Featured Image Credit: 60 Minutes Australia / YouTube
Topics: Jeff Bezos, Technology
Callum Jones
Over the years, there has been some pretty wild predictions made about the future by technology heads, film and TV shows, and just ordinary people.
One of our favourites is from the classic 1989 film Back to the Future Part II, where part of the film is based in 2015.
Back in the late 80s, the film's producers depicted the year of 2015 in a very futuristic way - something we would even see as farfetched seven years after it was predicted to be a reality.
In this fictional 2015, you can see flying cars and a quite unusual fashion catalogue.
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But there are some predictions that are more outlandish than others - and these ones comes from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Back in 2000, Bezos was interviewed on the 60 Minutes Australia programme and spoke about how technology will advance, as we had just entered a new century. Watch it below:
The Amazon boss made some pretty wild claims about the future, some that even sound unimageable 22 years later.
Bezos said that the 1990s would soon look like the stone age due to a technological change beyond 2000.
The now-fourth richest person in the world delved deep into what he thought might be possible in the technology space in the coming years.
He said: "Computers will be part of everyday objects, anything from plates to cell phones to your clothing, you’ll have little computer chips embedded in these everyday objects."
Well, I suppose he got the cell phone part right there.
He continued: "Maybe the medicine bottles in your medicine chest will tell you if you are about to take two drugs that will conflict with each other.
"They will have communicated with a central computer, and they will alert you to the problem."
If that didn't sound wild enough, Bezos' next prediction surrounding dinner plates of all things was quite extraordinary.
He said: "So you could have a computer chip inside a plate and some other sophisticated electronics that would allow the plate to diagnose what you are eating.
"They’ll say ‘look there are 18 grams of fat in that and I’m not sure that’s what you want to be eating today because you have already had 40g of fat'."
Not sure I'd want that reminder when delving into my takeaway...
Anway, Bezos' next prediction was about how computers would be able to take over human like activities - to an extent this has become a reality, but the way the Amazon founder discussed it still seemed a bit unrealistic.
He said: "It is possible theoretically at least for computer power to get to such gigantic proportions that they can do complicated things that we think of today that only human intelligence can do.
Bezos then added that we'd speak to people on the phone not knowing if they are human or a computer.