Wonder what they're cooking up nowadays

Lauren Weinstein has apparently been converting his old videotapes to digital, and is posting some curiosities. Here's one about the 1970's predictions for the waves of the future. It's funny to hear the oooh-aaah tone in which they discuss the distant possibility of things we take for granted today, but it's also surprising how much of the impact of our technology they were able to anticipate.

Kind of makes me wonder what wild and impossible thing someone's working on today that we'll be absolutely dependent on in 30 years. My prediction track record is not good. I remember the first time I heard someone talking about protein secondary structure prediction from amino-acid sequence. My reaction was, "Nah...it's much more complicated than that. They'll never get it to work." And when Ellen bought her first PC, she whined "I know it will be obsolete as soon as I get it out of the store." I was just starting grad school at the time, and thought I knew plenty about computers. Chortled I: "Obsolete??? With 20 meg of hard drive??? You couldn't fill that much memory if you sat down to write from now through the rest of your life."