Back to the Future: Lessons from Decades of Foresight
What can we learn from the predictions of the past?
It is seldom true that imagination knows no bounds. As someone who writes fiction almost daily, I witness this fact as I recognize the seeping of my life’s experiences into my stories. It feels, in essence, that I am attempting to paint an unlimited canvas with a predetermined color palette. Lately, I am cognizant of this feeling in my career as a futurist as well.
I came across a video on social media that showed how people (a set of rather geeky Brits, in particular) in the 1980s imagined our present day. The predictions were impressive: biometrics to open our doors, smart watches with satellite access, and VR headsets that could whisk you away to another world. Even a heat-regulating fabric for suits that would come in quite handy for Texans like me. And yet: those yesteryear futurists couldn’t imagine a world without a portable printer to read documents. Really?
It may seem silly, in our screen-addled world, that hard copies once seemed like a fixture of the future. But that printer stoked my curiosity (not sure if that sentence has ever been written before). It made me realize that the future is a sort of mirror of desire (any Potter fans here?): we can imagine our wildest dreams, but removing ourselves, and by association, our understandings, from the picture is nigh impossible. What other blind spots can we find in past predictions of the future? What lessons can time travel offer? What I found, as you’ll read below, is that prediction is reflection.
A Brief History of Time Travel
*Much thanks to the insights of this YouTube video by hochelaga for inspiring this line of thinking and inquiry.*
1910s: Over a hundred years ago, a collection of color postcards was created in France to accompany the sale of consumer products. These postcards imagined life in the year 2000 to comical effect. Firefighters and police flew around on great mechanical wings, not unlike superheroes. Passenger ships were hitched to whales as an efficient means of transport. Video calling was done through the prevailing gramophones of the era.
The images, which show men and women dressed in their finest 1910 regalia even in the year 2000, prove a point about the limits of prediction. What’s clear in these predictions is an obsession with the prevailing technologies of the time: flight, shipping, and radio communications. The innovations of the present moment were assumed to be the lasting projects of humanity. How does this change as we step through time?
1960s: A world aware of atomic bombs and the space race understandably predicted stark new futures. Magazines of the era promised radiation that could grow giant vegetables to increase food supply, or full dinners delivered through simple pills. Profound new powers over chemistry led people to believe they could go so far as to control the weather, eliminate disease, and correct hereditary defects. We were even supposed to colonize space by the year 2000.
Again, the innovations of the era defined their predictions. After the initial breakthroughs in space exploration, humans have waited until recent years for the economics to enable a space renaissance. The futurists of the 60s also did not anticipate the disasters and atomic fallout that would hinder future investment and progress in nuclear energy. Will there be a watershed moment that prompts humanity to reconsider a technology we’re pushing to the brink today?
That being said, there were also incredibly prescient analyses from this time, thanks to renowned futurist Arthur C. Clarke. Check out the video below for his take on the move from “commuting to communicating.”
1980s: It’s been 36 years since Marty McFly traveled to 2015 in Back to the Future II. Many may be disappointed about our current lack of hoverboards and flying cars, but the predictions from this sci-fi blockbuster are directionally accurate. We do indeed have video chatting, smart glasses, and drones that extend the powers of technologies first imagined decades ago. But what strikes me about this era is the prediction from a different movie: Terminator.
The nascent presence of artificial intelligence served as both inspiration and trepidation for the filmmakers. They worried a burgeoning world of computer science might lead to a risk of war triggered by digital overlords. Perhaps there was an understanding by this time, given the lessons of decades past, that tech should be reigned in to be most effective.
The Future of… the Future
Each prediction of the future contains an unshakeable sliver of the present. The nature of that sliver can vary greatly as it has in the examples above, but it must remain. Having recognized it, there are ways we as futurists can try to work around it:
Don’t assume that today’s obsessions are tomorrow’s. Eras that are defined by their technologies, like the Space Race, can be followed by decades of investment and progress in completely different areas. It’s hard to read about a future that’s not defined by AI and Artificial General Intelligence right now, but what if something halts our development of mechanical minds? Perhaps, in five years, the realization of a superconductor, or the advent of quantum computing, puts AI on the backburner.
Yesterday’s utopias can still be today’s goals. The interest in chemistry at the outset of the atomic age represented a dream of a future where disease could be eradicated. The science and technology may not have been ready in the 1950s, but today, advancements in BioTech are indeed curing the incurable. In other words, let’s not give up on flying cars just yet.
Build a bigger tent. We are living in a new Gilded Age of tech-based wealth but here’s a prediction I’m certain about: nothing lasts forever. Rather than relying on a small subset of the population to determine what our tech-fueled future will look like, bring in the reinforcements. Make space for the artists, interdisciplinary thinkers, middle managers, ethicists, bureaucrats. Technology is having an increasingly profound effect on society, and we assume at our peril that technology experts are apt students of sociology, economics, or culture. Technology harnessed through humanity > technology unleashed by humans.
Let’s set a date for the future—time travel should give us much to discuss.
- Abhijith Ravinutala, OCTO Manager & Substack Editor, Deloitte Consulting LLP
