Flying cars are also horrifying: they've existed for about a century, popular culture won't accept they're a bad idea and imagine the research breakthroughs drone warfare would experience if a consumer market were funneling funds in from a whole new closely-related industry

Speaking of utopias, have you heard that the internet was supposed to bring people together and ends pointless debates?

The idea was that people would be exposed to opposing viewpoints since everyone could communicate effortlessly with everyone. Information would also be easily available to everyone, which would make it clear who is right and who is wrong.

Yeah, that worked out perfectly…

'You won't have a calculator on you everywhere you go' was another one.

This is the result of us seeing a shift from technology being benignly applied to technology being used as a tool for an unmitigated profits.

As with any product, all of the good is sucked out of it for the sake of making more money for the greedy tech billionaires.

Lots of these predictions were actually quite horrible. e.g. flying cars would be so much worse than regular cars in so many ways.

Khan Academy Kids is incredible. Watching a toddler battle brain fatigue learning the number two because they want to is terrible and terrifying. If you let them pace themselves and treat it as a game without forcing a schedule they easily get two years ahead of schedule. But it is so much an outlier.

the lack of physical books certainly came true

Actually, your kids will be taught dependency on proprietary corporate software that spies on them and conditions them into corporate vendors walled gardens in order to a create lifelong customers (+ data mining sources) in order to enrich giant tech corporations.

Ideally, your kids would be taught genuine computer literacy so that they can be digitally self sufficient but that is never going to happen in a school setting.

Here's an unrelated picture of a North American wood ape:

In high school, teachers used to insist we become computer techs and engineers cause it was the future! And teachers would tell us "if you don't get into computers, you'll end up as a plumber or garbage man!"

Meanwhile I'm adult, watching the plumbers and garbage man bringing home the money and having unions and benefits. And I hated computers so I just got into nothing

in the year 2000

I learned almost everything I know of value from a computer.

Funny answer: well it's not like we're going to pay teachers a living wage, either way!?

Brace yourself for a significantly worse one now: Project 2025 may end teaching almost entirely. Factory workers don't need "school" like we have had it all of our lives - I mean they would to avoid getting scammed and such, hence why schools would be taken away, bc they lead to such things as unionization, which henceforth is to be consolidated "bad" (bc sharing = caring hence socialism = communism and... fuck, nobody can explain this with "factual terminology", you just have to turn off your brain in order to feel the Truthiness of it, yeah!? 👍🤮).

Similar attacks on basic infrastructure are ofc also taking place elsewhere across the world as well. And ofc even if any individual attempt to roll back provision of education fails, it will simply continue on with the next attempt, and the one after that, etc.

Therefore I vehemently disagree: learning via computers may be the only method of instruction left to people who cannot afford access to human teachers, in the world that seems inexorably and progressively advancing upon us.

So it is what may offer us perhaps the best source of hope for our future!

My kids use chat gpt to learn stuff sometimes, like math. They do extensively check it's not bullshit though.

I definitely see a trend where crappy teachers get bested by computers.

Being the devils advocate here but the quality of my teachers during school was worse than GPT4. They were more biased, made more errors, were more unfair, pushed more extremist views...

How will this take place when kids won't even respect a substitute teacher let alone an AI generated personality?

This is a 1972 documentary about the life in the year 2000. It is in German, but English subtitles can be set up in the video settings. It turned out to be a bit different, but some predictions back then came to reality.