Rare William Shatner Video Shows Off The Future Of Robotics
William Shatner might not be the authority on technology, but he was once asked to give an instructional video on the future of robotics.
This article is more than 2 years old
If you want to have a good time, go back, and watch videos of people in the 1970s and 1980s discussing what they think the future is going to look like. Naturally, they are all completely wrong. Most of us would be wrong too because technology has the habit of going completely in a different way or becoming far more advanced than initially thought. That is certainly the case for a video that has been unearthed from 1984, which features William Shatner speaking about the future of robotics. However, some topics posed in the video seem to be correct. You can see the video below:
William Shatner is going through the technological breakthrough in robotics in the above video, which would have seemed awe-striking in the 1980s, but now seems a bit silly. He showcases the capabilities of Cincinnati Milicron’s T3, which was the first commercially available computer-controlled industrial robot. Back in the 1980s, this might have looked right out of a science-fiction movie. Now that machine is likely in a museum somewhere on display for people to walk by and see how far we have come in the technological sense. It also made a ton of sense to have the star of Star Trek appearing on a video to talk about the future of technology.
This instructional documentary was made by AIMS Media and had been uploaded to the Internet Archive in 2016, though little to no people watched it. The same happened on Monday when the video was the Computer History Archives Project uploaded onto YouTube. Naturally, people are likely not going to watch William Shatner talk about outdated technology. However, anyone who happens to be a fan of the 1980s or Shatner should certainly give this video a watch. For pure nostalgia purposes, of course.
What makes this video a bit of a premonition and eerie is that William Shatner speaks about the next breakthrough in robotics would be artificial intelligence. Sure, it did take some time for A.I. to be at the forefront of the scientific community, but now the subject dominates many landscapes of the science community. A.I. has been achieving new and scary heights in the last 10 years. Another premonition was the question posed about robots posing a threat to workers. Again, this was 30 years ago, but there have been manufacturing plants that have used robotics to replace human workers. Kind of scary to think that this video was able to predict a bit about the future. Maybe Shatner is from space?
Taking in outdated videos serves plenty of purposes, mostly to have a laugh at what the future was thought of to those living in those times. However, this video seemed to have been accurate about robotics being the wave of the future in two distinct categories. William Shatner might have been right about a few things in this video, and that might be something interesting to look at for those interested in robotics and technology. One thing is for sure, Shatner might know about Skynet. It would make sense.
