From a 1960s TV call button to a 1943 claim about how many computers the world would ever need, here's how nine old predictions about the future actually held…
Old Predictions About the Future — Some Nailed It, Some Aged Terribly
Predicting the future is a bad bet, statistically. Most guesses miss badly in one direction or another. But every so often someone gets it eerily right, decades before the technology existed to prove them correct — and just as often, a confident expert gets it spectacularly wrong. Here's a mix of both.
The one that basically described video calls in 1926
Nikola Tesla told Collier's magazine that a future wireless device would let people see and hear each other across any distance, small enough to fit in a vest pocket. This was decades before television was common in homes, let alone anything resembling a smartphone. He wasn't vague about it either — he described the core idea of a portable video-calling device almost exactly as it exists now.
The one that got the internet right, and wrong, at the same time
In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke predicted that by 2000, people would conduct business from anywhere in the world through a device connected to a global network, without needing to travel. He nailed the concept of remote work and instant global communication. What he didn't anticipate was how casual and constant it would become — he imagined occasional business use, not something billions of people carry everywhere and check every few minutes.
The famous one that almost certainly never happened
You've probably heard that IBM's founder once said the world would only ever need "maybe five computers." It's one of the most repeated tech quotes of all time — and there's no solid evidence he actually said it. It's a useful reminder that some of the most viral "predictions" are really just internet folklore dressed up as history.
The one where a magazine got the shape of your phone right, not the function
A 1926 issue of Science and Invention magazine imagined future citizens carrying small radio devices for constant communication. The illustration is startlingly close to a smartphone. What the artist missed entirely was everything a phone actually gets used for today — cameras, apps, games — since none of that existed as a concept yet.
The one about cars that still hasn't fully happened
Throughout the 1950s and 60s, predictions about "the future" almost always included flying cars by the 1980s or 90s. Several were even built as working prototypes. The problem was never really the engineering — it was regulation, safety, and cost, none of which the confident magazine illustrations ever bothered to account for.
The one that undersold streaming by a mile
In the 1990s, several telecom executives predicted that video calling and video-on-demand would remain niche, expensive services for businesses, not something ordinary households would use daily. Fifteen years later, Netflix and Skype made both completely mainstream, essentially for free.
The one about robots stealing every job
Since at least the 1960s, predictions have repeatedly claimed that automation would eliminate most human jobs within a generation. It's happened in specific industries, but the broad "mass unemployment by robots" prediction has been wrong for over 60 years running — though it keeps getting recycled with each new wave of automation, AI included.
The one about paper disappearing completely
Tech futurists in the 1970s and 80s were confident that the "paperless office" was just around the corner, thanks to computers. Decades later, global paper consumption for printing actually increased for years afterward before finally declining — not because of the original prediction, but because of smartphones and cloud storage nobody had specifically predicted.
The one that got the timeline wrong but the idea right
In 1970, a prominent computer scientist predicted a machine with the general intelligence of an average human would exist within a decade. That didn't happen anywhere close to on schedule — but the underlying idea, that machines would eventually approach general reasoning ability, is now taken seriously again for the first time since.
Nobody bats a perfect record on this. The people who got things right usually weren't smarter than everyone else — they just happened to notice one real trend early and didn't get distracted by the details they couldn't have known yet. The ones who got it wrong mostly just assumed today's constraints would last forever. They rarely do.