I can’t remember in what bin or bag I found this report, written under the auspices of Allan Gotlieb and submitted to then Minister of Communications, The Honourable Eric Kierans. Every now and then, it’s fun to sift through early documents that speculate on or develop policy for future technologies. It’s useful sometimes to reflect on where we’ve come from and how we once envisioned the future. By looking at how well we did in formulating previous futures, we can learn to refine today’s future and more accurately anticipate what’s coming.
To give the report some context, in 1971, computers no longer used vacuum tubes but incorporated transistor technology. Circuits were even being embedded in a silicon substrate (which would later become the microchip) further reducing the size of transistors. Cable TV was beginning to spread in urban areas and it was now technically feasible to have more channels than provided by the 13-channel switch on a standard TV set. Canada was the third country into space with its Alouette series and Isis series of experimental satellites and was planning to deploy communications satellites especially to service remote regions of the country. Marshall McLuhan had published The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media and had coined the phrase “global village” to describe changes that electronic media were introducing in the way we conceive of ourselves. Databases were now being used to track certain information and it was possible to remotely access this stored information.
The most amusing parts of the report are those that get too specific when discussing the future. More than forty years later, these predictions seem naïve. From the chapter titled “The Crystal Ball”:
The most recent computers are a million times faster than the 1944 prototype, and internal speeds have increased by a factor of 200 between 1955 and 1965. A computer which occupied 1,000 cubic feet in 1955 required only 100 cubic feet in 1965, and the cost of performing one million additions decreased from $10.00 to two cents in the same decade.
In basic technology, continued research and development on the control of microscopic, molecular, and atomic processes are likely to result in new multiple-function high-speed devices which can be quickly and cheaply fabricated. Large-scale integration (LSI) techniques will reduce the cost and size of sub-units by a factor of about 30 times in the latter half of this decade, and will facilitate extended automatic control and maintenance. All active communications equipment, except that with high output power, will be made from solid-state components. More esoteric research will continue to be addressed to the possibility of transmitting all five senses, instead of only sight and sound. It has even been said, probably apocryphally, that the only serious research on extra-sensory perception is being undertaken by the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the United States.
The bit about transmitting in all five senses reminds me of the Google Nose prank and iSmell. As for the ESP research, I’m sure there are still people around who take it seriously…
The decade 1980-90 may see the introduction of ”magnetic-bubble” and holographic memories with greater storage density at a much lower cost. The storage density in serial-access bulk-storage memories may increase by a factor of about 100 over the next 20 years. In the shorter term, it is predicted that a computer occupying 100 cubic feet of space in 1965 will require only 1/10 of a cubic foot by 1965, and that the cost of performing a million additions may be reduced from about two cents in 1965 to 1/200 of a cent during the present decade.
Very rapid progress has been made during the last few years in integrated circuits. For example, between 1968 and 1970, the density of random-access chips has increased from 400 to 1,000 bits/sq. in.; arrays of 300 chips are now being made on a 4″ X 5″ substrate, with 4,0000 components on each chip. The ultimate limit on bit density is not the ingenuity of the designer or the processing of the chip, but the dissipation of the heat generated in operation.
The report is reasonably prescient when it speaks in more general terms and doesn’t offer dates-by-which. It uses the terms “on-line banking”, “cashless society”, “phone-in radio” and “on-demand video”. It anticipates the Skype and Facetime with its “videophone” (which Stanley Kubrick had shown the world three years earlier in 2001: A Space Odyssey).
There’s the world wide web:
Another engineering objective is to consummate the marriage of the once separate technologies of computers and communications. The outcome, ultimately, would be a multiple-access information-retrieval network, through which people at home or in the office can have access to all available information, and at the same time have the means at hand to manipulate and process that information in almost any way and for almost any purpose they may have in mind.
YouTube:
Some of the products of the new telecommunications technology—multi-channel cable systems, home video-casettes[sic]—have within them at least the promise of transforming broadcasting, which is now a one-way medium that treats viewers as largely passive homogeneous groups, into an interactive medium; more and more people will then be able to decide for themselves what they want to watch and when they want to watch it and, still more importantly, to originate programs themselves. Thus, the electronic mass-media will perhaps be transformed into more individualized kinds of media.
Data Mining:
The advantages, for police work and other legitimate purposes, are obvious and substantial. But, now, detailed and categorized information about masses of people is becoming a saleable commodity, and there is already a fairly wide commercial market for information about the health and credit, and even the psychological characteristics, of individuals.
Piracy:
The mounting capability of technology to undermine measures for the protection of intellectual property is creating difficulties that are different not in kind but in dimension. For example, some authors have long complained that the acquisition and circulation of their works by public libraries deprives them of rewards to which they feel reasonably entitled … The problem will clearly be aggravated in the age of computerized information-transfer unless some effective protection can be devised.
eBooks:
So far as storage of library-type information is concerned, an acceleration of practical possibilities can be foreseen as a result of the successful development of the video-cassette; it will be recalled that a single cassette can accommodate as many as 500 novels of average length recorded at a page per frame.
…
Some computer experts believe that newspapers will eventually become obsolete, giving place to video displays summoned at will through a universal-access omniscient computer/communications network, the construction of which may have to be promoted by governmental action.
Online Shopping:
A recommendation put forward by the Seminar on the Wired City was that, in advance of any pilot project to test total communications systems in an urban environment, a multi-disciplinary task force should examine the issues from all aspects, such as the substitution of communications for transportation, or the psychological or sociological impact upon family life of a society in which housewives could shop from home …
Funny, don’t you think, how easily bleeding edge technology could filter into the consciousness of policy-makers, but feminism, which had been gaining ground since World War II and was in full swing by the 70’s, hadn’t made a dint on their thinking.
Alienation:
By demolishing the familiar, accelerating technological change is bringing about serious social and psychic disturbances. Benjamin Singer, of the University of Western Ontario, described their pathology:
“Bombarded by ever-increasing rates of message transmission, man becomes fragmented and disoriented. Nothing seems real or permanent—everything is transient in a world where more than 90 per cent of the knowledge that will be available in one’s lifetime will be generated during it. Images, character, styles, even his own identity are part of this sense of transience, breeding even more insecurity.”
Or citing Dale Thomson of Johns Hopkins University: “Communications systems make available new concepts, alternative ways of life. They erode established patterns and values. They create new demands without satisfying them, and lead to dissatisfaction.”
The only thing the report fails to anticipate is spam. Oh well, you can’t foresee everything.