Beeld en Geluid: De toekomst is nu

Bas Agterberg, curator of media culture at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, is an expert in using the collection for historic research. In this programme, Agterberg presents the visions of the future depicted years ago on Dutch television. He shows extraordinary fragments from the extensive Sound and Vision archive. Intelligent robots and sentient machines have always appealed to the imagination. The 1958 TV show Morgen gebeurt het was an exciting science fiction programme set in space. Other, more serious programmes offered a scientific view of the future. Can machines really take over human thinking? That was one of the questions posed in the 1958 programme De taal van de machine. It prompted viewers to think about the ideas they were being fed on computers and artificial intelligence.