Reading:
This was read sometime during the month of January, 2005.
Specs:
Margolis, Jonathan, A Brief History of Tomorrow, The Future,
Past and Present, Bloomsbury
press, London, 2000. From my personal library.
Overview:
This book discusses the views of the future that have been held in
the past, as well as some held in the present. I found it more
interesting because of the former than the latter.
One important observation is how much people's view of the future
is, in fact, influenced by their present reality. Although it does
not appear in the book, the most notable observation I've seen of
this is Star Trek, the Motion Picture.
This is the first of several movies based on the Star Trek
series form the mid-1960's. The movie, however, wasn't made until
the 1979, more than ten years later. The first thing the movie does
is a complete overhaul of the Enterprise (the ship)'s interior. The
reason, ultimately, is that computers had changed so much between
1965 and 1979 that the old images were no longer acceptable. That
is, the interior was so much based on the 1965 reality that by 1979,
it was no longer acceptable.
I did not finish this book because
after a time it starts to rehash the author's current view of the
future. I've already seen a lot of this and got bored.
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