[HN Gopher] AT&T's predictions of the future (1993)
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AT&T's predictions of the future (1993)
Author : danielam
Score : 33 points
Date : 2023-01-03 19:57 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| jeffbee wrote:
| They failed to predict that in the year 2022 all voice calls will
| be mutually unintelligible.
| petilon wrote:
| If you were to make an ad like that today, what would your
| predictions be?
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
| entwife wrote:
| Vaccines that cure cancer.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Conversational interfaces. I don't think GPT is taking us to
| the singularity any time soon, but I do think it's pretty
| strong evidence we can go a lot further with conversational
| interfaces.
| taftster wrote:
| These are really good ads. I remember watching them as a younger
| person, not realizing how profound or accurate they were.
|
| But of course, it's also interesting to compare it to the actual
| world we live today. The most notable thing is the unification of
| all these futuristic ideas into a single platform, the modern day
| smart phone.
|
| What I see in the AT&T ads are seemingly all different individual
| devices operating with various independent protocols and support
| infrastructure. There's a commonality that AT&T is getting at,
| the early internet, but the devices themselves were never
| imagined as a single platform. A video screen in a phone booth,
| for example.
|
| These ads remind me that the iphone (and other smartphone brands)
| have so fundamentally changed the way we live in just 2 decades.
| AT&T might have had some to do with our world, but I don't think
| anyone could really see it or execute the way Steve Jobs could.
| stuart78 wrote:
| I think the other element is a move from hardware to software.
| The zoom calls that replace the video phone booth are not just
| iPhones, but also conference rooms, computers, iPads.
| Smartphones bring all these solutions together, but the variety
| of ways to engage on such a wide variety of platforms is just
| as transformative.
| brewdad wrote:
| While certainly there is an element of the "unknowable"
| unknowns that led to the singualar device dominating so many of
| these predictions, I have to also think that some of the
| examples are used to make these future scenarios relatable to
| the 1993 present uses.
|
| For example, I can't imagine anyone at AT&T forward thinking
| enough to envision sending business communications from the
| beach thought we would be sending literal faxes.
| casey2 wrote:
| Right about everything except AT&T being the company that will
| bring it to you. OOF
| danielrhodes wrote:
| They weren't wrong. They are one of the biggest cell carriers,
| backbone, and broadband providers. I'm not sure what role they
| imagine they would take, but it is similar to the role they
| have had in the past.
| maupin wrote:
| Without seeing the ads, I can still recall the music.
| smm11 wrote:
| I was researching a thing called Polymer Flexible Circuits at
| this same time - those I spoke to talked of a future with all
| this sort of stuff and more. One guy said he was working on
| 'circuit' that would be small enough to carry in a pocket, then
| fold out to have a larger presentation surface for words and
| images.
|
| It's worth noting that AT&T was the exclusive carrier for the
| first iPhone.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| > It's worth noting that AT&T was the exclusive carrier for the
| first iPhone.
|
| That was a happy accident due to the acquisition of Cingular by
| AT&T
| giantrobot wrote:
| Which was just AT&T Wireless' re-brand. Which sucked for me.
| I had moved to T-Mobile from AT&T due to their shitty
| service. Then Apple gave all full-time employees an iPhone
| the summer of its release. I had to go back to AT&^H^H^H
| Cingular in order to use the phone. Back into the cold
| embrace of AT&T's crappy service and support.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others? Don't miss the June 2010 thread
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866), which has great
| comments from Bell Labs people
|
| _"You Will", AT &T's ad campaign (1993) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25829007 - Jan 2021 (2
| comments)
|
| _AT &T 1993 "You Will" Ads [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19504544 - March 2019 (100
| comments)
|
| _AT &T's 1993 "You Will" ads were remarkably accurate_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11246081 - March 2016 (4
| comments)
|
| _AT &T's "You Will" (1993)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9415693 - April 2015 (1
| comment)
|
| _AT &T's predictions of 2014 in 1994 were surprisingly accruate_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972473 - Dec 2013 (3
| comments)
|
| _AT &T 1993-1994 'You Will' Ad campaign [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6871467 - Dec 2013 (1
| comment)
|
| _AT &T nailed the future, in 1993_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373689 - March 2013 (1
| comment)
|
| _AT &T You Will Ads From 1993 - Amazingly accurate predictions_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2068344 - Jan 2011 (1
| comment)
|
| _AT &T 1993 "You Will" Ads_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866 - June 2010 (39
| comments)
|
| _AT &T's 1993 "You Will" Ads (excellent foresight) [vid]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503709 - March 2009 (1
| comment)
| xseparator wrote:
| These ads are pretty much directly responsible for inspiring me
| to work in this new Internet thing after graduating college in
| 1995. That and Wired magazine.
| [deleted]
| kube-system wrote:
| It's somehow sad that they got everything so perfectly right
| except "the company that'll bring it to you".
| drewg123 wrote:
| I came here to say exactly that.
|
| However, in one sense of the word, we do owe a _lot_ of the
| modern tech stack to ATT. Between their invention of
| transistors, and their invention of UNIX, they do form the
| basis of the modern tech stack that all these inventions depend
| on.
|
| (and yes, I know we're not running AT&T UNIX, but BSD was
| derived from it, and Linux / Minix etc were inspired by UNIX).
| kube-system wrote:
| No doubt. But it's just even more ironic that other people
| took the phone company's technology to build the phone
| company's vision just shows how much they squandered their
| potential. Cash cows really are a death knell for progress.
| taftster wrote:
| Right. That's fascinating, isn't it.
|
| @dang's link to the June 2010 comments[1] tells the story:
|
| _> Bell Labs was upset because AT &T made those commercials
| without consulting us. A PR company thought up all the ideas.
| We had zero projects internally working on such products._
|
| So the PR firm (probably just a single person at the firm) was
| obviously quite visionary. I wonder who that person was and if
| they ever surfaced at another company that was actually able to
| bring some of these ideas forward.
|
| It could just be like writing science fiction, and those ideas
| felt so futuristic that they weren't expected to actually come
| to pass. But man, give credit to those ideas, because almost
| all of them came true pretty close to the ad's depiction.
|
| It's one thing to write science fiction that is so outlandish
| that we know it's not even likely in our life spans (Star Trek,
| etc.). But it's quite another thing to write some sort of
| "fiction" that is just right on the boundary of plausible and
| achievable within a decade or two.
|
| Those people that can see 10-20 years in the future, they're
| the ones I'm jealous of. That's a talent that I just don't
| have.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Heinlein said something to the effect that predicting gadgets
| was easy -- societal changes hard.
| huijzer wrote:
| The ideas were based on demo's that existed at the time
| according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1445816.
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