Walter Cronkite Predicted the Future

Posted on February 12, 2013 at 11:08 am by Bob Cesca

And he was pretty damn accurate. I love this stuff. Here he predicts Skype, the internet and telecommuting.

Not so accurate on kitchens. Maybe fast food kitchens, but not home kitchens.

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  • Chris Andersen

    I’ve noticed when looking back at these kind of predictions that they often get many of the individual technologies correct, but they miss out on perhaps the greatest technological innovation of all: the multi-purpose device. Notice that Cronkite activates several different machines to do a single thing. No where is there any suggestion that one device might actually be able to do more than one thing (the closest he comes is a machine that shows both the weather and stock prices).

    Recall that this was made at a time when this was in fact the model for most technological innovation. NASA did not use multi-function machines to get to the moon. Each of the machines at mission control were designed for a specific purpose. The idea of a single machine that could do multiple things probably didn’t even occur to most of them.

    • bphoon

      I don’t think that, back then, even the most forward thinking technological minds predicted the microchip, much less the quad core processor. Silicon chips hadn’t yet been invented if I’m correct. The most advanced circuit available back then was the transistor.

      Seems rather quaint by our standards. Makes me wonder what folks will think of our “smart” (or as I like to call mine, “notso smart”) phones fifty or sixty years from now.

  • Ipecac

    I can’t function in the 21st century since I’m not very good at punch cards. :-)

    Edited to add: And it’s bizarre that most of the stuff he does is dial-based. Even printing is done with a dial.

    To be fair, Cronkite isn’t predicting the future, it’s more the engineers and scientists behind the script. Cronkite is just hosting.

    • muselet

      The technology on display has a faint whiff of Bell Labs about it.

      –alopecia

  • gescove

    Great, but where’s my jetpack?!

    • muselet

      And my flying car!

      –alopecia

  • gescove

    In the kitchen: “Frozen or IRRADIATED food are stored in that area…” Yummy!

  • Victor_the_Crab

    Think of all the porn you could download onto each of those screens! :D

    This video from 1969 also showed how the internet would look in the future.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0pPfyYtiBc