This is my favourite. I love being able to video chat with my sister in NZ. As someone who grew up with big black bakelite dial phones, it seems like a miracle.
this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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Just as surreal as that flying car!
As amusing as these are, I have to assume that a lot of the time these things aren't direct predictions of the future, but instead a visual metaphor for what it might look like.
The big funnel full of books ("books go in") and hand crank ("work is done") are such that any regular joe of the time can look at it and see "ah yes, this is a machine that eats up books and zaps them into your head!"
If someone had to make a serious prediction at what such a future machine might look like, I doubt it would have looked so haphazard as that, with books funnelled in like coal.
For all I know, this illustration isn't serious at all, and could be nothing more than political satire - on the danger of technology in education - and massively exaggerated just as our current political satire is. The things of true value (the books) are chewed up like worthless fodder for the machine, while the students sit bored, all the interest of learning taken away, as they can no longer learn for themselves. Meanwhile the "teacher" sits there all pompous, getting paid for apparently doing almost nothing!
There's a lot of reasons this illustration could be the way that it is.
My favourite part in that picture is that seemingly one of the students has to miss out on that knowledge since they need to operate the crank.
He's from the next grade up. He already had that batch of knowledge pulp extruded into his brain.
If they put a motor on the knowledge machine, that kid will be out of a job and his family has to move back to the country to tend the fields.
Bold of you to assume they aren't outsourcing the farm jobs to big machinery producers(John Deere) or prison forced labor.
His parents are behind on tuition
Must be a public school
At least they accurately predicted the term "LAN".
I imagine EN is short form for Ethernet. Nailed it.
Guess the kid turning the churn don't get to learn shit today
Wha-
What happens to the books after they go into the machine?
Are they reusable?
Do they have to be printed anew?
That's how you digitize books, obviously. It's so easy!
Skyrim spell book rules
You know how we all have micro plastic in our brains?
I am afraid I have to inform you that the books are not reusable.
Or you can interpret the image: Students get brainwashed via headphone propaganda while real books are shredded.
Or they're using active noise cancelling headphones to prevent the children from hearing the destruction of the books, which naturally they would want to prevent. They just couldn't imagine that noise cancelling headphones could be wireless.
On the flip side, there are many ancillary conventions that we keep to this day because we don't examine them.
QWERTY. We have had better layouts since…before the invention of computers lol.
"Lol, they thought students would still be learning in group settings in rows of desks, like some kind of assembly line, rather than uploading at home"
This is exactly how I remember primary schools in France in the 2000's
I see someone else also interpreted L'an 2000 as such :)
"10 hours straight. He's a machine... and my arms are tired from the crank"
"I know Kung-fu"
"You better, that was our last copy of Kung Fu Elements, by Shou-Yu Liang"
So..audiobooks
That's the whole problem with education today - lazy teachers want a motorized crank!
Misguided future interpretation aside, I'm very fond of the user's icon of Big-fat-ugly-bug-face-baby-eating O'Brien from Muppet Treasure Island.
It's a LLM which eats books to learn. Quite precise
Oh this is great. Google has a treasure trove of these kind of pictures.