Inability to Imagine the Future

[Zarathustra]

Check out some of these embarrassing quotes. I found them brushing up on my time travel knowledge for a Runes discussion here: www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/time/through2.html

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." (Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895)

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." (Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943)

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." (Ken Olsen, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977)

"The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." (Western Union internal memo, 1876)

"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." (Marshal Ferdinand Foch, French commander of Allied forces during the closing months of World War I, 1918)

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" (David Sarnoff's associates, in response to his urgings for investment in radio in the 1920's)

"Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." (New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work, 1921)

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" (Harry M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927)

"Everything that can be invented has been invented." (Charles H. Duell, commissioner, US Office of Patents, 1899)

[A Gunslinger]

I have see those and more either on the web or in a book somewhere. Without any backgroud or context, the quotes are amazing in their lack of vision.

My guess is that some of those quoated may have had either personal or financial intests to protect (the commercial vlaues ones in particular).


Thaks for the laff though!

[Avatar]

People are inevitably suspicious of anything new, and afraid to endorse it for the possible negative economic or ego effect.

I've always loved that one by the IBM chairman.

--A

[Marv]

heh. You can imagine some Roman architect saying "these straight roads, they'll never catch on"...or..."how about these aquaducts? give me a cesspool any day".

[Queeaqueg]

Here is another one(not word-for-word).
"The sun and the universe go round the Earth" Catholic Church.
"The World was created in 7 days" Verious Religions.

For the time flying machines were hard to imagine, that is why we should stay open-minded about everything. Anything is possible(unless it does against logic).

[Hound Of Chulainn]

Relevant Simpsons quote (my specialty):

Well sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive - don't touch it - but I predict that within one-hundred years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten-thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.

Heads will roll if I don't get to ride in a hover-car before I'm dead, that's all I'll say.

[Zarathustra]

Anything is possible(unless it does against logic).

Well, I hate to thread-jack my own thread, but logic doesn't put any constraints upon the world. Logic is a formal system by which conclusions are drawn from premises via logical necessity. There is absolutely nothing in the real world which happens due to logical necessity. Events in the real world are contingent, not necessary--i.e. they depend upon other events, not upon the logical necessity of propositions. Logic ONLY describes the relations between ideas, not the relations between matters of fact.

Anything IS possible. No need to qualify it. Laws of physics are descriptions of regularities we've noticed. We have generalized from those regularities to the universe as a whole, but anyone who has taken at least one course on logic knows that you can't take a few (or many) specific examples and generalize this for all cases. That mistake is one of the contributing factors that led the above people to make such silly statements to begin with. They thought that all the computers in the world were big, expensive, and with little use to the average person, therefore, all computers must share these qualities. Obviously, this generalization was wrong. Ah, the problems of inductive reasoning.

And yet, that's how science works. Most people don't realize that at its core, science violates logic as a standard operating procedure. Causality itself is based upon expectations, not upon logic. We see events regularly following each other in the past, therefore we conclude they are causally linked, and will behave so in the future. However, there is no logical law whatsoever which states that the future must be like the past.

The fact that science works at all, and that the world can be described in mathematical units, never ceases to blow my mind, especially when there's no discernable reason why this should happen. It has led some philosophers to speculate that we just make it all up, that we are responsible for all the order we notice.

This is classic David Hume. Consult him if you're interested in this sort of thing.

[Avatar]

Excellent post Malik. I agree whole-heartedly.

Incorrect data means that a false conclusion can be reached with perfect logic. We make it up as we go along, and it's great.

--A