Predicting the future is always difficult. Just look at the various predictions that educated people have made in the past about what our lives would be like in the 21^st century. Paul Milo has even written a book with the title: Your Flying Car Awaits. His book is full of inaccurate predictions about what our world today would be like.

These prognosticators believed we would live in a world of robot butlers, flying cars, lunar vacations, and predictable weather. Some of these predictions were reinforced by TV shows like The Six Million Dollar Man or cartoons like the Jetsons. We don’t have bionic bodies, though there has been significant progress in producing artificial limbs.

Our homes have computers, hi-tech TV screens, and microwave ovens. But they don’t have any robots making our lives easier. And we don’t have cities underground or under water.

We might also be glad that we don’t have eugenics, baby farms, and Big Brother controlling behavior and even controlling our minds. Many of these dystopic visions have fortunately not come to pass.

Predictions that have been remarkably accurate were the ones Issac Asimov wrote about in 1964. Much of what he wrote fifty years ago has stood the test of time. He predicted that electroluminescent panels would be in common use. We see these everywhere today as retail signs and lighting.

He predicted that “communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone.” Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangout are all examples of this in our world.

He also predicted that “the screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books.” Our smart phones, tablets, and laptop computers allow us to do this every day.

All of this is to say that it is very difficult to predict the future. For every futurist (like Isaac Asimov) that got it right, there are hundreds that got it wrong. You can literally fill whole books with all the inaccurate predictions.