Whoa. In 1968, someone wrote an article wondering "What Will Life Be Life in the Year 2008?" for Mechanix Illustrated. Now, its homage-blog has dug up the journalistic time capsule. There are many insane predictions, such as "modemixers," which contain a "launching pad from which 200-passenger rockets blast off for other continents." However, if by "self-maintaining homes" with "robots" to do the chores he meant "underpaying a recent immigrant in cash to clean your apartment"—then damn it, he was right.

As 1968 imagined 2008, "the average work day is about four hours." Not yet, but Timothy Ferris did publish The Four-Hour Workweek, in which general phone-etiquette douchiness and outsourcing your work to others can result in the four-hour workload. WWTFD? (What Would Thomas Friedman Do?)

But:

"The extra time isn’t totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder’s spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments—on the average, about two hours of home study a day."

Read: updating your Facebook, MySpace, Tumblr, Twitter, and Gchatting. Yeah, two hours sounds about right.

[Modern Mechanix]

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