When people make predictions about future technologies that come true, they are seen as visionaries. When people miss terribly with their predictions, they have infographics that live forever telling of how wrong they were.
Such has been the case for many futurists over the past century and a third. It’s often easy to make a bold prediction when it is supposed to come true in the distant future, but some predictions were proven to be exceptionally wrong looking a couple of years ahead. Bill Gates, for example, said spam would be solved in 2 years. That was 2004. We’re still waiting and hoping for it to become a reality.
This graphic by our friends at SocialCast takes us through a 136-year journey that shows us some of the best examples of predictions gone wrong. It even includes a few examples of near-misses that have become close to a reality. It’s a tricky game, trying to guess about the future. What do you foresee?
Click to enlarge.
flying cars will def come one day steroids
Typical shitty list only presented in a more annoying format now. The first few were not predictions, but statements made by heads of companies against their competition. And the Bill Gates one just shows your ignorance of the statement. He was touting a new Microsoft model for eliminating spam that was not allowed to be implemented. There is no way to know if his prediction would have come true if they were allowed to move forward with their plan. So his prediction was NOT false since the actual prediction was “Using our new plan, spam will be a thing of the past.”
I realize this is a blog…and a really shitty one at that, and that no one will EVER confuse JD Rucker with a real writer or an intelligent human being…but someone, you managed to sink even lower than you already were.