Folks, in 1960 the future was a shiny Cadillac with fins tall enough to shade a mule. We were promised jetpacks for the commute, push-button dinners for the kitchen, and a polite little robot to scold the dog. The salesmen were certain because the blueprints were clean, the budgets were theoretical, and the human heart—most inconvenient machine ever built—was politely left out of the diagram.
Truth is, predicting tomorrow is easy if you leave out the people who have to live in it. The futurists got the wires right and the souls wrong. They saw pictures on telephones but not the meetings that should’ve been emails; they spotted moon landings but missed the committee meetings that cancel Mars. They believed progress was a straight road; they didn’t notice the tollbooths, detours, and a sheriff named “Politics” leaning on the speed limit sign.
So here we stand, sixty-odd years later, with pockets full of supercomputers and a calendar still arguing with human nature. We built miracles out of silicon and then asked them to fix our habits. The lesson, dear reader, is simple enough to be ignored: technology makes things possible; people decide what’s probable.
If you want a trustworthy map of tomorrow, don’t just count the gadgets—count the incentives. The future tends to arrive on schedule for the engineer and forty years late for the committee. It moves at the speed of habit, not hype; it is slowed by law, sped by profit, and steered—always—by vanity and fear.
The prophets of 1960 weren’t fools; they were optimists with clean shirts. They guessed the what and tripped on the who pays, who benefits, and who says no. That’s the arithmetic that still matters. So when someone offers you a brochure of flying cars, ask about noise ordinances, insurance tables, and the neighbor who hates fun.
Here’s my final counsel: bet on things that compound (chips, networks, learning), beware things that vote (budgets, zoning, committees), and never forget the oldest algorithm—human nature. Do that, and when 2085 rolls around, your grandchildren might say you didn’t predict the future perfectly, but you had the good sense to build for the parts that don’t change.
The future as seen from 1960 — the good, the bad, and the ugly (and how it aged)
The good (surprisingly accurate)
- Instant, global communications. The 1964 AT&T Picturephone was the prototype dream—even if it bombed at the time, the core idea (face-to-face calls) became everyday reality once the internet and smartphones arrived.
- Computers everywhere. Tech insiders in the ’60s foresaw explosive progress: Licklider sketched a world-spanning computer network (the “Intergalactic Network”) and Paul Baran described packet-switched networks—foundations of today’s internet. Moore (1965) predicted relentless chip scaling, which held for decades.
- Robots at work. Not the Jetsons’ maid, but factory robots arrived fast: the Unimate was on a GM line in 1961, launching industrial robotics that now saturate manufacturing.
The bad (over-optimistic or slow)
- Space colonies & Mars by “around 1985.” Post-Apollo roadmaps pitched space stations, lunar bases, and a human Mars expedition in the 1980s; budgets and politics killed it. We’re still working toward Mars today.
- Videophones… right away. The tech was demo-ready in 1964, but cost, clunkiness, and culture made it a market flop for decades. (Right idea, wrong timing.)
- Nuclear power “too cheap to meter.” A famous mid-century promise badly missed real-world economics, regulation, and public acceptance.
- Flying cars & routine supersonic travel. Pop culture (e.g., The Jetsons) normalized flying family commutes; in reality, airspace, safety and noise kept them niche, and Concorde died in 2003.
The ugly (the blind spots baked into the vision)
- Car-first cities. GM’s Futurama exhibits sold a highway utopia that helped popularize the interstate model. We got congestion, sprawl, and environmental costs along with mobility.
- Gendered “push-button” homes. The House/Miracle Kitchen of Tomorrow promised effortless domesticity—while centering the era’s “perfect housewife.” The tech image aged; the social assumptions didn’t.
- Doom-laden population forecasts. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb predicted mass famines in the ’70s–’80s; the Green Revolution and demographics made those misses stark.
Scorecard: what 1960-era futurists got right (and wrong)
| 1960s headline idea | What actually happened by the 2020s | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Videophones | 1964 launch failed; mainstream with internet/smartphones | Right idea, 40–50 years early. |
| “Networked world” | Packet switching + ARPA vision → Internet | Bullseye (insiders). |
| Ever-smaller, cheaper chips | Moore’s Law drove a half-century of progress | Remarkably accurate. ( |
| Robotized industry | First line robot in 1961; now ubiquitous in autos | On the nose. |
| Mars bases by the ’80s | Plans proposed, never funded; still pending | Miss (underestimated politics). |
| Nuclear “too cheap to meter” | Costs never fell that far; build-out stalled in US | Big miss. May be soon |
| Flying cars/jetpacks | Demos exist; not routine transport | Mostly miss. |
Bottom line
1960’s future was technically imaginative but institutionally naive. We nailed bits-and-networks, stumbled on politics-and-infrastructure. The artifacts of that optimism—Futurama highways, the Picturephone, plastic houses—show how often the what was right while the when, who, and at what cost were the real unknowns.
They largely missed the everyday shape of the digital world: a world-spanning internet built on open-source and cloud services; pocket supercomputers (smartphones) that fuse camera, map, wallet, and newsroom; social media, memes, influencers, and surveillance capitalism; AI that writes, codes, drives, and designs; search engines and Wikipedia flattening access to knowledge; GPS in everything with turn-by-turn navigation, ride-hailing, and delivery apps; streaming that replaced broadcast and film; digital photography everywhere; Bitcoin, blockchains, smart contracts, DeFi/NFTs—i.e., programmable money; CRISPR gene editing, cheap DNA sequencing, and mRNA vaccines; wearables, telemedicine, and at-home diagnostics; 3D printing, drones, and a global gig/remote-work economy; and the cultural and geopolitical shockwaves of climate change, cybersecurity, and always-on connectivity.
What we might be missing now: The sleepers are likely enablers more than gadgets—things that feel niche today but flip the table once they compound. Think agentic AI that schedules, negotiates, and buys on your behalf (machine-to-machine markets); privacy-first “personal data vaults” that let apps compute on your info without seeing it (FHE/MPC); cheap, quiet geothermal and grid-scale storage that make renewables 24/7; bio-manufacturing platforms that print enzymes, fuels, and materials on demand; non-invasive neurotech that reads intent well enough to control interfaces; photonic/neuromorphic chips that do AI at a fraction of the power; programmable matter/metamaterials that change optics or acoustics on the fly; autonomous construction and micro-factories that build locally; and in-space manufacturing piggybacking on ultra-cheap heavy lift. The real blind spot is social plumbing: identity, payments, law, and insurance catching up so these techs can actually transact.
Our 2025 forecast (humble, but specific): By the late 2030s, AI shifts from copilots to autonomous teams handling whole workflows; most consumer devices run strong on-device models, and search looks more like delegated agents than links. Power grids get steadier as batteries + advanced geothermal scale, while sodium/solid-state cells squeeze EV costs; hybrids remain common, but charging ubiquity makes range anxiety quaint. CRISPR-based therapies move from “last resort” to earlier lines of care; longevity pivots from hype to measurable risk-reduction bundles (metabolic, sleep, muscle, GLP-1 follow-ons). AR glasses find a foothold in work before mainstream leisure. Tokenized real-world assets creep into finance, regulated and boring—exactly what they need to be. Cities spend more on climate adaptation than mitigation: heat, water, insurance. Space gets industrial: inspection, debris removal, and first niche manufacturing. The big constant: winners are those who marry chips and code to distribution, compliance, and trust.
AND YOU WILL BE ABLE TO FINALLY GET A JETPACK, but you will be crazy to use it.
EXTRA CREDIT – Inspiration for this Post – And a demonstration of what AI can do
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