We were before the times as students at UCG (it will always be UCG to me despite ongoing titles, currently resting on the University of Galway). Yes, one motion we thrashed out at the Literary and Debating Society there was “That Columbus Went Too Far”.
We knew nothing of Trump back then. It was very heaven.
But Columbus almost went nowhere. In May 1486, when he asked the Spanish royals to support his voyage west, they set up a committee. As you do. It thought Columbus’s plans daft, a waste of time and money.
A myth grew that they opposed his trip west as it implied the Earth was round and that he hoped to find people on the other side “who walk with their heels upward and their heads hanging down” where it “snows upward”. They felt too that “centuries after the creation, it is unlikely that anybody could find hitherto unknown lands of any value”.
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Not true, but such a great myth.
The Spanish royals rejected the committee’s advice, in case the Portuguese might fund Columbus if they didn’t, and so, he went too far.
Experts? Ha, ha, ha ...!
The great late 19th century Belfast-born physicist Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), after whom the Kelvin temperature scale is named, dismissed X-rays as a hoax, said radio had no future, claimed that heavier than air flying machines were impossible, and believed evolution was not possible as the sun was too young. Well!
More recently, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman – he who coined the phrase “leprechaun economics” in 2016 about Ireland’s economy – predicted in 1998 that “by 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s”.
And he did so under the heading: Why Most Economists’ Predictions Are Wrong.
A leprechaun is heading your way, Krugman.
In 1966, the esteemed Time magazine predicted that computers would soon be filling the roles of all but high-level executives, leaving 90 per cent of the population to live a state-subsidised life of leisure.
Sound familiar? It would appear that same prediction has been reheated where AI is concerned.
The moral of all of this is that, frequently, “experts” know as much about the future as do you or I.
Expert, from Latin expertus, for “tried, proved, known by experience”.
