Assessing predictions
There are a number of specific and general predictions made in Bob’s paper for the Encyclopaedia Britannica from November 1981. Forty years later, it’s interesting to look at what he got right and what he didn’t – and maybe figure out why.
Preface
. . . the actual quantity of information is increasing exponentially and will continue to do so for some time.
I want to restrict my definition of “predictions” to things that are testable and measurable, but this is too good of a place to start. There’s not an easy way to measure this, but this is indisputably right.Possibly 1981 was underestimating the magnitude?
Some naive people who espouse the important potential of video and computers in learning completely miss the point by arguing that reading is on its way to becoming passé. Our view is completely opposite to this. PEOPLE WILL READ MORE IN THE COMPUTER AGE, NOT LESS.
This is one of the more surprising passages in the text – and the caps are what’s found there. The argument he’s critiquing rose in prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, but has declined since then, in part because the ubiquity of the internet – particularly through the smartphone – made everyone read constantly. People in 2021 are reading more than they were reading in 1981; that might change, as direct audio/visual communication becomes easier and easier, but it will probably be the case for some time yet.
(It’s also almost certainly true that Wikipedia is in use far more now than the Encyclopaedia Britannica was in 1981.)
Chapter 1
Since at least one, and possibly as many as two or three, products billing themselves as electronic encyclopedias will come to market before Britannica does . .
Not sure! The EB project Bob was pushing never came to fruition, but I’m not sure how fast electronic encyclopedias (as opposed to online encyclopedias, which came much later) came to market; later in the paper, Bob suggests that some products already existed, though they were severely lacking in functionality.
Chapter 2
In this chapter and the next we will discuss the creation of two different encyclopedias, one for children, on the order of Compton’s, and the other, a wholly electronic edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. These projects are futuristic only in the sense that it will be at least five to ten and ten to fifteen years respectively before either could be ready in completed form.
Two predictions here: first, that a visual encyclopedia for children could be produced between 1986 and 1991, and second, that a more complex online encyclopedia could be produced between 1991 and 1996. Nobody did either of these things in the model suggested, of course; maybe Microsoft Encarta, released in 1993, could be seen as analogous to the proposed children’s encyclopedia. Wikipedia would start assuming the complexity of the online encyclopedia (with video demonstrating concepts, for example) roughly around 2006.
There probably was educational software between 1986 and 1991 that did things roughly similar to what was being described in Bob’s idea for Compton’s, though videodisc-quality video wouldn’t really show up on computers until the CD-ROM era.
Later we will discuss the possibility of a fully electronic “on-line” edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica which delivers text and computer programs over telephone and cable-TV lines (or even satellite) while visual and audio information is accessed at home on a videodisc. Although we think in the future this will be the dominant form of encyclopedia, the market for a stand-alone videodisc encyclopedia definitely exists today and will continue for some time.
He’s right here that the dominant form of encyclopedia would be online, not right about videodiscs. The problem here is not imagining how fast information could be transmitted over networks (by satellite even) and understanding how thoroughly that would transform the media landscape.
The relatively high price of microcomputer equipment alone will mean that for many years, many consumers will own videodisc players but not computers.
Blatantly wrong, though this wouldn’t have been clear at all at the moment it was written. In 1982 and 1983, the price of microcomputers would plummet (killing the industry for a few years, but leading to widespread adoption); at the end of 1981, microcomputers were still expensive. Videodisc systems, by contrast, stayed expensive because people weren’t buying them. One suspects it could have as easily gone the other way.