I realized I haven’t really spoken all that much about my dissertation, so, considering the fact that I am around the halfway point and have just handed in my formative draft of it, and then considering the evolved purpose of this blog was to, well, blog about projects and progress at university, I imagine it’s high time to do so. So, here we go.

The title of the dissertation is Technological Predictions in Practice: Do predictions in technology come true and what impact do they have on our future? The goal is to discover what predictions people have made about technology and weather they have come true in present society. The idea came about from reading The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil. The book makes predictions as to the future of technology moving through various decades. Starting with 2009. As it is currently 2008, and 2009 isn’t all that far away, I assumed that it would be reasonably straightforward to say whether he was right or not about his 2009 predictions; and it is.

However the nature of the dissertation does not make things straightforward. In fact it makes things incredibly difficult. It’s not satisfied if I say so and so was right or not. I have to say why they were right (or not), and they were (or weren’t), then why they were (or weren’t). In addition to this, I have to expand the text with examples, references, contexts and all the other little details that will build the word count up to the 7,000-9,000 words it has to be. I’m getting there, little by little. I’ve done an interview, with another lining itself up. I have questionaires, and many book and web references about Dennis Gabor, NASA and hoverboards. People and things that experiment with the future. On the whole I’m enjoying it, though the prospect of writing 9,000 words is somewhat daunting. But I think I’ll get there.

So there you have it, my dissertation. Or at least its concept.