Watching a show set in 2040, right off the bat we see a scene about the last elephant in existence, then it shows a farm kid using some kind of hover board to make sweeping out the barn easier.
It got me thinking about all the tech and conditions predicted in film, TV and by real life futurists, wondering which tech and situations that were presented as happening by now that have not happened, happened, or which have been far exceeded by reality.
So, anyone care to weigh in?
You might want to look at this Wikipedia entry:
Back to what I was watching I see something that has been predicted forever and has happily not come to pass: transparent screens and phones. I get that they look cool in a show but they seem really stupid in a practical sense. Why would you wanna see everything behind the screen you’re looking at or the phone you’re holding? It just seems like visual clutter that makes things more difficult.
And a contribution to the topic I’ve started is video phones. When I was a kid back in the 60s, they were predicting we would have them inside of 20 years. We did not. It took about 45 years: til FaceTime.
Thanks! Fun list, includes one story That predicted New York City being the epicenter of a pandemic in 2020!
And I just learned that Soylent Green is set in 2022! It predicts a world population of 7 billion so we have exceeded that by almost a billion.
They left off “In The Year 2525.”
They also left off La Jetée, the short film that the feature film 12 Monkeys was based on. La Jetée is a better film than 12 Monkeys in my opinion. I told Terry Gilliam (the director of 12 Monkeys) that La Jetée was better, although 12 Monkeys was pretty good, when he introduced the film and spoke afterwards at a preview of the film. He said that he’d never seen La Jetée.
Do predictions in non-fiction count? One of my third grade textbooks said we’d be out of oil/gas in 20 years and by 2000 we’d have self-driving cars.
I’m not super good at math but 1985+20 is 2005 and when do they predict peak oil now? 2040. Hmm. Seems like it always 20ish years away…
I also was assigned reading in college in the early 00s that “Peak Oil” would mean $10 a gallon gas by 2010 and by 2020 gas would be so expensive that almost all airlines would disband and only the government and the ultra rich would fly in planes.
I don’t think those prognosticators were counting on shale oil becoming profitable to extract.
The Forever War had Earth in 2024 as an authoritarian state run by the UN where resource rationing has becoming ubiquitous and homosexuality is actively being promoted by the government as a means of curbing overpopulation. We’ve managed to evade that fate, but then again our timeline hasn’t been stuck in an interstellar war of attrition for 30 years.
On a more accurate note, it predicted the existence of a trans-Neptunian dwarf planet called “Charon” before the real Charon was discovered.