A blog about the history of futurism—from flying cars and jetpacks to meal pills and utopia.
Back in 1975, life expectancy in the U.S. was just 63.6 years for men and 72.3 for women, according to government statistics. The country has made significant progress since then, with the latest figures showing men can now expect to live to 75.8 and women 81.1 years. That’s lower than other wealthy nations, but it is much higher than it was 50 years ago.
What will the future look like in the year 2025? It was a question about the distant future for those of us who were alive to remember the 20th century. But now that we’re a few weeks into that year, we know exactly what it looks like. And it’s a bit depressing, I’m not going to lie.
Back in 2014, I gave a talk at UCLA about the future of money that’s funny to think about now. Well, technically it was about the paleo-future of money. But the topic was particularly relevant in the early 2010s, given the fact that bitcoin was starting to enter the public consciousness after being invented in late 2008 and released into the world the next year. So with bitcoin recently hitting…
The future can be presented in a lot of ways. Sometimes we imagine it in the darkest of terms, a dystopian hellscape that shocks our sense of safety, making us fearful about what’s to come. Other times we imagine the future as utopian—joyful and wondrous with all of the things we could ever want at our fingertips any hour of the day. But every once in a while our predictions take a weird turn into…
There are so many things I take for granted here on the verge of 2025. When I turn on the faucet, water comes out. When I flip the light switch, there’s illumination. And when I press one of countless buttons during the day, the thing that corresponds to that button generally happens.
Elon Musk spent at least $250 million to help re-elect Donald Trump as president this year, making him one of the most powerful oligarchs the U.S. has ever seen. Trump is a fascist and Musk unabashedly supports his fascist agenda. Musk even tweeted in support of Germany’s AfD political party this past week, which has ties to neo-Nazis.
On the morning of July 18, 1889, Professor Edward D. Hogan went up in what can only be described for the time as a futuristic piece of airship technology, launching from Brooklyn, New York. Hogan had spent the past twenty years working with flying machines and told people he’d done hundreds of ascensions in that time. But that day was the last that anyone would ever see him.
The U.S. and Canada both have long histories of forced sterilizations for people deemed “undesirable.” Roughly 70,000 Americans were sterilized in the 20th century, according to official figures, with black people being disproportionately affected by the racist program. And while this dark chapter in history is often regarded as something that was perhaps done by people who were abusing their…
Old futures are filled with ridiculous contraptions for getting around. You’ve got the automobile-powered yacht, the enormous four-legged mech-pedicab, and the gyroscopic rocket car, just to name a few of my favorites from decades gone by. But at least all of those absurd ideas had something that made sense. Other ideas are so weird it’s hard to imagine how they’d work in the real world.
Time capsules are fascinating to me. They can be incredibly boring, as people often stuff them with rather mundane items like coins, American flags, and bibles. But every once in a while they can be thrilling, with unique items just waiting to be uncovered.
We often think of the internet as a piece of infrastructure that cannot be changed. But people built the internet and all the devices we use to connect ourselves to it. People made conscious choices about the way we interact with our devices and the way that the internet is structured. And with that in mind, we have a short list of old ideas that may be worth reconsidering as we move forward into…
More than half of Americans in 2024 say they have a side hustle to earn extra money in addition to their main job, according to a recent report from Marketwatch. A whopping 54% of Americans are doing jobs on the side, something that in the late 20th century used to be known in some form as moonlighting, a reference to doing a job at night under the light of the moon.
I’m nervous. The U.S. presidential election is Tuesday and it’s all I can think about. Because if Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris, some extremely dark forces are going to be unleashed in a country where society is held together by little more than chewing gum and off-brand sticky tape. But aside from Trump, there’s one name I really hope I never hear again after November 5: Allan Lichtman.
If you asked kids of the 20th century what inventions they’d like to see in the future, there are always a range of creative answers, from robot servants to bubble-top cars. But there’s one idea that you see pop up perhaps more than any other. It’s the homework machine.
The year 2006 wasn’t that long ago in the grand scheme of things. But when you look back at the predictions of that time, it’s an interesting year, if only because it was just before the mainstream explosion of two things we take for granted today: smartphones and social media.
U.S. senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was asked on the radio program “Who Said That?” in 1949 what she’d do if she woke up in the White House one day. The senator replied: “Well, I’d go straight to Mrs. Truman and apologize. Then I’d go home.”
When I look back at the The Jetsons, a show that debuted in 1962 and lasted just one season during its first run, it’s easy to see how it inspired so many visions of the future that would occur in the 1960s, 70s and beyond. But what inspired The Jetsons?
Last week OpenAI rolled out its new virtual assistant, dubbed Advanced Voice Mode, that allows users to have a conversation with an AI bot. There’s some controversy about the technology, not least because actress Scarlet Johansson threatened a lawsuit when the tech was first demonstrated earlier this year. The early demo voice sounded an awful lot like the actress, whose character in the 2013 film…
When the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles featured a new “coffee robot” in October 1967, the newspapers covering it sounded both excited and terrified.
The astronauts who are currently stuck in space thanks to Boeing's little mishaps will soon be voting in the upcoming U.S. presidential election between vice president Kamala Harris and convicted felon Donald Trump. They were supposed to come back to Earth after just eight days and given the latest schedule to get them home, it’s probably going to be about eight months meaning they won’t be back…