So this is the twenty-first century! It doesn’t seem to be quite what we were promised. We were supposed to have unlimited atom-powered energy - not to be running out of oil. We were supposed to be cruising about in flying cars - not getting gridlocked in traffic.

And they told us that all sorts of diseases were being eliminated - nobody mentioned aids or ebola or sars or bird flu. And what about those nasty antibiotic-resistant viruses. We were the ones supposed to be getting resistant - not the bloody germs!

And why can’t I take a trip to the Moon? That movie was set in 2001, so tripping off to the Moon should be routine and our first visit to Jupiter should be history.

Then there were those who worried that Communism would spread from Russia throughout the world. Nobody said that Moscow would end up having more capitalist billionaires than any other city.

And what would the authors of that God Is Dead issue of Time make of the rise of religious fundamentalism?

And why didn’t anyone predict climate change?

The reason is that we’re at a point of discontinuity. When people try to predict the future, they usually look at what’s been happening and assume that the same sort of thing will continue to happen. But sometimes it doesn’t. The Industrial Revolution was such a time. From the middle of the eighteenth century, new mechanical technologies produced an entirely different world to the one which would have been predicted by extrapolating the trends which were occurring in the old post-feudal agricultural economy.

("Industrial Revolution" ex Flickr)

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