Predicting the future

I sometimesask myself how much of today’s dystopian and sci-fi books and movies depict anaccurate picture of our world in 50 or maybe 100 years. Or at least of ourtechnological progress.

Maybe alook into the past will help:

Take “Backto the Future II” for example. The movie was released in 1989 but parts of ittake place in 2015. Not too far from today.

Hoverboard and automatic shoes

If webelieve the movie’s prediction, we will use flying cars in three years fromnow, our kids will use hover boards instead of skateboards and our shoelaceswill be automatic. I think we all agree that won’t happen. What I’m wondering:why didn’t the producers of the movie even consider mobile phones? InsteadMarty uses a phone booth. ‘What’s that?’ a few of you might ask. ;)

Or takee-readers for example. In the movie a salesperson talks about dust jackets. Athing of the past in the movie, but are there e-readers? No. Instead books havemulti-functional covers.

Many moviespredicted that we’d live on the moon or other planets in this century.Especially older movies put much emphasis on space travel and spacecolonisation. Maybe the euphoria about space travel in the 50s and 60s led tothis belief. As of now we’re still far away from moon colonies.

Let’s takea look at the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”. It was released in 1968 and is setin 2001. The movie predicted space tourism with trips to Jupiter or Mars.Of course that’s not the case. Only very few, very rich people have got thechance to join a space crew so far and certainly not for a trip to Jupiter.

Anotherwrong prediction of the movie and of many other movies of the time is thepredominance of artificial intelligence in the future. If many movies had beencorrect with their predictions, we’d all be using robots for cleaning andcooking. Alas, sadly that’s not the case.

And whatabout laser pistols? When will they come? Never?

But a fewpredictions weren’t totally wrong. In “Back to the Future II”, there are flatscreen TVs. And some movies of the past predicted scary reality shows. “TheRunning Man” for example, where convicts try to outrun Stalkers who want tokill them. Though we don’t kill each other on reality TV yet, I think I’m notthe only one who thinks that the majority of reality TV today is what manypeople of the past would’ve regarded as a downfall of society, and maybe it's true. Big Brother certainly shows some similarities to the movie “TheTruman Show”.

"The Running Man" - hiding from the Stalkers

That leadsto one conclusion regarding today’s dystopian literature: though I’m sure 99%of it is totally off, some things might come true. Probably the things we leastexpect!

Scary.

Do you knowany movies that got it wrong when they predicted the future? Or do you know anymovies that got it right?