09-02-2018, 09:07 PM
Many of us love to make predictions and prophecies about the future: it's a pursuit that's about as old as human history itself. Nowadays, we're still making prediction after prediction on a daily basis: some of these will come true, but many won't (especially given how contradictory many of these are).
If we want to know what predictions of the future are likely to come true, then perhaps it's instructive to take a look at past attempts to predict what was then the future, and see what they got right. In this video, YouTube user Second Thought explores this, and lists past predictions from a variety of fields which turned out to be correct (and what turned out to be horribly wrong ):
If you haven't got time to watch the full video, then here are some of the more interesting examples:
So, does anyone know of any other examples of past predictions of the future that ended up being correct?
If we want to know what predictions of the future are likely to come true, then perhaps it's instructive to take a look at past attempts to predict what was then the future, and see what they got right. In this video, YouTube user Second Thought explores this, and lists past predictions from a variety of fields which turned out to be correct (and what turned out to be horribly wrong ):
If you haven't got time to watch the full video, then here are some of the more interesting examples:
- Self-driving cars were predicted in the 1950s (although, they also thought cars might have aeroplane-style controls - which never caught on, as they were complicated and unnecessary);
- People in the 1920s correctly predicted that we'd one day have our phones with us everywhere (although they thought the phones would be mounted on our chests!);
- By the 1960s, people were predicting that we'd one day be doing most of our learning on computers (although, their timing was off: they expected this to be the norm by 1999. In reality, this is still a work-in-progress, although things are definitely trending in that direction);
- Again, by the 1960s, there were pretty accurate predictions of people shopping on computers within the comfort of their own home (although, some of the earlier predictions had shoppers communicating with humans over a telephone);
- If these predictions were way off on anything, it was sociological change. For example, in the 'phone' prediction, only men had phones with them, and in the 'home shopping' prediction, it was still the husband paying for everything.
- Oh yeah, and if you make it all the way through, this video ends with a great ad transition !
So, does anyone know of any other examples of past predictions of the future that ended up being correct?
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