Predictions: The History of the Future

"Books will soon be obsolete in schools," Edison predicted in 1913. "I think there is a world maket for maybe five computers," Thomas Watson, the president of IBM, said in 1943. "Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved," Marvin Minksy said in 1965. "In 50 years, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them," Sebastian Thrun predicted in 2012. "We will reach Mars by 2025," Elon Musk insisted in 2016.

Technologists love to predict the future. Indeed, there is an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to the predictions of futurist Ray Kurzweil. His track record for getting "the future" right is... not good.

This Contrafabulist project tracks the predictions being made about the future of science and technology. Who's right? Who's wrong? And who are the loudest voices shaping not so much the future itself as much as our imagination about what the future is supposed to look like?

The Month in Predictions: May 2018 (Note: This website is on hiatus thru 2019

The Year in Predictions: What Tech Predicts for 2018

(You can also stay up-to-date via this project's blog.)

Image credits: Bryan Mathers