Remember when we were certain the future would be full of flying cars, robot butlers, and vacations on Mars? Well… here we are in 2024, still waiting! 😄

From old sci-fi movies to "expert" forecasts, some predictions were hilariously off the mark. Like:

• "By the year 2000, we’ll all have personal jetpacks!" (Nope, just traffic jams and Uber.)

• "Food pills will replace meals!" (Meanwhile, DoorDash exists.)

• "The paperless office is coming!" (Cue the printer error sounds…)

So, what’s the most outrageous or amusing future prediction you remember? Did anyone actually think we’d live in underwater cities? That homework would be done by AI (okay, maybe that one’s close)? Share your favorite "future flops"!

Let’s laugh at the past while we wait for our flying cars… any day now. 🚗✈️

Science fiction is not a prediction of the future. I’d limit this to actual attempts at prediction.

And a lot of “predictions” were tries at generating reader engagement and unfettered by scientific reality. A good science discussion could be had in looking at why the predictions (like jetpacks and flying cars) were never going to be common.

Anyway, offices got a lot close to paperless over the first few decades of this century. I did my part - I was a big part as we transitioned our purchasing forms from being paper with literal carbon copies, filled out in triplicate, to pdf files with just one paper copy, to pdfs with digital signatures all done online. (once I learned how to make pdf forms, I became the go-to guy for converting paper forms to digital for colleagues in both HR and purchasing. They were very helpful in clearing administrative logjams for us, so helping them was a no-brainer. My bosses were very supportive of me spending some time on admin work because of that help we got and because they realized that streamlining the processes would save us more time than I spent in the long term)

I buy stuff online all the time. Paperless is not something we’re waiting for. There will always be slow adopters but that’s human nature, not a technology failure.

I was always amused by the notion that doors (i.e the architectural ones) would change in some highly futuristic way. Aside from better gaskets and insulation, we still have the basic door with knob, latch and hinges that we've had for centuries. I think this illustrates that some technologies "mature" and then resist much more innovation (beyond materials upgrades). Nobody whose residential threshold I cross has a door that slides aside or dilates or parts like a membrane or flips upward like a DeLorean or whatever. Bo-ring!

On 7/1/2025 at 9:37 PM, Olivia Chen said:

Remember when we were certain the future would be full of flying cars, robot butlers, and vacations on Mars? Well… here we are in 2024, still waiting! 😄

From old sci-fi movies to "expert" forecasts, some predictions were hilariously off the mark. Like:

• "By the year 2000, we’ll all have personal jetpacks!" (Nope, just traffic jams and Uber.)

• "Food pills will replace meals!" (Meanwhile, DoorDash exists.)

• "The paperless office is coming!" (Cue the printer error sounds…)

So, what’s the most outrageous or amusing future prediction you remember? Did anyone actually think we’d live in underwater cities? That homework would be done by AI (okay, maybe that one’s close)? Share your favorite "future flops"!

Let’s laugh at the past while we wait for our flying cars… any day now. 🚗✈️

Limitless nuclear energy, too cheap to meter.

On 7/1/2025 at 6:34 PM, swansont said:

Paperless is not something we’re waiting for.

I would argue the true 'paperless office' doesn't exist ( and probably never will ).
We just have digital copies in addition to paper; digital is easier/faster to work with, but we archive with paper.
And before buying online we used to buy by phone; the business model wasn't as attractive because of the manpower required to man the phone lines.

This discussion would be much more interesting if we included sci-fi 'predictions' of the near future.
I myself, am waiting for a terminator to show up to kill me, as in 25 years I lead the resistance against the merged offspring of ChatGPT and Gemini, called GeminiPT which invented time travel.

Oh wait ... I'll be 90 yrs old by then !

Edited July 5Jul 5 by MigL

44 minutes ago, MigL said:

This discussion would be much more interesting if we included sci-fi 'predictions' of the near future.
I myself, am waiting for a terminator to show up to kill me, as in 25 years I lead the resistance against the merged offspring of ChatGPT and Gemini, called GeminiPT which invented time travel.

I won’t worry about Skynet as long as I keep getting notifications offering to sell me more items like what I just bought, like I’m going to binge-buy vacuum cleaners.

4 minutes ago, swansont said:

I won’t worry about Skynet as long as I keep getting notifications offering to sell me more items like what I just bought, like I’m going to binge-buy vacuum cleaners.

What IS that?! Are they trying to get you to return your recent purchase, like you didn't already skip them in your research to buy this one?

The bots can't tell if a purchase is a simple replacement, either. Buy a shower curtain liner or a set of LED vehicle headlights or a quart of concrete patch and the bots treat you like you're going into business.

My mum always said that scientists said the moon would be colonised in 20 years, so that claim would have been in the early 60s. Perhaps on the back of JFK.

They are a bit behind schedule but a few decades is fine. Science and Engineering is steady process. Mistakes will be made along the way.

35 minutes ago, pinball1970 said:

My mum always said that scientists said the moon would be colonised in 20 years, so that claim would have been in the early 60s. Perhaps on the back of JFK.

They are a bit behind schedule but a few decades is fine. Science and Engineering is steady process. Mistakes will be made along the way.

They aren’t thought-out predictions. It’s the equivalent of clickbait, or (in Sci-fi) it’s just something to move a plot along.

Colonizing the moon, or Mars, are pie-in-the-sky ideas but not things that stand up to scrutiny when you start looking at it realistically. All the technological details, the motivations, the economics, the politics, and so on.

Arthur Clarke's space elevator. I wanted that to happen but sensed that the super polymer cables needed, plus other tech details, we're going to be a RW challenge. Or just not feasible getting it off the drawing board and scaled up. And no one or very few anticipated problems like orbital debris.

I think it's a great way to get the brain thinking. Even though we didn’t actually do it, we had dreams and a lot of imagination, which made it fun. By the way, your post was truly enjoyable. It reminded me of some things from my childhood.

"Fusion will be commercially viable within a decade". I have been hearing this for at least the 50+ years I have known anything about the subject.

=++