What past predictions of the future got right

[Kyng]

Well, I just found another of these videos, showing a bunch of predictions made in the 1920s. They have quite a distinctive style to them - lying somewhere between the 'steampunk' visions of the Victorian times, and the 'atompunk' predictions of the 1950s and 1960s:



I have to say, these have a certain charm to them, even if they didn't get much right . (Though, they do get top marks for predicting that London and Paris would be connected by an underwater railway tunnel!!!)

[SpookyZalost]

Kyng one of my favorite future ideas that actually now exists is the concept of self driving cars written about by Issac Asimov, granted his used positronic brains but the idea was still there in the 1950s.

One interesting effect they had that I could see actually happening at some point as they got better was that the automated vehicles were determined to be 80% safer than letting people drive and so the us government outlawed driving to increase road safety.

Given the number of accidents, especially since the pandemic started it's not as big a stretch as it once was.

the idea was put forward in his short story Sally which talks about a self aware one that lives on a farm with other ones.

[Kyng]

One interesting effect they had that I could see actually happening at some point as they got better was that the automated vehicles were determined to be 80% safer than letting people drive and so the us government outlawed driving to increase road safety.

Given the number of accidents, especially since the pandemic started it's not as big a stretch as it once was.

the idea was put forward in his short story Sally which talks about a self aware one that lives on a farm with other ones.

Yeah, this is something I've wondered about as well . However, I expect there would be a lot of resistance to a ban on driving, from people who grew up driving their own cars and had been doing so for their entire adult lives. If such a ban were to be implemented, then I can only see it happening once most of the adult population has switched to self-driving cars. We're talking decades... if it ever happens at all.

(Still, I guess that debate is a matter for another topic entirely!)

[Kyng]

Earlier today, I watched the following video by Tom Scott - where he revisits a bunch of predictions that he made in 2012, about the year 2022:



First of all: his political predictions were dead-wrong, but then, politics has always been notoriously hard to predict . He did better on tech predictions, such as the arrival of 5G - although, he did still have some pretty big misses in that field. For example, most of his predictions still showed websites on a desktop - rather than apps on a phone. Of course, that's because in 2012, we still weren't living in the "smartphone era": smartphones certainly existed, but only around 50% of people in the developed world had one, and the resulting social changes hadn't taken place yet. When Tom made his video, those shifts were still a couple of years in the future - and he simply hadn't seen them coming.

(He did end his video with one more prediction, about what things might be like 10 years from now - but that's a matter for another thread, really !)

[Terminotter]

Somebody posted this on a discord.



They were mostly fantastical, but they did get one or two things rights.
The traffic
This ships(kinda)

[JHG]

The Simpsons had predicted that Trump would be president, in an episode aired in 2000. Sixteen years later, the show was right.

Coincidence? I think not.

Sure was a coincidence. I wasn't a big Simpsons fan until I discovered their mockery of the King of Six Wives.
Dang! Forgot to mention George III hoped for an alliance between the United States and Britain in the 1780's. As of World War I onwards, the US and Britain have indeed become allies.

[Kyng]

Here's a video from 1948, showing off some visions of "Cars of the future":



What did they get right? The answer is: honestly, not a lot . The first car bears some similarities to the Isetta (or 'Bubble Car'), but that's about it.

Still, it's interesting to see the direction that they thought cars would go in!

[Kyng]

I'd say this comic from 1919 did a pretty good job of predicting the age of the smartphone !

[Kyng]

Here's another smartphone prediction, this time from 1963:



Doesn't predict absolutely everything, of course - but they did predict a primitive version of FaceTime, so I'll give them points for that !