David Bowie: Futurist?

[DonRocks]

This is an absolutely fascinating series of videos on bbc.com dealing with various aspects of predicting the future. Along the way, you'll see an amazing prediction by none other than David Bowie, and you'll cringe when you're reminded of the Y2K Bug, which even now sounds scarier than it really was.

"How Easy Is It To Predict the Future?" on bbc.com

When I helped design EPA's enforcement system, we also used two-digit years, and I made the decision (in 1990) to treat the years as follows: Any year between 00 and 69 was treated as being in the 21st century; any year between 70 and 99 was treated as being in the 20th century. Why? Because the EPA wasn't founded until 1970, ergo any date that read, e.g., 69, was obviously a data-input error, because it was impossible for any EPA-related actions to take place in 1969 (most of the enforcement laws had been passed in the 80s). I also knew that technology would advance rapidly enough so that it was impossible for our system to last until 2070 - we were Y2K-ready almost ten years before everyone started to panic about it. Incidentally, I also predicted, in the 1990s, that "one day, memory would be so cheap that disk drives would no longer be used," so we pre-designed the system to be ready to handle everything from memory - it sounded ridiculous at the time, but my supervisor - an absolutely brilliant man - wholeheartedly agreed. A lot of good it did - our beautiful system has already been "modernized" by off-the-shelf software which is easy to maintain, but disallows any custom queries about the data.

[dcs]

David Bowie is @ the Brooklyn Museum, March 2–July 15, 2018.

Quote

David Bowie is presents approximately 400 objects drawn primarily from the David Bowie Archive, including the artist’s original costumes, handwritten lyric sheets from famous songs, original album art, photographs, and videos, all tracing Bowie’s creative process from his teenage years in England through his last twenty years, when he resided in New York City.