Checking Wired’s reality check

A review copy of Reality Check turned up in 1996. The book by Brad Wieners and David Pescovitz (ISBN 1-888869-03-8) is published by Hardwired, the book division of Wired magazine.

According to the review at Amazon.com:

Reality Check is based on the popular and amusing futurism section in Wired magazine. It makes bold predictions about when we will see some of the wonders suggested by pundits, thinkers, science fiction and today’s technological revolution.Wondering when we’ll finally see universal picture phones? Electric cars? Contact with extraterrestrial life? Tricorders? Predictions for all of those are here, along with when the two-party system will die and–of grave importance–when we’ll all have virtual sex slaves.

You have to hand it to the authors for putting their reputation’s on the line with the predictions. Few are so public with forecasts.

Here at the start of 2010 we’re about halfway through the book (in terms of pages). So far  the authors have had more misses than hits – that’s only likely to get worse as time goes on.

According to the authors this year (2010) will bring:

• Smart drugs. The description in the book is hazy, but so far, to my knowledge this doesn’t look like being on the agenda.
• Robot surgeon (in a pill). While there is some robot surgery and some advances of this nature, the idea of swallowing a robot pill which swims through your body fixing up ailments is still a way off being an everyday reality.
• The Audio CD becomes a format of second choice. In reality this happened four or five years earlier, but seeing as the book was written in 1996 we can give the authors a big tick for this prediction. What they failed to predict is in many places the Audio CD is now third behind digital music and vinyl – but that’s another story.