<i>It will soon be possible, for instance, for a business man in New York to dictate instructions and have them appear instantly in type in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up from his desk and talk with any telephone subscriber in the world. It will only be necessary to carry an inexpensive instrument not bigger than a watch, which will enable its bearer to hear anywhere on sea or land for distances of thousands of miles. One may listen or transmit speech or song to the uttermost parts of the world. In the same way any kind of picture, drawing, or print can be transferred from on place to another. It will be possible to operate millions of such instruments from a single station. Thus it will be a simple matter to keep the uttermost parts of the world in instant tough with each other. The song of a great singer, the speech of a political leader, the sermon of a great divine, the lecture of a man of science may thus be delivered to an audience scattered all over the world.</i><p>- Tesla, 1909<p><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nN8DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA476&vq=tesla&pg=PA476&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow">http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nN8DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA476&vq...</a><p><a href="http://www.teslasociety.com/pictures/teslatower/teslatower3.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.teslasociety.com/pictures/teslatower/teslatower3....</a><p>He also said some nice things about communication devices "in your vest pocket," but I can't find it.
I interviewed Clarke in Sri Lanka in 2003 and asked him what he predicted for the future. He pointed to a bookcase full of his books. Then he told me a joke: <a href="http://newslines.org/mark-mary-devlin/arthur-c-clarke-tells-mark-a-joke/" rel="nofollow">http://newslines.org/mark-mary-devlin/arthur-c-clarke-tells-...</a>
This is from 1974. It's worth noting that by 1974, the TCP/IP spec was already written, what many consider the first PC (the Altair 8800) was out, and ARPANet had been around for years, with transatlantic nodes already in existence.
...but Robert Heinlein predicted why or rather how the web would work on us. In 'Friday,' he gets wrong that it will be a system with metered, limited access...<p>...but (to my mind, remarkably) predicts that multimedia-enabled hypertext will lead to associative impulsive serendipitous browsing, not structured intentional behavior. The one scene in which the eponymous character interacts with the network is given primarily to a discussion of her own digression into subjects far afield from her nominal research topic.<p>...he also predicts that this might provide surprising value.<p>RIP RAL!
Prescient. However the earliest accurate prediction of the Internet and personal computing I've yet come across is still Murray Leinster's 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe"<p><a href="http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm</a>
To be accurate, he predicted not the PC and the internet in this clip, but having a terminal (console) at home that connects to a computer somewhere else. My dad had that in the late 1970s: a big (printer) terminal that connected by 300 baud modem to his office.
Clarke also predicted genetically engineered chimpanzee slaves, the 'Superchimp' (or 'Simp' for short). Leaving aside the ethical issues this raises, it indicates that he thought that it was more likely that such a creature would be created than intelligent robots.<p><a href="http://nemaloknig.info/read-88307/" rel="nofollow">http://nemaloknig.info/read-88307/</a>
It's a nice video but this was in 1974, not THAT long ago despite the fact it's in black and white. Let's not forget that a lot of people actively try to achieve things that take longer than they expect to come to market, so it's not completely surprising someone back then had a clear vision of what could the future be like (and happened to be right. But for each good prediction there's a 100 out there which were wrong, so let's not forget that).
He also predicts that the entire workforce will become purely remote workers (telecommuters). While this is technically possible, it has met quite the opposition (and lack of proper tooling to make it as efficient and effective as it needs to be). Of course, maybe that is the idealist view. The realist view is that it will only lead to easier outsourcing? :p
Yeah, Arthur C Clark had some doozies. The bio-engineered monkeys as servants was a good one. :) <a href="http://mentalfloss.com/article/57157/arthur-c-clarke-predicts-future-1964" rel="nofollow">http://mentalfloss.com/article/57157/arthur-c-clarke-predict...</a>
He also predicted in this video "digital nomadism" when he mentions about being able to live anywhere in the world and still work.<p>Yeah, I'm British but I'm posting this from Singapore. #yolo
Isn't it a bit late to predict that NOW!?.. :P<p>I really enjoyed books like "Rendezvous with Rama". It isn't often that books written about the future in the 70's still are as mesmerizing today.