Predicting the future in 1999: Tech predictions 25 years on
31 December 2024, 00:04
Futurists and industry experts expected technology to change the world drastically with the turn of the millennium, but how accurate were they?
At the end of the last century, commentators and futurists looked at the upcoming 2000s as the time when the world would change drastically because of a technology revolution taking place.
Many of their predictions – in particular about how computer devices would become not only central to daily life but small and portable enough to carry with us everywhere – have since come to fruition in one form or another.
But not all of those visions for the 21st century have proven to be accurate.
One such prediction from 1999 was that every home would get a so-called “smart box”, a lockable and refrigerated box placed outside every front door that would allow post and perishable items to be stored after delivery.
While delivery lockers and pick-up points have become a regular feature, the prediction failed to anticipate the speed with which deliveries could be made, or how logistics firms would develop ways of chilling food and other items during transit.
And before becoming one of the world’s best-known tech billionaires, Jeff Bezos predicted that computer chips would be in everything from dinner plates to clothing and even medicine packaging by the early 2000s – with those systems using the data they gather to tell users how healthy their food is, or whether two types of medicine should or should not be mixed.
Giving an interview to 60 Minutes Australia in 1999, the Amazon founder also suggested computers would eventually become powerful enough to take on tasks for humans, and that we would reach a stage that when speaking on the phone, people would not be able to tell if they were communicating with another person or a computer, perhaps predicting the rise of artificial intelligence which has begun in the 2020s.
Another common prediction from the turn of the century was that “computer glasses” would be common by the early 2000s as electronic devices continued to shrink in size.
Google Glass may have come and gone without ever truly taking off, but computing devices built into glasses are almost certainly set to become more mainstream in 2025, with Meta’s Project Orion expected to be previewed further, and Google has already confirmed it plans to unveil a new pair of smart glasses too.
Away from gadgets, senior figures at Wired in 1999 accurately predicted another aspect of the tech sector of the 21st century – that regular lawsuits over issues such as intellectual property, patents and competition issues would become common.
As generative AI has taken off in recent years, lawsuits around copyrighted material being used to train AI models have become much more common, while campaigners and smaller firms have been attempting to take legal action against the biggest tech firms over their alleged monopolisation of parts of the industry.
