We’ve been obsessed with what’s next for a long time. Honestly, it’s a bit of a national pastime. You’ve seen the old postcards from 1900 showing firemen with bat wings or cities under giant glass domes. That was their past and present future—a weird mix of what they knew and what they hoped for. It’s funny because, looking back, they usually got the "what" right but the "how" completely wrong. They knew we’d fly; they just didn't realize we'd do it in pressurized metal tubes while complaining about the price of tiny bags of pretzels.
The thing about the past and present future is that it’s never actually about the future. It’s a mirror. When we look at the 1950s "House of the Future," we don't see 2026. We see 1950s anxieties about domestic labor and nuclear energy. If you look at our current predictions—AI overlords, climate collapse, or living on Mars—you’re seeing what keeps us up at night right now. It’s a loop.
The Problem With Linear Thinking
Humans are kinda bad at exponential growth. We think in straight lines. If a car goes 60 miles per hour today, we assume it'll go 70 tomorrow. But technology doesn't work that way. It jumps. This is why the past and present future always feels so clunky when you look at old sci-fi.
Ray Kurzweil, a guy who basically made a career out of predicting things at Google, talks about the "Law of Accelerating Returns." He argues that we’re not just moving forward; we’re accelerating. Yet, even the smartest experts miss the mark. Remember the "Paperless Office"? People in the 70s were convinced physical paper would be a relic by 1990. Instead, we invented the personal printer and started using more paper than ever. We didn't account for human habit. We like touching things. We like the tactile feel of a physical page, even if a PDF is "better."
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The complexity of our past and present future predictions often fails because we ignore the "Lindy Effect." This is a concept popularized by Nassim Taleb. It basically says the longer something has lasted, the longer it’s likely to last. We keep predicting the death of the book, but the book has been around for centuries. It’ll probably outlive the Kindle. When we imagine the future, we tend to add new things but forget to keep the old things that actually work.
Retro-Futurism: When the Past Got It Right
Sometimes, they actually nailed it. In 1964, Isaac Asimov wrote an essay for the New York Times about what the world would look like in 2014. It’s eerie. He predicted "electroluminescent panels" (LEDs) and that "communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone." He basically described FaceTime 50 years before it was a thing.
But then he also thought we’d have "nuclear-powered batteries" in our appliances.
That's the trap. We project current "hero" technologies onto every problem. In the 50s, everything was nuclear. In the 90s, everything was "The Internet." Today, everything is "AI." We assume the current shiny object will solve every single pain point, from cancer to laundry. It won't.
The Present Future: What We’re Getting Wrong Today
Right now, our past and present future is dominated by Silicon Valley's vision of the "Metaverse" and Generative AI.
A few years ago, everyone was screaming that we’d all be wearing VR goggles and working in digital offices by now. It didn't happen. Why? Because wearing a heavy plastic bucket on your face for eight hours is annoying. It’s a physical constraint that tech enthusiasts ignored because they were too focused on the software.
The AI Hallucination of Progress
We’re doing the same thing with AI. There’s this idea that we’re five minutes away from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that will do everything for us. But if you look at the research from people like Yann LeCun at Meta, there’s a massive gap between "predicting the next word in a sentence" and "actually understanding the world."
Our past and present future tends to overestimate what can be done in two years and underestimate what can be done in twenty. We’re in the "hype" phase of AI. It’s incredibly useful for coding or summarizing a boring email, but it’s not a replacement for human judgment yet. Not even close.
- The Energy Crisis: We talk about a digital future but forget that ChatGPT queries use ten times the electricity of a Google search.
- The Material Reality: We dream of "the cloud," but the cloud is just a massive, hot building in Virginia filled with spinning fans and rare earth minerals mined in difficult conditions.
- The Social Fatigue: People are actually moving back to "dumb phones." The future might actually be less connected, not more.
Why We Need to Study the Past and Present Future
Studying how people used to think about today is a great way to avoid making the same mistakes. It teaches us humility. If the smartest people in 1920 thought we’d be commuting by personal helicopter, maybe we should be skeptical when people today say we’ll all be living in pods by 2040.
The past and present future shows us that the most impactful changes are often the most boring ones. It’s not the flying car; it’s the shipping container. It’s not the robot butler; it’s the washing machine. These things changed the world more than any flashy gadget ever did because they changed how we spend our time.
The Myth of the "Great Reset"
Every decade has a "Great Reset" narrative. In the late 90s, it was the Y2K bug. In the 2010s, it was the "sharing economy" (which just turned out to be renting things from venture-capital-backed apps). Today, it’s the "Post-AI world."
History suggests that the world doesn't reset. It just layers. We still use trains. We still use pencils. We still go to physical grocery stores. The past and present future is always a messy collage of the stone age and the space age. You can find a guy using a high-end smartphone to order a hand-carved wooden table. That is the reality of progress.
How to Actually Predict What’s Next
If you want to understand the past and present future without getting sucked into the hype, look at the friction.
Where is the world annoying right now? Technology usually flows toward the path of least resistance. We didn't get flying cars because they are loud, dangerous, and require a pilot's license. We got Uber because calling a taxi was a pain in the neck.
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- Look for the "Old" in the "New": The most successful "future" tech usually mimics something we already understand. The "desktop" on your computer is a metaphor for a literal desk.
- Follow the Energy: If a future vision requires more energy or water than we actually have, it’s probably a fantasy.
- Bet on Human Laziness: Anything that makes life 10% easier will win. Anything that makes life 10% more "cool" but adds two steps to the process will fail.
The past and present future is a graveyard of "cool" ideas that were too much work. Segways were cool. Google Glass was cool. Neither of them solved a fundamental human problem.
Practical Steps for Navigating Your Own Future
Stop worrying about the "end of work" or the "robot uprising." Those are narrative tropes that have existed since the Industrial Revolution. Instead, focus on the skills that are "Lindy"—things that have been valuable for 2,000 years and will be valuable for 2,000 more.
- Master Communication: Whether it’s a clay tablet or a neural link, being able to explain an idea clearly is the ultimate "future-proof" skill.
- Understand Systems: Don't just learn a tool (like a specific AI). Learn how the system works. Tools change every six months; systems stay the same.
- Stay Physical: As the world gets more digital, physical presence and manual skills become more scarce and, therefore, more valuable.
The past and present future tells us that the more things change, the more we stay the same. We still want to be entertained, we still want to feel safe, and we still want to connect with other people. If you base your view of the future on those three pillars, you’ll be a lot more accurate than the guys drawing bat-wings on firemen.
Focus on the bottlenecks. Look at the things that haven't changed in fifty years—like how we build houses or how we educate kids. Those are the areas where the "real" future is actually hiding, waiting for a solution that isn't just another app or a flashy headline.