While going through old SF magazines, I found mention of Atlantic Richfield’s ad campaign requesting vision statements from Americans of what life might be like in the Tricentennial. ARCO received some 60,000 responses and in 1977 published an 80-page booklet summarizing those visions.

The SF reviewer stated that most of the visions listed therein would have seemed old-hat to SF fans in the ‘70s. As in 20 to 30 years out of date. He figured these visions were “borrowed” from old-time SF books and movies. Or, more likely were (at the very least) slow extrapolations of life as lived in Bicentennial America towards Tricentennial America. A linear progression was foreseen for America, and presumably for the world.

Here are some of those visions: We will have early retirement. Education will stress careers, quality of life, liberal arts, and culture. There will be less government at all levels, with more relative power in local governments’ hands (well, we could always hope). There will be more interest in religion and spirituality. There will be universal health care (Obama, call your office). Labor unions will exist. The family as we now know it will exist. Marriage as we now know it will exist. Issues will include environmentalism, attempting to slow down the pace of modern life, restricting individual credit, and an array of even more prosaic concerns.

In short, life would be like 1976 in 2076, only more so.

No hint of the telecommunications revolution that was already well underway in 1976. No hint of the things young men named Gates and Jobs were up to. Nor any discussion about what that then newfangled computer network, the Arpanet, might grow into.

Curiously enough, when discussing the idea of a Technological Singularity on most public discussion boards today, I find most participants wear the same blinders the American people did 1/3 of a century ago. We’ll suffer from pollution, lack of jobs, poor education, traffic jams, health care rationing… The future will look an awful lot like now, only more so.

In the last few decades, we’ve had the advantage of seeing giant firms grow up out of what were then the garage firms of cutting edge computer technologies. We’ve witnessed the Internet explode with billions of web pages of content. We’ve seen a young grad student revive and expand the late ‘50s concept of von Neumann machines into the late ‘80s concept of nanotechnology. And we’ve seen master inventor Kurzweil analyze the history of human technology and detect what we all should have noticed, at least since 1976, that its development is indeed accelerating.

And yet, we (or most of us) have yet to put 2 and 2 together and come up with the accelerating technological answer: At least 16.

With the concept of the Singularity staring at us out of Moore’s Law and numerous other accelerating trends that are telling us emphatically that things really are changing faster and faster, will we do better than our younger selves did during the Bicentennial? I hope we will, but I suspect mostly we won’t.

The Singularity will sweep over us like a tsunami well before the Tricentennial and we will be stunned as the future proves to be far, far more than “2009, only more so.”