In the past how did you think the future would look like around the year 2012? Did you ever expect it to look like anything it is like to-day?
I thought that there was a much better than even chance that there would have been a nuclear world war by now, and that it would have started more or less by accident.
I did not foresee the extent to which computers and the internet would become a part of everyone’s lives.
I expected religion to have become a very minor factor in human society by now.
I thought there would be a great deal more social equality than there actually is by now.
I expected the Cubs to win a World Series by now. (On second thought–naaah!)
I expected that smoking in public would be illegal by now. It’s getting there, though.
I expected that automobiles would be much more technologically advanced than they are now.
I did not foresee cell phones, at least not with the portability and ubiquity they currently have.
I did not foresee that the two most popular TV shows in America would be based on watching idiots sing and dance and minor celebrities making snarky comments about them.
I did not foresee (though I welcome!) the huge influx of Asian food and culture into the U.S.
I did foresee the coming of the Great Pumpkin. However, it was on April 28, not Halloween.
I’m a Child of the '60s:
I expected spaceflight to be far more advanced than it is. And nifty stuff like SST’s, etc.
I thought we’d replace most fossil fuel technology with things like nuclear, solar, and fuel cell cars.
I thought there was maybe a 25% chance we’d have discovered a cure for old age.
I thought marijuana would be legal and that sexual promiscuity would be more widespread.
I’m a child of the 60’s too, and I agree with the above expectations.
I thought it’d be about as widespread as it is. Which is pretty damn widespread.
Me too… I envisioned an out-of-control spiral of escalation, such as the days leading up to WWI. I thought the future (i.e., today!) would resemble the Road Warrior movies. Damn happy to be wrong.
(But we still have runaway climate change to face, so a world of deserts and shortages might still be attainable.)
I WANTED the future to look like the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I feared it would more resemble Soylent Green, or perhaps Rollerball.
No kidding, from what I see it seems like everyone is bonin’ everyone else.
Ditto.
We’re in the *second *decade of the 21st century… where’s my flying car?! 
I’ve heard that that casual sex was even more widespread before AIDS during the “Sexual Revolution”…
I was certain the planet would belong only to organisms very tolerant of darkness, cold, and radiation.
If I had been asked about other possibilities, i’d have probably said that the future would be a lot like the present with incremental improvement to technology. When I was a kid in the 60’s there were already computers, car phones, and satellites. Transistors were making electronic things smaller. Home computers, cell phones, and such were just incremental improvements on that. With the exception of the internet, the present is just a PIP version of the 60’s, which is about what I expected.
unfortunately that isn’t true. people talked it a lot but didn’t do it as much as seems to be in recent decades.
i thought that energy and food would be a greater crisis with increasing population. i expected troubles with pollution, though more an immediate health issue and not the climate change issue.
still waiting on the jet pack and land line noncomputer picture phone.
Computers would still be isolated mainframes but they would talk.
Radioactive.
More of the same, but louder and more slickly marketed.
This is also my prediction for at least the next 50 years. I hope I’m proven wrong.
Because of all the bible study I was forced into, I thought the world would not exist anymore at all.
I thought we’d have had some contact with an extraterrestrial form of intelligent life. Maybe we’ve got to find some here on Earth first.
I thought I’d probably be some kind of scientist, building inventions in my space lab in space.
Seriously, it surprises me, looking back, how little thought I gave to what the future would be like. I honestly can’t remember ever coming up with a view of what the world would be like 20 or 30 or 40 years hence. This may be because I thought I’d be dead by now, but nonetheless.
This is what I thought, too. I also thought that we’d have blown up Russia by now and possibly would’ve gotten blown up ourselves. Kinda glad we didn’t.
As far as I was concerned everything that wasn’t in the UK was in the “over there” category in a big blob of non-Western vaguely imagined countries, except Russia which was like the Emperor in Star Wars. I assumed it would continue to be that way.
I also thought that the Internet was something only dorks used - true in the early 90s. I figured that it was just a passing novelty (at that time, it was all chat rooms); lo and behold, one of the first requirements on entering college was learning to use my school e-mail account. Never could I have imagined that I’d spend so much of my life on a computer.
I also thought I’d be a nun (my family was Methodist and Jewish - have no idea where that came from) or a stay-at-home mom. Now I’m an agnostic bordering on atheist working mom of two.
Child of the 50s
- flying cars
- orbital resorts
- lunar vacations
- trade wars with the Martian colonies
- Evening news updates from the Alpha Centauri expedition