Tech leaders love predicting the future. Sometimes they nail it, sometimes they miss spectacularly, and sometimes they leave behind quotes that only get better with age.
In Hindsight: Tech Quotes That Got the Future Right and Wrong
In Hindsight: Tech Quotes That Got the Future Right and Wrong
- Thread starter Julio Franco
- Start date
+1 for Hawking's quote. I would reckon, though, that when we meet other intelligent life, humanity will be shown to be pretty average in galactic terms.
Thatsdisgusting
Posts: 521 +599
Heh, the optimist.
Not a tech prediction but my favourite quote of Bill's is the one about who stole the GUI from whom: "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
Theinsanegamer
Posts: 8,820 +17,955
You should add in there the hordes of internet users that claimed the DIY market was dead in 2011.....and 2014.....and 2020.....and now 2026.
Ahh, the pessimist.
onebignerd
Posts: 156 +89
My hope is that the AI bubble, the resultant push to build data centers and the computer component hoarding ALL collapses in a giant ugly heap!!
Axeia
Posts: 1,051 +1,449
"Two years from now, spam will be solved"
To be fair, Bill was sort of right. It's just that Microsoft never seems to have solved it.
Gmails spam filter is so good that I haven't checked the 'spam' folder for years (other than the occasional subscription email ending up there). So a very minor 'false positive' problem (non-spam marked as spam).
Knowing people with hotmail (and thus Microsoft handled spam) the problem is two-fold. They got spam in their regular inbox and legit mail in their spam filter.
Ah spam, once considered a waste of resource due to it taking up significant resources and making communication harder. Those were simpler times.
Now we got AI polluting the internet with garbage articles/lists/music/videos wasting far more resources and neigh-impossible to avoid besides filtering out search results to before its deployment
To be fair, Bill was sort of right. It's just that Microsoft never seems to have solved it.
Gmails spam filter is so good that I haven't checked the 'spam' folder for years (other than the occasional subscription email ending up there). So a very minor 'false positive' problem (non-spam marked as spam).
Knowing people with hotmail (and thus Microsoft handled spam) the problem is two-fold. They got spam in their regular inbox and legit mail in their spam filter.
Ah spam, once considered a waste of resource due to it taking up significant resources and making communication harder. Those were simpler times.
Now we got AI polluting the internet with garbage articles/lists/music/videos wasting far more resources and neigh-impossible to avoid besides filtering out search results to before its deployment
That was from Pirates of Silicon Valley no? Not from Bill Gates directly.
It does seem to be an authentic quote, even if the wording isn't 100%.
Read Bill Gates' answer to a Reddit question about whether he copied Steve Jobs
"The main 'copying' that went on relative to Steve and me is that we both benefited from the work that Xerox Parc did," Gates says.
www.businessinsider.com
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