Here's what is so great about the Internet: You can pop a term like "futurism" in the search field of a browser and in seconds discover someone like John McCarthy.
The two go together like peanut butter and jelly. If you're a computer scientist, you already know that. The Internet links the obvious for the rest of us.I was trying to gather views about technologies of the future for our growth series when I stumbled on McCarthy.
I know, I know. I should have known who he is. I didn't.
I simply found a Web site about his class at Stanford University on "Technological Opportunities for Humanity" thinking and was so enthralled I called him up.
I had to talk to a guy who requires students to read "old futurism"
about such things as the computer-controlled car and personal flying machines.
The computer-controlled car, forecast in the 1970s, was essentially a mobile, automatic chauffeur. You'd sit in the vehicle, tell it where you wanted to go and it would drive you there. And then go park itself.
Or, it might drive back home and pick up the spouse or your kids and take them wherever they needed to be. Freeways full of computer-controlled cars would move along at 80 miles per hour, bumper to bumper, safely.
McCarthy figured that at 1970s prices, a computer capable of controlling a car would cost $400,000 to $800,000, plus a few thousand for auxiliary electronic equipment.
Don't laugh. McCarthy has a habit of hitting close to the truth.
He is, it turns out, a Michael Jordan among futurist thinkers. He's been thinking about future technology since 1948.
That's when he started mulling over the idea that a mechanical machine might be able to simulate human intelligence. He called it artificial intelligence and presented what is thought to be the first paper on the subject in 1958.
The paper was titled "Programs with Common Sense," and he read it at the Teddington Conference on the Mechanization of Thought Processes.
About the same time, McCarthy predicted that someday everyone would have online access to computers. He followed that thought up in 1962 by inventing the concept of time sharing, where a single mainframe computer's resources were shared by people using terminals.
"I thought that was going to lead to something like the present situation," he told the Deseret News. "I did not anticipate it would come about through everyone having their own computer. I thought it would come about through terminals linked to large, fast machines."
He started using e-mail in 1971, when the Internet consisted of computers located at four sites (the University of Utah was one). He was stumped by the fax.
"What surprised me is that e-mail is easier and for most purposes more useful. It was invented earlier, but because of complications with networks it developed slowly," he said.
When he gazes in his crystal ball, he sees routine access to the Internet and displacement of paper publications by digital tablets (even though "we still don't have a computer terminal you can use in the bathroom").
Time frame? Ten years, he says.
And he still thinks we may get those automatically driven cars. "Then it will be possible to get enormous more use out of our present roads," he said. "I'd be willing to bet we won't have that one in 10 years, though I'm not sure I would bet against 20 years."
He actually thinks the personal flying machine - mini-private planes that fly automatically have a better chance of getting us out of traffic jams and out of our cars.
McCarthy has bet on technology before, and he's usually right.
"Once, about 10 years ago, I bet a guy he would not have (digital) screens hanging on his wall in seven years," McCarthy said. "I just didn't think things were progressing that fast. I'm sorry to say I won that bet."
See, a guy like McCarthy doesn't like to be right about the snail's pace of technological advancement. And his friend missed the time frame by just a few years.
Flat screens designed for TVs and computers were commonplace at the most recent Comdex and the Consumer Electronics shows.
And, of course, Bill Gates has a multimillion-dollar house full of wall screens.
"It's nice to see that somebody is pioneering these luxuries that 10 years from now will be available for all of us," he said.