical treatments enable prospective parents to predetermine sex of offspring.
Allard Lowenstein defeats Buckley in N.Y. Senate contest.
Temporary lunar base set up by U.S. - 6 men, 2 months.
Famine conditions worsen in India, Java. Communist revolution develops.
Sexual intercourse allowed in Yale sex ed. classes. Harvard follows suit.
Brazilian church secedes from Rome; "second reformation" as Dutch, some Americans, also walk out.
Tito dies in Yugoslavia, unsuccessful leftist coup to oust hand-picked successor.
Religious revival reported in Africa: Nigeria, Dahomey, Ivory Coast, Guinea become Baha'i countries.
Japanese firm announces opening of sea-chains, series of floating cities to accommodate 10,000 people each; located in Polynesia.
Police force retired in Seattle; replaced by paid, plain clothes community people.
First "time traveler." Star of ten-year hibernation for Minneapolis man.
Radio signals from vicinity of 41 Y Cygni indicate intelligent life in the universe.
Laser "arrays" used by commercial ships to navigate Antarctic waters; business firms start pilot plants on southernmost continent.
U.S. court system reformed. New features include "maximum wait law" - no more than 30 days between arrest and trial - and "obsolete statute law" - any law on the books is retired after 20 years unless specifically renewed by legislative act.
The August, 1976 issue of The Futurist magazine ran this blurb about the need for humanized machines, which would make technology less intimidating for the average user. The piece appears to have originally appeared in Hal Hellman's 1976 book Technophobia: Getting Out of the Technology Trap.
We need "humanized machines." Wes Thomas, editor of the future-oriented newsletter Synergy Access and a computer expert, once told me of a "dream" he has. "What I'd like to do," he said, "is develop computer systems that are more 'human,' that people are not afraid of, in fact that they would get along with and even enjoy." He would like, therefore, to develop the "Fuzzy-Duzzy."
Today, he explains, computer terminals are made out of metal and plastic. They are cold and uninviting; therefore most people are immediately turned off by them. And they look menacing, like something a mad scientist would create.
With Fuzzy-Duzzy, he says, "you would put your hands into this warm, inviting Teddy-Bear thing, and you would be able to look inside through a porthole. Inside there would be these big knobs you could get hold of and turn, instead of the usual miniature keys everybody keeps making mistakes on. By moving things around, you'd be able to communicate with the machine.
"And the pictures that come on the screen would not be the usual angular shapes, but nice, round organic forms.
"So I'm interested in developing a sort of organic computer terminal that people will feel at home with immediately."
When I mentioned this to an acquaintance, he became furious. He called it underhanded, meretricious, and worse. A machine has no right being "friendly."
Thomas's "dream" is a bit extreme, I will admit. Yet humanized machines combined with people who are not afraid of them (and who understand where and how to use them) may be the way we will eventually do many of the things that remain to be done in basic education and job training, in health care and perhaps in many other applications as well. Just as the supermarket put the customer to work, so too may it be necessary for patients and prospective patients to do some of the pre-entry work themselves, aided by computers - humanized ones, of course.
Machines will also help us provide sight for the blind and hearing for the deaf, mobility for the lame and dexterity for the handicapped. Will humanization of such machines be necessary too?
The 1979 book Toward Distant Suns features the "Space Spiders," illustrated below. Space Spiders are designed to help build the space colonies of the (paleo)future.
Use of Space Spiders to build a space colony of the Stanford torus type. In the foreground mobile teleoperators carry rolls of aluminum to restock the Spiders' supplies. Detail shows a Spider laying down the hull of the colony, which has the shape of a bicycle tire. Central disk structure will carry solar arrays.
See also:
Space Colony Pirates (1981)
Sport in Space Colonies (1977)
Space Colonies by Don Davis
More Space Colony Art (1970s)
Mars and Beyond (1957)
Challenge of Outer Space (circa 1950s)
Like Earth, Only in Space .... and with monorails (1989)
Space Colony Possible (The News, 1975)
