Forgotten mornings
In the colourful world of past visions of the future, there are bizarre and fascinating dreams that make our present look charmingly old. The forecasters of the time imagined a 2020 full of flying cars and gigantic space stations, while the internet and smartphones – the true revolutionaries of our time – were barely mentioned. Why were the futurist prophets so wrong? An expedition into the labyrinthine labyrinth of past futures sheds light on this.
The belief in flying cars and space cities
The visions of flying cars and space cities were characterised by an era that was deeply rooted in industrial and scientific optimism. After man had reached the moon, space seemed only a small step away. Pop culture from the 1950s to the 1970s, with series such as “The Jetsons”, painted a picture of the future that was technologically advanced but socially familiar. The idea of flying cars stemmed from the linear thinking of the time: cars were the primary means of transport, so why shouldn’t they just take the next step and take off?
Why nobody saw the internet and smartphones coming
The Internet and smartphones, the silent revolutionaries, were not born out of a desire to improve existing technologies, but as solutions to complex problems of communication and data processing. The Internet, originally a military and academic tool, was too specific and abstract for pop culture and mainstream visionaries of the future to foresee its universal significance. The miniaturisation of technology that led to the development of smartphones was based on advances in microelectronics that tended to fly under the radar of public attention.
Why our ancestors were wrong
Our predictive ability is often characterised by what futurist Alvin Toffler described as “future shock” – the inability to adapt to changes that occur faster than we can process them. This shock leads to cognitive dissonance, where we cling to familiar concepts (like cars that fly instead of being fundamentally different) and overlook disruptive technologies that don’t fit into our existing mould.
Societal fear and wishful thinking
The grand predictions of the future were often not just scientific speculation, but also a reflection of societal fears and desires. Space utopias reflected a cold war in which the sky seemed to be the next battlefield, while ignorance of the internet and smartphones shows how little we could imagine a world in which information and communication are ubiquitous and democratised.
The future that never was
The future as it was once imagined may not have materialised in many respects, but it offers us valuable insights into the hopes and fears of an era. While we talk about quantum computers and AI today, who knows what quiet revolutions are going on in the labs and start-ups of this world, unnoticed but potentially world-changing. So the lesson from the forgotten visions remains: The future is often where we are not looking.
