At the recent CES, Intel gave a demo of its vision of a future smartphone. This reminded me of my 2004 LRC post, The future of technology, about an NTT DoCoMo video forecasting the future of mobile communications. I’ve updated the links in that post; it’s interesting to see the forecast for the 2010s made in the early 2000s (NTT DoCoMo Vision 2010 video, on YouTube here); the most recent DoCoMo video I could find is The Road to Hokusai’s Waterfall. One interesting thing about these videos is they illustrate the Austrian view of forecasting and certainty. As noted in Verstehen and the Role of Economics in Forecasting, or: If You’re so Rich, Why Aren’t You Smart?, the future is uncertain, but not radically so. We can know some things about the future, so that we are not faced with radical, kaleidic uncertainty; but the future is not perfectly predictable either. Both the ability to make some predictions, and the inability to make perfect predictions, is illustrated in the 2004 technology forecast of 2010.
[LRC]
The future of technology
One vision of the future of presented here in this interesting 11 minute movie by Japanese company NTT DoCoMo [update: the NTT DoCoMo Vision 2010 video may now be found on YouTube here; may now be found here; see also NTT DoCoMo Mobile Future; and a new one, The Road to Hokusai’s Waterfall]. The movie “portrays the kind of technological advances that could transform our world over the next ten years. The events depicted are fictional, but the potential of NTT DoCoMo’s cutting-edge technology is very real. Our third-generation (3G) FOMA service is already operational throughout Japan; and by 2010, we hope to have fully brought our vision of advanced mobile communications to fruition…”
This ain’t sci-fi….
