Looking Back to Look Ahead

Musings of an Aging Mind

By Jack Bagley

I was going through some old columns of mine, looking for some kind of spark to touch off a new one for this week, when I came across the one I’d written in January of 2021 regarding predictions for the future.
You have to remember the time we were in: Covid was raging, we were all staying six feet apart and wearing silly masks, most if not all places that weren’t deemed “essential” were closed, and the government wasn’t sure what to do next. So the only thing we could hope for in that year was that the virus would subside (which it did) and that life would return to normal (which is just a setting on your dryer).
I took a look at some of the predictions for the future that had been made, and shared ten of them with you.  If you don’t remember – and I have no idea why you even would try to – here they are, as I presented them five years ago:
I have a 100% accuracy rate as far as predictions go – I am consistently wrong. So I’m not going to stick my neck out and try to guess what the next twelve months hold in store for us. What I will do, however, is look up some of the earlier predictions for this new year, and put them forth here.  You can keep this column and, one year hence, see which were right and which were wrong.

Apes will serve humans as chauffeurs. According to the RAND Corporation in 1994, there was a plan to breed an intelligent species of apes, and we would be able to use them to work for us – those of us that didn’t have access to the robots we were already supposed to have. I could make a comment about some apes driving better than some humans I know, but you’ve probably already thought of it, so I won’t.
We’ll be living in flying houses. Yes, that was a prediction made by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. He suggested that our boring Earth-bound homes would be replaced by this point with flying houses. Heck, I’m still waiting for the flying cars The Jetsons said we’d have by now!
 Everybody will have their own personal helicopter.  Okay, if we can’t have the flying cars, maybe we can all get around in our own personal helicopters.  This prediction comes to us from Popular Mechanics magazine, and it was made in 1951 – so you can forgive the over-optimism of it, I guess.
 The letters C, X and Q will be dropped from the alphabet. That prediction comes from 1900 and The Ladies’ Home Journal, which decided that those three letters would be deemed extraneous and quite considerable for eradication. (See what I did there?)
We will have both telepathy and teleportation, or so said Michael O’Farrell of The Mobile Institute. He called it part of the “nanomobility era” that was supposed to dawn in 2020. (We all know what happened with that, right?)
Nobody will work and everybody will be rich. I wouldn’t touch this prediction, made in 1966 in Time Magazine, with a ten-foot pole … not in today’s economic morass, I wouldn’t.
We’ll all be voting electronically from home. Another prediction I will withhold comment on, since the 2020 election was such a screwed-up mess. That one comes to us from Wired Magazine in 1997.
Everyone will stop drinking coffee and tea. Hold it right there – that ain’t gonna happen. Not in a million years, much less in this year. Nikola Tesla may have been a brilliant scientist and inventor, but he has no idea what he’s talking about here. He said it in 1937, if that makes any difference.
Everyone will be a vegetarian, but eating won’t even be necessary. The first part of this one comes from 1913 and the American Meat Packers’ Association, and the other half is from 2005 and a futurist and computer whiz named Ray Kurzwell. Both are wrong, just plain wrong!
And finally, number ten: There will be no need for futurists to predict the future.
I’ll let you figure out how that one would work.

I don’t have too much to add to that, except to say that people who try to extrapolate what the future holds are little more than guessing based on what they know today. It’s worth noting that, while the science fiction of the 1940s through 1960s did predict a lot of what we have today, they all – all of them – missed the one thing that no business could operate today without, and most homes are in the same boat: the home computer.  Nobody predicted that.
So I won’t try to predict what 2026 may hold.  I’ll just sit back and enjoy the ride.