The 1968 Book That Tried to Predict the World of 2018

What “Toward the Year 2018” gets most consistently right is the
integration of computing into daily life. Massive information networks
of fibre optics and satellite communication, accessed through portable
devices in a “universality of telephony”—and an upheaval in privacy?
It’s all in there. The Bell Labs director John R. Pierce, in a few
masterful strokes, extrapolates the advent of Touch-Tone to text and
picture transmission, and editing the results online—“This will even
extend to justification and pagination in the preparation of documents
of a quality comparable to today’s letterpress.” And it’s Ithiel de Sola
Pool—he of the free love and controlled economies—who wonders, five
decades before alarms were raised over Equifax, Facebook, and Google, how
personal information will be “computer-stored and fantastically
manipulative” in both senses of the word: “By 2018 a researcher sitting
at his console will be able to compile a cross-tabulation of consumer
purchases (from store records) by people of low IQ (from school records)
who have an unemployed member of the family (from social security
records),” Pool predicts. “That is, he will have the technological
capacity to do so. Will he have the legal right?”