Such breathless, over-reaching predictions are made at the advent of almost all new technologies — which have yet to deliver even a fraction of the projected returns: “the entire earth will be converted into a huge brain, as it were, capable of response in every one of its parts.” — Nikola Tesla, 1904 (quite a laughable way to think of radio today!)

D.W. Griffith predicted of the invention of film in the 1920s that “children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures. Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again.” (turns out it is not the children in schools, but the children playing with matches in Silicon Valley who tend to ignore the lessons of history!)

Of cable television in 1970 it was said in a Sloan Foundation report that “the revolution now in sight may be nothing less… it may be conceivably more,” as compared to the invention of the printing press. Ultimate irony being, I am using a keyboard to pour movable type into the largely plain-text website of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who probably shares the abject scorn of his tech industry colleagues for the Los Angeles-based entertainment industry so described (though that’s an assumption, and I’ll fall short of officially speaking for Ev on this matter ;-P)