From flying cars to colonizing Mars, humanity has always tried to imagine what the future would be like. Stories in movies and TV shows can help us imagine this future, and even inspire reality. But while some visions of the future have come true, some other predictions from movies and TV haven’t held up so well. Here’s what we’ve gotten wrong—and right—about the future, as well as the predictions we’re still making today.

Transcript

Intro

Humanity has always tried to imagine what the future would be like – from the second coming, to flying cars to colonizing Mars. Stories in movies and TV shows can help us imagine this future, and even inspire reality. In fact, the very first science fiction film, released back in 1902, depicted a then-fantastical trip to the moon. But while we did eventually make it to the moon, some other predictions from movies and TV haven’t held up so well.

Here’s what we’ve gotten wrong—and right—about the future, as well as the predictions we’re still making today.

Chapter One: Future Infotech

So how well did stories foresee what we now call “smart technology?

Film and TV portrayals have long vacillated between hopefulness and fear toward computers. . In 1965, French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard released Alphaville, where a secret agent investigates the Alpha 60 computer, which uses mind control to rule over residents of the town. In 1966, Star Trek swept in to make computers largely less harrowing and more exciting. The series’s many computer-related devices, according to the Computer History Museum, “influenced generations of filmmakers, writers, and especially technologists––some of whom are still working today to create technologies featured on the show.”

Of course, most stories didn’t foresee that a mobile phone could become capable of what we’ve seen today. Even Star Trek only comes up with “the communicator” – a glorified flip cell phone. According to Business Insider, the communicator literally inspired Martin Cooper, engineer for Motorola, to design the world’s first mobile phone in 1973. Oddly enough, modern “smartphones” deliver on a totally different prediction from lots of classic science fiction: a computer that somehow contains the collected knowledge of humanity. Now, all that knowledge is easily accessible—albeit fallible—at our fingertips.

Stories have also grappled a lot with the nature of artificial intelligence, or AI. Robots, machines, Amazon’s Alexa: What are they capable of? Can they feel love? What will they do to humanity? These modern questions are at the centers of stories from A.I. Artificial Intelligence to Blade Runner, to Her. While we don’t yet have robots like A.I.’s David, who yearns to become human and seems to feel deeply human emotions, perhaps 2013’s Her offers the prediction closest to our current state of affairs. Like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, Samantha is an amorphous female voice who can help with everything from searching recipes, deleting emails, to sharing in apparently passionate conversation. She appears to have a rich inner life, which she develops through machine learning. While Samantha outgrows humans, she (and many other fictional robots – like David or Wall-E- retain a compassion for their creators and do want to help us.

So––does this mean that AI can love us or learn to become…human? In September 2022, Madhurjya Chowdhury wrote in Analytics Insight that tech will likely never have feelings like humans, but rather just learn to appear compassionate.

Maybe this is for the best – our onscreen stories have explored how AI experiencing human emotions can go badly wrong or be plain creepy. Take Agnes, a computer in The Twilight Zone that keeps falling in love with the humans programming it or TV biz man Max Renn in Videodrome, who makes…love? to his girlfriend through a TV screen.

When it comes to the emotional instinct to survive or spread at all costs, many stories have also promoted wariness of AI and whether it could turn on us. Science fiction is littered with AI villains, from the replicants of Blade Runner to the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica. Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey’s iconic Hal 9000 is a thinking computer who exemplifies how this intelligence might compete with human beings for future survival.

Dave Bowman: “Open the pod doors Hal.”

Hal 9000: I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me.- 2001: A Space Odyssey

Still, perhaps the biggest thing to fear with future AI isn’t a humanly paranoid or ill intentioned villain robot, but a totally impersonal supersmart machine.

Already today we’re seeing some AI bots are being used by people in power to spread disinformation, perpetuate discrimination, and in turn corrode public trust. And watching a truly unfeeling, relentlessly deadly technology come to life like the dog robots in Black Mirror is a harrowing, and very plausible, nightmare, especially when real life tech seems to resemble it. Upcoming horror film M3gan also explores what happens when an AI robot will stop at nothing to perform the task it was programmed to do. Silicon Valley imagines an AI that could destroy all privacy, and the show ends with this cautionary tale about how just because we can create the tech for something (and it would probably make lots of money) doesn’t mean we should.

Today numerous experts working in the field agree that AI is incredibly potentially dangerous .

As Elon Musk pointed out “AI doesn’t have to be evil to destroy humanity — if AI has a goal and humanity just happens in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it, no hard feelings.”

Chapter Two: Future In Transit

One type of long-time dream for the future has centered around making travel easier and faster. If we can invent bikes, cars, airplanes, and then rockets, then why wouldn’t we create faster-than-light spaceships, which would allow us to go anywhere in the universe at the drop of a hat? We’ve seen examples of this future dream in franchises ranging from Star Wars to Battlestar Galactica.

But let’s not kid ourselves: The holy grail of futuristic transportation has always been teleportation.

In film and TV, the most popular form of teleportation depends on the theory that you can break down an object or person in one location and then recreate it in another. We’ve never gotten close to actually making this happen, but according to some scientists, that might not be such a bad thing: because this type of teleporter would just be a cloning machine that kills you first.

Michael Habib: “You know, I used to think the transporter in Star Trek was a nice teleporter, thought it’d be great to use it. Then I thought about how it works, and it’s really more of a suicide booth”-Fraiser Kane

Even when teleportation does work in film and TV, there are still plenty of drawbacks—like with the machine in The Fly, which famously turns the scientist at the center of the movie into a monster.

A little closer to Earth, supercars have been a fantasy practically since the invention of the automobile—which, we might add, was itself once a crazy idea. We’ve seen flying cars signal the future in everything from the sleek airways of The Jetsons, to the dirty taxi in The Fifth Element, and the airborne DeLorean from Back to the Future. Filmed versions of flying cars date all the way back to Just Imagine, a sci-fi musical from 1930 and one of the earliest examples to imagine a future where flying vehicles are as ho-hum as walking. But these supercars tend to simply transpose wings, rockets, or a sudden ability to fly onto the automobile as we know it, which doesn’t suit the physical realities of flight – so maybe there’s a good reason flying cars just aren’t going to happen. Recently, though, big backers like Boeing, Uber, and Aerbus are racing to be the first approved for a new market of pilotless “air taxis” that merge this concept with more traditional air vehicle technology.

Meanwhile, on the ground, other imagined onscreen vehicles seem to predict the self-driving car – whether you’re talking about the flashy capabilities of the Batmobile, James Bond’s remote-controlled car in Tomorrow Never Dies or the scary automated trucks that appear in Logan, in the future of the X-Men universe. Today it seems like we’re close to seeing self-driving cars on the road via companies like Tesla and Google; still, Tesla founder Elon Musk has claimed these supercars were just a year away every year since 2014. And the forbidding Logan example where the truck causes a mysterious accident may be the most accurate prediction: there are already instances when this technology has become deadly or not operated the way it’s supposed to. The movie that best predicted all this might be Total Recall, with its self-driving taxis that have difficulty with some of the…er…nuances of communication if a passenger goes off-book.

Chapter Three: Future Immortality

Many stories about future health have centered cryonics and immortality as the ultimate goals for humans. Netflix’s Altered Carbon imagines a world where human consciousness can be compressed into a “cortical stack,” a computer that allows people to jump between different bodies, interact with computer systems, and live for thousands of years. Upload and the Black Mirror episode “San Junipero” imagine similar technologies that involve uploading humans’ consciousness to another world after they die. But this technology is decidedly out of our reach, at least for the foreseeable future—though scientists generally seem to agree that uploading our minds is hypothetically possible, it would require a full capacity to map and store the information in the human brain, a remarkably tall order. And with advances in computing slowing down, it’s possible we’ll never have machines powerful enough to mimic a human brain.

Abby Tang: “Moore’s law at one point predicted that computer power doubles every 18 months. And in recent decades, these advances have slowed. If they come to a halt, our computers may never be fast enough to sort through the data.”- Business Insider

Still, some will certainly keep trying to see this through––and at what cost? That’s uncertain.

Scaling back from the ultimate goal of functional immortality, we’ve frequently imagined a world where routine sickness and major disease can be stopped. Some depictions – including Star Trek’s medical technologies like the tricorder – have inspired real breakthroughs in medical science.

But despite all the medical advances we’ve seen in real life, past predictions didn’t account for the chaos and messiness of actual disease control. Not only are experts predicting more pandemics becoming common in the future due to factors like the climate crisis and smaller buffer zones between humans and animals, but even older diseases are making reappearances, in part due to large swathes of society rejecting the medical advances we already have like safe vaccines.

Chapter Four: Future Cities

Movies have long been fascinated by future megacities, imagining cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles growing bigger and bigger over time, turning into massive cultural melting pots.

However, these visions of the megacity may be less imaginative than plain observant. Blade Runner 2049 is heavily reminiscent of Tokyo’s modern Shinjuku district and many futuristic stories are just connecting the dots on how civilization grows under neoliberal capitalism, globalization, and consumerist culture––where property and housing are used more to build wealth than to meet the basic human need for shelter. As rents continue to rise, some of our darker visions of the future surface: By 2050, more than 70% of the world is expected to live in a city, yet few can truly afford to live there. If there’s a movie that really nails this aspect of the future, it’s Rian Johnson’s Looper. The characters of Looper have access to psychic powers, more advanced touch screens, and even time travel technology. But none of this has actually made people’s lives better, exemplified by the way everyone in the movie’s version of Kansas City continues to struggle to survive.

Still, why do all futuristic predictions assume that cities will just devolve into seedy, wiped-out centers, barren of greenery and run by criminals? Not many stories have predicted the dream futuristic city of today: The sustainable city. Instead of a Metropolis, many now instead envision––and desperately underline the need for––”smart” cities that prioritize localized communities, mixed-use development, reduction of nonrenewable energy, and landback movements. We’d love to see a story that visualizes that when it’s already happening in real life.

Outro
While older media imagined flashy inventions like flying cars and teleportation- people today are increasingly focusing on “radical imagination”. This encourages people to envision and act toward care-focused worlds, such as through advocating for policies that support healthy and sustainable communities over profit- and exploitation-based ones. No matter the year or future we imagine––no matter the tools we have or the technological progress we create––we can’t––and shouldn’t––engineer away what people really need.