Year 2000: Home Computers, Disappearance Of Privacy

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31449, 16 August 1967, Page 8

Year 2000: Home Computers, Disappearance Of Privacy

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright)

NEW YORK, Aug. 14. i By the year 2000 ' Americans could expect computers and robots in the home, the virtual disappearance of privacy, a drastically changed family unit and a gross national product ’ of four trillion dollars, the “New York Times” News Service reported.

These predictions are included in the first working papers and discussions of the Commission on the Year 2000 published as the summer issue of “Daedlus,” the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sponsored by the academy and founded by the Carnegie Corporation, the commission is making an inter-disciplin-ary effort to anticipate future problems, and to begin designing alternative solutions. Its chairman is Daniel Bell, the Columbia University sociologist.

Harry Kalvem, jun., professor of law at the University

of Chicago, said that by the year 2000 “man's technical inventiveness may, in terms of privacy, have turned the whole community Into the equivalent of an army barracks. It may be a final ironic commentary on how bad things have become by 2000 when someone will make a fortune merely by providing, on a monthly, weekly, daily or even hourly basis a room of one’s own.”

Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, said that many functions now expected of the family might be transferred to wider shifting groups. "Companionship for work, play and stable-living would come to be based on many different combinations, within and across sex lines, among different-sized clusters of individuals.” The “massive failure of the family today,” she said, “could lead to a new family style with an emphasis on very small families and a high toleration of childless marriage or a more encompassing social style in which parenthood would be limited to a smaller number of families whose principal function would be child-rearing. The rest of the population would be free to function—for the first time in history—as individuals.”

George A. Miller, professor of psychology at Harvard, said that, by 2000, the limit of man’s mind to absorb information might be reached. “We may already be nearing some kind of limit for many of the less gifted among us,” he said, “and those still able to handle the present level of complexity are in ever increasing demand." According to David Riesman, professor of sociology at Harvard, growing pressures for personal achievement could bring severe social tensions by 2000, as well as a decline in manners and charm, and social disapproval of many hobbies.

Herman Kahn, director of the Hudson Institute, said that the amount of leisure time available to Americans by 2000 could be “catastrophic.” He said, “the American with leisure is a man at loose ends, it will take him a generation longer to adjust to leisure than it takes the European.”

Kahn offered a list of 100 technical innovations likely in the next 33 years, including a pocket-telephone, home computers, programmed dreams, and artificial moons for lighting large' areas at night

By 2000, said Martin

Shubik, professor of the economics of organisation at Yale, the aged could constitute between eight and 10 per cent of American population, and 11 or 12 per cent of Americans would be Negro. The nation is about 11 per cent Negro today. Kahn said Anthony J. Wiener, of the Hudson Institute, predicted that almost half of the American population would live in three huge super-cities: "Boswash,” the urban strip, including Boston, New York city and Washington, “Chipitts,” the area from Chicago to Pittsburgh, and "Sansan,” which would stretch from San Francisco to San Diego.