For decades, science fiction writers have imagined the future and offered their own visions of what marvels and perils humanity will end up unleashing on the world.
And whether their guesses were more educated than some thought or people were just inspired to bring their predictions to life, we can sometimes find that what they wrote about actually came true . And most bizarrely, it seems that the writers who were just trying to tell jokes about the future sometimes came the closest with their predictions.
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Still, a lot of the serious predictions that tended to appear in major magazines from decades past now seem almost adorably quaint in how wrong they were. That said, nobody was laughing too hard once it was revealed that a Wired article from 1997 foresaw a lot of the problems we’re now facing.
Although the tech magazine’s July 1997 issue posited that we were at the start of a 25-year period of prosperity, it also identified some major issues that could hamstring that utopian vision.
And as people on Twitter recently discovered, the unfortunate truth seems to be that Wired was a lot more accurate about what could go wrong than what would go right.
For instance, the article predicted that tensions between the U.S. and China would escalate to the point of a Cold War while Russia would retreat into a quasi-authoritarian nationalistic policy that threatens the rest of Europe.
It may be overstating things to say America is in a Cold War with China and you might say Russia’s influence reached further than Europe, but it’s a little too close to being right.
And unfortunately, one of the magazine’s most important predictions came true sooner than any of us expected.
As one item on this list of boom-killers stated, “Major rise in crime and terrorism forces the world to pull back in fear. People who constantly feel they could be blown up or ripped off not in the mood to reach out or open up.”
Although crime rates have largely declined since the ’90s, that seems scarily accurate in predicting the effect that national tragedies like the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 and other terrorist attacks in Europe had on the world’s collective psyche.
And while another prediction fortunately overstates a more recent issue, the “Wired” staff in 1997 seemed to think we were due for the pandemic we now face.
They predicted that an “uncontrollable plague” that either comes from an influenza outbreak “or its equivalent” will spread like wildfire and claim the lives of over 200 million people.
And while that certainly seemed to describe how quickly COVID-19 spread, the one saving grace we have is that we’ve been able to prevent such a staggering death toll thus far.
And of course, even the most uncomfortably accurate predictions of the future’s woes can’t get everything right.
For instance, the Wired staff seemed to think that increases in pollution would accelerate cancer cases to the point that they would overwhelm unprepared medical systems.
But while COVID-19 has had that effect in various regions at different points in time, it seems we’re managing to avoid that specific fate, at least.
They also predicted that the technological advancements they were so excited about at the time could turn out to be “a bust” and bring none of the promised benefits to the economy and productivity.
To be fair, those advancements have certainly brought their own problems with them, but not quite what people expected.
Still, the further down this list you go, the easier it is to identify how many ways the magazine creepily called it right.
Granted, there was already a precedent for climate change and energy price concerns by the time that article was written.
Nonetheless, there is something chilling about the way it seemed to predict both Brexit and the phenomenon of people actively choosing not to move societal progress forward.
This definitely seems like one of those cases where people hate to be right.
