Author: Alan Oppenheimer
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Left Behind on Purpose: The Light Bulb?
More surprising than the planned obsolescence of analog TV was the planned obsolescence of the light bulb. The light bulb? Yes, the incandescent light bulb. Invented by Thomas Edison in 1879, light bulb technology remained essentially unchanged for over a century. Fluorescent lighting became popular in businesses, but households continued to use Edison’s technology well…
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Left Behind on Purpose: TV
Many technologies are left behind as an accidental side-effect of the adoption of newer technologies. For instance the decline of the post office. Or “video killed the radio star.“ But some technologies are left behind intentionally, often with a very complex planning cycle to do so. In the 1990s it became clear that there was…
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Left Behind in the Future
At the end of our last post, we asked “What’s next?” as far as potential Future obsoleted technologies. Why not ask one of those potential Future obsoleted technologies that question. “List the items in the graphic” Produce? ChatGPT: “Let me clarify what I meant… Bananas aren’t obsolete. But driving somewhere weekly to buy bananas might…
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The Future Left Behind
The addition of “The end of the Post Office” to our Future Bucket List leads to questions about other technologies that have ended or are ending. We’ve had lots of posts about Future technologies we’ve helped distribute, and about ones we hope to see, but how about technologies we’ve helped to obsolete? We asked one…
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The Super Bowl of Ads
Today here in the U.S. is Super Bowl Sunday. The New England Patriots play the Seattle Seahawks in a repeat of the exciting 2015 contest. The Super Bowl is not just the pinnacle of the N.F.L. season. It’s also the pinnacle of the TV advertising season, “the Super Bowl of ads,” so to speak. 30-second…
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The Future of the Post Office
As the first month of 2026 comes to an end, we’re adding one more entry to our Future Bucket List: the end of the Post Office. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. Cars replaced horses and buggies. Digital music replaced CDs which had replaced records. Email replaced letters. A graph of first-class cards and letters…
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Space on the Bucket List
While we were reviewing the past year, and adding a couple A.I. items to our Future Bucket List, we came up with one more. Going to space. As in “Priscilla and Alan go to space.” Current Future Bucket List technologies include “People on the Moon (again)” and “People on Mars,” but Priscilla and Alan are…
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The Future of A.I.
We missed adding the current “version” of A.I. to our Future Bucket List, but we are going ahead and adding two related entries on what a Future A.I. might look like. Both of these Future items were envisioned well before the present “A.I. boom” and should have been on the list already: The Singularity is…
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A Brief Personal History of A.I.
Maybe one of the reasons we missed A.I. on our Future Bucket List is that, like fusion, it was one of those technologies that was always coming, but never quite here. Until it was. Alan got his first exposure to something called A.I. through Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason. In particular…
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Happy New Year
Happy New Year! And happy one-year anniversary of the start of this blog. 2025 is now part of the Past. 2026 is now the Present, and the Future. This first blog post of 2026 includes a cautionary tale: attempts to have A.I. create the above graphic failed miserably. Mainly A.I. insisted that the scene in…
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