25 Aug What the Next 50 Years Will Bring — Looking Back from 2025
Once upon a time passengers on commercial airlines were offered a choice of magazines. You were asked to leave them on the plane but in May 1983 on a Pan Am flight from Bombay to London when I was unable to finish an article, What the Next 50 Years Will Bring in a copy of U.S. News & World Report, I nicked it thinking it would be interesting look back on it in 50 years.
Well, here we are, 42 years on, and cleaning out a cupboard this morning guess what turned up? The magazine is yellowed with age and still tucked inside its Pan Am folder, itself now a relic of a vanished airline. And I am here as well – though since longevity hasn’t stretched quite as far as the experts once promised, I thought I’d better review it now while there is still time.
It was the age of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The article brimmed with optimism. After a decade in which “doomsayers” warned of overpopulation, famine, pollution, and nuclear catastrophe, the editors sketched out a very different future. Drawing on “hundreds of experts,” they envisioned a 21st century filled with breakthroughs and prosperity.
- People would live to 100 or more, as “super drugs” cured cancer and senility.
- Genetic engineering would expand food supplies and clean up pollution.
- Space colonies would orbit the Earth, and the Moon would be mined for resources.
- Robots would handle housework and factory tasks, and cars would be programmed to avoid accidents.
- A woman, Black, or Hispanic president was possible; people would have three or four careers in a lifetime.
- Home computers would provide families with “enormous sources of data and entertainment.”
- An economic boom would bring the highest standard of living ever known, with floating cities, 250-mph levitating trains, and new energy sources freeing the U.S. from dependence on foreign oil.
- On the world stage, developing nations – comprising 85% of the population by 2033 – would demand a greater share of resources, with economics becoming the common language of international relations.
To be fair, the magazine reminded readers that predictions could be wildly wrong. The Titanic was once declared “unsinkable.” U.S. officials once insisted Japan would never attack Pearl Harbor. In 1939, experts had predicted that slums would vanish and traffic jams would be eliminated.
Even so, the editors ended on a hopeful note. America, they wrote, would see the rise of a new “mass elite,” freed by technology to enjoy more wealth, liberty, and creativity than ever before. Unless humanity did something “violently stupid,” Princeton futurist Gerald O’Neill reassured, “the eternals of hope and love and laughter will still be there.”
Looking back from 2025, how did those predictions fare? Some were strikingly prescient. America did elect a Black president (Barack Obama in 2008) and a woman vice president (Kamala Harris in 2020). Home computers indeed opened vast new worlds of information and entertainment – though few in 1983 could have imagined the internet, smartphones, and artificial intelligence reshaping daily life. Multiple careers per lifetime have become the norm.
Other forecasts overshot the mark. We still don’t live to 100 as a matter of course, nor have we cured cancer or dementia. Space colonies remain in the realm of science fiction. Floating cities never arrived, and while maglev trains exist in places like China and Japan, they are not part of everyday life. Energy breakthroughs came not from exotic new sources, but from the shale boom and a still-unfinished transition to renewables.
Perhaps most tellingly, the article was right to warn about unexpected calamities. In 2020, COVID-19 swept across the globe — an “unknown plague” every bit as disruptive as the article imagined. Nuclear war has, thankfully, been avoided, though tensions remain.
Re-reading this old magazine today is both sobering and strangely comforting. The experts of 1983 got some things laughably wrong, but they also underestimated the quieter revolutions that would transform the world. Prediction, as they admitted, is a risky business. Yet there is value in seeing how past generations imagined the future: their hopes, their blind spots, their faith in human ingenuity.
Forty-two years ago, I tucked this magazine into my bag, thinking it might be fun to look back one day. I didn’t expect that in doing so, I’d find not just a record of predictions, but a reminder of how quickly life itself becomes history.
And yes, Gerald O’Neill was right: despite everything, the eternals of hope and love and laughter are still here.
Michael Katz
Posted at 16:29h, 01 SeptemberI agree the eternals are still there. I think, since1983, the biggest change is the rise and rise of China.
Gerald Lipman
Posted at 21:22h, 01 SeptemberI find these musings of 50 years forward or 50 years back fascinating. I wonder about the world my grandchildren will live in. What should they learn, what is not necessary?
What values are essential, what optional?
In 1964 Donald Horne wrote “The Lucky Country”, expressing the view that even at that time Australia’s success was not due to good politics, hard work, and skill, but luck. 60 years on, Australia is even in a more fortunate position than we were in 1964. How long will the luck hold? Or, maybe it was not luck but a wise electorate who kick out ineffective politicians when they do not like their policies.
We’ve always had the risk of war, economic ruin and disease. But we now have AI, environmental disasters, Trump and even more to consider.
Does it make more sense to predict 20-40 years in the future, which really is one big guess, or should we simply observe astutely on the current day- like Donald Horne. This is hard enough!!
Andrew Maconie
Posted at 06:04h, 04 SeptemberAbsolutely fascinating. A lot to be said for less booze more exercise and a loving family