As Danish physicist Niels Bohr may have said, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
And when we start to think about the future, people of a certain generation will say: “Where’s my hoverboard?” — a reference to the 1980s Back to the Future movie franchise which suggested, among other things, that we’d be able to buy levitating skateboards by now.
The message is that before you try your hand at prediction, bear in mind how bad we’ve been at it in the past.
The Washington Post has published some drawings made by Jean-Marc Côté and other French artists in the late 1900s and early 20th Century purporting to show France in the year 2000.
Of course, they mostly look absurd because the artists were extrapolating on what they already knew; imaging refinements to technologies and behaviours already in existence. They were not able to envisage true innovation.
One of my favourites, which I’ve inserted at the top of the post (I believe it to be in the public domain, somebody please correct me if I’m wrong), shows a postman on a flying vehicle delivering a letter or some other paper documents to a man on a balcony. The artist perceived, correctly, that door-to-door delivery by a man on a bicycle would no longer be the norm in the future, but couldn’t imagine a plane without a propeller let alone the fact that the document itself could be digitised and transmitted across wires and the airwaves.
