Book from 1980 predicts the future with scary levels of accuracy

Please Note: The TotalFreedom Forum has now been put into a read-only mode. Total Freedom has now closed down and will not be returning in any way, shape or form. It has been a pleasure to lead this community and I wish you all the best for your futures.

    In 1980 (before the IBM PC and the first Macintosh were released), two authors Gary B. Shelly and Thomas J. Cashman published an educational book titled Introduction to computers and data processing. While the book is mostly filled with extremely outdated documentation of various languages, instructions, and trivia, the book raises some concerns that hold up extremely well in today's world 4 decades later.

    On a few occasions it raises concerns about how computers could be utilized to store huge amounts of information about citizens and the implications that could have if the data were to be misused, especially in regards to privacy. When you connect it to big companies like Google and Facebook (who already have a shady as fuck record when it comes to privacy) doing sketchy shit with your data for profit, you'll shit bricks. To quote Shelly and Cashman at page 446:

    Quote

    The computer will have a significant influence on the way in which society functions in the future. One of the more pressing issues ... is that modern computer systems have made it technically and economically feasable to store large volumes of data about citizens ... in such a way that this data can be readily accessed and analyzed. Some feel the establishment of these data banks offers a great potential for the loss of privacy and that misuse of this data threatens many of the basic freedoms found in society.

    Holy fuck. This is fucking scary levels of accuracy. It's literally as if they knew that this exact thing would happen and tried to warn everyone decades earlier before it was too late, only to fall on deaf ears.

    image.png

    As someone who has had to read a number of old reaserch papers from time to time for school stuff, it's scary that there's a ton of papers which have equally scary predictions about the state of things as they are now, such as this one

    Quote

    The presence of a large reser- voir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. The possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories and therefore the need for preparedness should not be ignored.

    There's a bunch of others I could list but it's 11pm and this one was easy to find since its at the top of Google if you search for it but if you want to find more for yourself look at some ones about climate change, those guys are on point

    To be fair, this is probably confirmation bias more than anything else. Almost every possible (and impossible) event has been predicted by someone at some point. Over 99% of the time they are wrong and forgotten about, and once in a while they happen to get it right and their text predicting it is rediscovered after it has come true.