Yesterday's Tomorrows

I think this joke is pretty funny. They fooled me, for a while. The caption reads in part:

"Scientists from the RAND Corporation here created this model to illustrate how a home computer could look like in the year 2004"

The problem with this is, it's completely bogus. In reality, I guess this is a photo of a mock up of a nuclear submarine command center from the 1950's. Even in the 1950's, most futurists would not have predicted home computers to come with steering wheels.

Photoshop and false pretenses aside, it's really hard to predict the future. I own a couple of books that prove just how hard that is. One is called Yesterday's Tomorrows and the other is The Experts Speak. (Example Quote from the Expert's Speak: "Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will be a reality within ten years. " - Alex Lewyt, president of Lewyt Corporation, a vacuum cleaner company in 1955.) That's so goofy that I now wonder if that's a myth as well. Feel free to post other bad past predictions of the future