Visions of the future at Los Angeles International Airport (photo by Flickr user brewbooks)
Which television family do you prefer: the Jetsons or the Simpsons? If you picked the former, you will certainly enjoy this visit to the future past, when sci-fi-esque advertisements provided a vision of the then-future, which is now a part of our present reality. It’s as if Ray Kurzweil — inventor of the scanner and author of the seminal The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology — visualized these videos, which we found thanks to Mashable.
This 1993 advertisement from AT&T, simply titled “View of the Future by AT&T,” eerily predicts in-car GPS, tablets that can send faxes from the beach, and ebooks. Nowadays it’s unlikely for people not to whip out their smartphones and punch in directions, or tap them into an in-car GPS. We thank the technological gods for GPS and wonder what we did in the days of glove-compartment maps. In fact, this AT&T advertisement did offer a vision of the future in 1993, but not one that was completely sci-fi; according to PCMag.com, the US Department of Defense launched the satelitte-based system TRANSIT around 1960, and it was refined in the early 1980s. Still, it wasn’t until around 2000 that GPS navigation went mainstream.
Read the story on Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/100595/6-videos-from-the-past-that-predicted-the-future/
