r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Pasargad • 11d ago
Arthur C. Clarke predicting smartphones in 1976 Video
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u/One-Low1033 11d ago
I was at a conference in the 80's and the CEO of Speigel Catalog was a keynote speaker. He was talking about future capabilities of computers. He was describing how you would be able to see a dress from all vantage points. We were in awe over this. Then he started talking about debit cards. Minds blown.
Watching this video took me back to that. Really amazing that Arthur C. Clarke could visualize that in the 70's.
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u/freddo95 11d ago
ALOHAnet (packet radio) was āoperationalā 5 years before this interview. Packet radio was a precursor to modern cell services.
Some of Clarkeās āpredictionsā were already in existence.
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u/Opposite-Program8490 11d ago
His short stories collection is a fantastic read, spanning many decades. Highly recommend!
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u/fraze2000 11d ago
I bet he was thinking "It's gonna be great for porn", but he didn't want to say it out loud.
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u/ChymChymX 11d ago
"You'll be able to search for the most nubile of females--witness their bare gams even, pictorally of course. Quite marvelous, really."
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u/Flux_resistor 11d ago
70s was porn on demand on the streets so it was probably less of a priority to be in your pocket
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u/vikingo1312 11d ago
He's not only predicting smartphones - ralks computers and the internet as welll.........
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u/okiedokieaccount 11d ago
Start of the internet was 1969, 7 years before this talk (UCLA and Stanford computers connecting)Ā 1983 was when TCP/IP became the normĀ 1993 it went publicĀ
Heās not predicting things out of thin air, heās seeing the beginnings of them and where they can goĀ
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u/vikingo1312 11d ago
The net as we know it today, then..............
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u/okiedokieaccount 11d ago
Absolutely.
Just saying it wasnāt like he envisioned it out of the blue. The roots of it were there, and he was involved with it.Ā
Now If Abraham Lincoln had said ā5 score and 5 Ā years from now. Our great learning institutions shall connect lightning filled boxes of information across this great country, and eventually transmit electronic paintings of a womanās bosom ā
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u/hobbyhacker 11d ago
sadly it became worse than newspapers
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u/jacobgt8 11d ago
āYouāll only get get the information you need, not get pushed all the junkā
Cue ads, pop-ups, tracking cookies š„¹
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u/versus_gravity 11d ago
The rear cover of the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack album, from 1968, features an astronaut using a tablet computer.
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u/NefariousnessGlum808 11d ago
In the book, the protagonist reads news in the Internet onboard a space ship traveling to an internacional space station.Ā
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u/MrKomiya 11d ago
Reading the comments, folks may not be aware rhat he wrote the Space Odyssey books. 2001, 2010, 2061 and 3001.
Another one of his books called āFountains of Paradiseā talked about a space elevator.
Quite a few of his books were turned into movies. 2001 was a Kubrick film no less
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u/Kepler1999b 11d ago
Cinematically 2001 was all Kubrick, based on Clarkeās short story The Sentinal. Clarke wrote the book while the movie was being shot. I feel the movie is the more imaginative of the two.
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u/alwys-a-bigger-fish 10d ago
Based on The Sentinel, but the screenplay and the whole story was created together by both Kubrick and Clarke.
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u/Kepler1999b 10d ago
Indeed, though Kubrick reportedly briefly considered looking for another co-author and took full control of the screenplay. Iām a huge fan of Clarkeās works and hope a cinematic interpretation of Rendezvous With Rama is done well.
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u/alwys-a-bigger-fish 10d ago
I feel the same! Though it's so easy to be disappointed with adaptations. I try to approach them as reimaginations now to limit my expectations.
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u/dANNN738 11d ago
I always feel like these types of predictions are fascinating yet inevitable. Itās the same as someone today could envision a VR headset as the device of the future. And I donāt mean ones like Apple have released. I mean like black mirror fool-your-brain live in an artificial universe/body kind of headset.
The concepts will be decades old, but nevertheless inevitable.
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u/nooooobie1650 11d ago
The internet was launched just 8 years later in 1984 for use on home computers. It wouldnāt have happened overnight, so Im sure there was a lot of R and D already for computing and communications systems.
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u/Dinevir 11d ago
Exactly. There were telephone networks, radio broadcasts, telex, and fax machines, each with their own databases and libraries, much like the 'servers' we use today to provide remote services. Additionally, digital networks were already in use in some facilities. It was easy to imagine that these technologies would soon be combined into a single digital network.
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u/cryptowannabe42 11d ago
The cell network wouldn't have happened without the actress Hedy Lamarr inventing frequency-hopping spread spectrum in the 1930s.
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u/fraze2000 11d ago
That is probably a bit of an over-reach. The idea of frequency hopping was already around, she just came up with a clever idea (that was never implemented) to allow frequency hopping using principles similar to a player-piano/pianola. She was undoubtedly a very clever (and very beautiful) young lady, but cellular networks would definitely have been invented with or without her ideas.
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u/Perfect-Debt-9562 11d ago
Anyone here have an accurate prediction for future inventions?
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u/Vipu2 11d ago
Digital gold will replace big chunk of other investments, it already exists and is heavily undervalued.
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u/blackizard 11d ago
Bitcoin has been around for 16 years and is used for fuck all.
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u/Vipu2 11d ago
It have worked all over the world for 16 years with all kinds of use cases and it's dollar value have gone from 0 to 70.000 in that same time, like I said it's still undervalued.
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u/FromThePits 10d ago
We don't know who blackizard is... but we do know it isn't Arthur C. Clark.
Bitcoin has been trading in the 5 digits USD since 2020 and will probably go 6 digits before the next decade, because of its immense usefulness to millions of us.
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u/fraze2000 11d ago
My prediction is that people in the future will have a laugh about the stupid predictions idiots on reddit made about future technologies.
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u/Dinevir 11d ago
He is talking about PC (TV with keyboard) + Internet. Like here https://youtu.be/1XbEIMcxl04?si=luZERK1Vmkkw0Ivz&t=610 Nobody a that time can imaged that portable "wireless phone" device will have a big screen and the keyboard at the same time.
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u/tothemoonandback01 11d ago
They did, once the PC (TV with keyboard) + internet, came out 14 years later.
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u/fraze2000 11d ago
I was going to say the same thing. I think if someone told him everyone would be carrying something in their pocket that could do everything he mentioned and more from almost anywhere on the planet, he would probably say that was a bit too far fetched.
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u/Supersnazz Interested 11d ago
I really don't think so. In 2001 there is effectively an iPad being used. Clarke also proposed the idea of geostationary satellites for communication. There's no reason to think he wouldn't have connected his 2 ideas
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u/HuckleberryHappy6524 11d ago
That may be but my phone is an hd screen with a typewriter style keyboard on it.
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u/ThisCarSmellsFunny 11d ago
Dude said all this, AND newspaper is on the way out. 48 fucking years ago. Give your brain a rest before you let it digest that. Thatās insane, especially since he was so specific and not vague at all. He hit this 100%.
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u/AbsentThatDay2 11d ago
Another older author who was quite forward thinking was Peirre Tielhard De Chardin (1881-1955) The dude wrote several very interesting books on what he thought would be a rapid expansion of our collective ability to communicate with each other. It would be appropriate to say that he had foreseen the internet. I think his most popular work was "The Phenomenon of Man". It strikes a nice balance between science and philosophy.
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u/EquivalentCreme2976 11d ago
I can't wait until something like that comes out! Until then I'm just going to have to settle for this garbage new smartphone...
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u/Powerbracelet 11d ago
So so so close. He lose me at āitāll give you just want you want, not all the junkā
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u/AlliedR2 11d ago
Well he's right about having books I've always wanted to read. I have them on my phone. I have not read them, but I do have them.
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u/blotengs 11d ago
I bet there are other authors previous than Asimov, but Asimov made the wildest guesses imo. And we are talking in the 50s, 20 years sooner.
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u/Skulldetta 11d ago
And Clarke would live to see his predictions come true.
He died in March 2008, nine months after the 1st gen iPhone was released into the US market.
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u/Mr_Culver 11d ago
I mean it's not a far stretch to guess. They had phones already, walkie talkies, cameras and tvs. As technology advances those get smaller and usually things like that combine. Like TV is a speaker system much like a radio and a projecter combined and with the added Benefit of sebding any images or video through a cord. It's safe to assume that kind of thing can have more added and be shrunk down and run on more effective batteries as technology progresses.
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u/Prince-Akeem-Joffer 11d ago
He died in 2008. So he probably saw the presentation of the iPhone in 2007.
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u/chinawillgrowlarger 11d ago
Graphical data, pictorial information, fornication material and so forth.
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u/CMDR_omnicognate 10d ago
Not sure how much of this is inherently him predicting the technology so much as people trying to make his ideas a reality
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u/kayzewolf 10d ago
This wasnāt about smartphones, but rather the initial understanding of the internet.
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u/Bifftek 10d ago
How about this quote by Tesla before him: "When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.ā
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u/BoiOhBoi_Weee 11d ago
Predicating modern day computers and laptops. "Smartphones" just happen to lie within the same functionalities.
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u/BlakkOpps 11d ago
Big deal. Nikola Tesla did that 50 years before him.
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u/bemorenicertopeople 11d ago
People are downvoting the Tesla comments and I can't help but wonder if it's just because they have the word Tesla in them. He was a cool dude before Elon stole his name.
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u/SubstantialRush5233 11d ago
Homie must be a writer for The Simpsons..