Topics: Science, Technology, Artificial Intelligence
Making predictions about the future is certainly not easy. I mean, not everyone can be Baba Vanga.
However, one person who comes pretty close to the Bulgarian mystic is a British science fiction writer who went by the name Sir Arthur Charles Clarke.
During his life, Clarke was regarded as futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series presenter as well as being the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But part of the legacy he's left is certainly for his wild predictions about the future that he made in the 1960s.
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60 years on, it's eerie how many of them are a reality nowadays.
Speaking on BBC's Horizon program, in an episode titled 'The Knowledge Explosion', which originally aired in September 1964, Clarke said: "The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic, so, if what I say now seems to you to be very reasonable, then I’ll fail completely."
He spoke about the city of the future during the broadcast, which was actually the landmark year of 2000.
Opening up about how he predicted to see the world in 2000, Clarke continued: "These things will make possible a world in which we can be in instant contact with each other wherever we may be, where we can contact our friends anywhere on Earth even if we don’t know their actual physical location."
Of course, that has certainly come to fruition as we can now contact anyone, no matter where they may be, in the world via text messages, phone calls and social media.
Clarke didn't stop there with his predictions, as he added: "It will be possible - perhaps only 50 years from now - for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London.
"In fact, if it proves worthwhile, almost any executive skill, any administrative skill, even any physical skill, could be made independent of distance. I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand."
Clarke even touched on artificial intelligence in the 1964 broadcast, known as machine learning back then.
"The most intelligent inhabitants of that future world won’t be men or monkeys," the futurist said.
"They’ll be machines. They will start to think, and eventually they will completely outthink their makers. Is this depressing? I don’t see why it should be. We superseded the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthal men and we presume we’re an improvement."
Doesn't that sound all too familiar?
Clarke concluded the broadcast by telling viewers the future is 'endlessly fascinating' and, despite our best efforts, 'we will never outguess it'.
Clarke passed away from respiratory complications and heart failure in March 2008. He was 90 years old.
