Mensa Symposium Predicts Future
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Mensa Symposium Predicts Future (About Anglia)
Sir Clive Sinclair outlines his vision for our computer future.
The 1984 Mensa Symposium opened with chairman Sir Clive Sinclair's vision of the 21st century. Highly intelligent robots will become our doctors, teachers and even our companions, he predicts. By 2020 mental toil will be the task of a computer. Sinclair insists that he is not trying to replicate the human brain through the computers, but rather to create 'thinking machines', sharing a large pool of data ensuring consistent, unbiased information. The metacomputer will become a friend and servant to the family, never forgetting a birthday, and will even have its own unique personality.
Sinclair does not believe people should be intimidated by the fast-developing technology. One day computers will provide wisdom and a place to turn to when having a problem - a wonderful stress reliever. Miranda Hambro, the youngest Mensa member at the symposium is more cautious about the role of computers in the future, saying she would not want a computer to take over the world.
The reporter was Owen Spencer-Thomas for this video, made to be shown in a news story on Anglia Television's early evening news / magazine programme About Anglia.
Founded in 1946, Mensa is an organisation limiting its membership to people of high intelligence, generally reflecting those scoring in the top two percent of the population in a standardised IQ test. Sir Clive Sinclair was a pioneer in the 1970s and 1980s computing industry, developing consumer electronics, including the Sinclair Executive, the world's first slimline electronic pocket calculator in 1972. His continuing work was a key part of the cluster of high-tech businesses in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire.
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That Was the Future
Their future, our now: explore how earlier generations imagined the world we're living in today.
For anyone living in the later years of the 20th century, it felt like the future was arriving unusually fast. As computers, once huge behemoths that filled rooms, began to shrink to desktop size, they quickly spread into every arena of society, spreading out from university labs and industry giants to ordinary offices, schools and into the home. Meanwhile astonishing advances in robotics, genetics, materials, transport and entertainment all offered glimpses of a brave new world. Just trying to keep up with this revolution was dizzying, never mind making sense of it.
What did it all mean? What did the future hold - for our work, our leisure, our health, our food, our relationships? How would technology change us as people? Would it be the kind of future we'd want? Nobody could say for sure, but there were plenty of people willing to speculate. And now that their future is our present, it's fascinating to look back and judge for ourselves how right - or how wrong - they were.
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