f your refrigerator notices that you are out of milk, it can “ask” your car to pick some up on your way home. Appliances today have all too little computing. A toaster should not be able to burn toast. It should be able to talk to your other appliances. It would really be quite simple to brand your toast in the morning with the closing price of your favorite stock. But first, the toaster needs to be connected to the news … The notion of an instruction manual is obsolete … The best instructor on how to use the machine is the machine itself. It knows what you are doing, what you have done, and can even guess what you are about to do … Appliances of tomorrow should come with no printed instructions whatsoever (except This Side Up). The “warranty” should be sent electronically by the appliance itself, once it feels it has been satisfactorily installed.
Predictor: Negroponte, Nicholas
Prediction, in context:In his 1995 book “Being Digital,” Nicholas Negroponte writes:”If your refrigerator notices that you are out of milk, it can ‘ask’ your car to pick some up on your way home. Appliances today have all too little computing. A toaster should not be able to burn toast. It should be able to talk to your other appliances. It would really be quite simple to brand your toast in the morning with the closing price of your favorite stock. But first, the toaster needs to be connected to the news … A centralist model for such sharing is tempting, and some people have suggested information ‘furnaces’ in our basements – a central computer in the home that manages all input and output. I suspect it will not go that way, and the function will be much more distributed among a network of appliances, including one that is a champion at speech recognition and production … The notion of an instruction manual is obsolete … The best instructor on how to use the machine is the machine itself. It knows what you are doing, what you have done, and can even guess what you are about to do … Appliances of tomorrow should come with no printed instructions whatsoever (except This Side Up). The ‘warranty’ should be sent electronically by the appliance itself, once it feels it has been satisfactorily installed.”
Biography:Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab and a popular speaker and writer about technologies of the future, wrote one of the 1990s’ best-selling books about the new future of communications, “Being Digital.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: February 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Intelligent Agents/AI
Name of publication: Being Digital (book)
Title, headline, chapter name: Chapter 17: Digital Fables and Foibles
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Pages 213-215
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Guarino, Jennifer Anne