TheGwen

one thing i regret as a child is not reading arthur C. Clark. (I think it was because i rebel against everyone in my family as a child… since both my brothers have read them, why must I?)

Anyway, this was a unique point by him, and really is making want to read is books to see the reflection of technology he was envisioning and what we have developed today. It is indeed scary that he is on the same path of metaphors and ideas that we are performing today.

I personally feel we must believe in these rules or at least understand them in their context. Reason is, because I personally feel there are no rules in the world of technology innovations look at the segway! It does not fit a purpose to market today, but I feel it is an invention to do for future inventions, which is called evolution….

This is something i think most engineers and designers DON’T get, we have to produce products so it evolves into key critical ideas that changes society. for a second just stop thinking about the project you are working on as the end all be all solutions, because if we actually did make products that are SO PERFECT, then we no longer have jobs! we become unemployed.

I will agree you have to give you best on the project. Or otherwise we did not learn anything about that project for future project’s success rates.

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Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, identified what he called the “three laws of prediction,” reflecting an optimistic view of ingenuity:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong;

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture past them into the impossible; and

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Clarke was an exception to the rule that predicting future technology is hard. In Wireless World magazine in 1945, he proposed using a set of satellites in geostationary orbit to form a global communications network.

In “The View from Serendip,” published in 1977, Clarke predicted the Internet: “Immediate access in the home via simple computer-type keyboards, and TV displays, to all the world’s great libraries . . . And items needed for permanent reference could be printed off as soon as located on a copying machine—or filed magnetically in the home storage system.”

In the same book, he also forecast email and online news: “Facsimile services whereby letters, printed matter, etc. can be reproduced instantly. The physical delivery of mail and newspapers will thus be largely replaced by the orbital post office, and the orbital newspaper . . .”

via Gordon Crovitz: Technology Predictions Are Mostly Bunk – WSJ.com.