A List of Predictions Made in 1926 About 2026

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Marriages will be easy to cancel
Beef will disappear
There will be so many cars that none of them will be able to move
People will work until age 100
Breakfast will be summonable by the press of a button
Americans will get rid of elected politicians and enjoy having less money
Students will eat food made from soy beans
Crime will be treated by doctors
The world will be standing room only
People will get vaccinated, have their teeth removed and go to therapy
Big cities will be a thing of the past
Jazz will be replaced by Buzz
Canada will have a population of 100,000,000
People will read old newspaper clippings
Meals will be replaced by tablets
An instrument will allow people to hear and see each other over long distances
People will be basically the same as today
@paulisci You reminded me of a verse from Psalms. “The days of our years because of them are seventy years, and if with increase, eighty years”. The verse is about 3500 years old. Despite 35 centuries of medical advances, we still have about a the same life expectancy.
@BoTally54 @paulisci
But fewer of us die in infancy which is nice!

@BoTally54 @paulisci back then, 70 was the maximum, now it’s the average.

Nice thread, BTW.

@BoTally54 @paulisci I think the big difference is infant mortality. If you factor that in, people leave a few decades more these days, on average.
@BoTally54 @paulisci it's a good example of selection bias. If your sample is "people over 70", then sure, life expectancy didn't grow that much in the last 100 years. But you're only counting those who get that far. My grandparents lost like half their siblings back then, to childhood diseases. Even my mom (1960s) lost her newborn brother to a congenital condition which could probably be treated today. We're much better at keeping people alive.
@BoTally54 @paulisci well, not really. In 1500 BC life expectancy was 20-30 year, now we have 80-90.

@se38 @BoTally54 @paulisci

If prehistoric man survived childhood, they could easily live into their 70s.

That's what he's talking about.

You're talking about with all the childhood mortality averaged in.

As others have said. We're better now at keeping children alive.

@paulisci could you please provide the source of this image? Thanks.
@paulisci Oh yeah. Safest prediction ever
@paulisci
I bet @blouzouga can do the same with BNF Gallica.
@paulisci i.e. man will still be just as stupid.
@paulisci welp we went straight through this one and out the other side in that time

@paulisci Nazi Germany had video telephony a decade after this was written.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony

History of videotelephony - Wikipedia

@paulisci Gee, thanks MS Teams

@paulisci easy one, 1926 newspaper hack! John Logie Baird actually showed mechanical television in late January 1926, and he didn't come up with it overnight...

I predict in 2026 someone will invent a robot to mix drinks for lazy clueless hipsters who don't drink liquor anyway but they wanna show off the app.

@paulisci Some of these are spot on.
@paulisci amazing how back then, like now, futurists wanted to get rid of the good things in life, rather than the bad ones.
@ubik @paulisci futurism was, and still is, a fascist movement
@blogdiva @paulisci I meant it in the broader sense, but yeah, it kind of applies.
@ubik @blogdiva @paulisci Yeah, we still like real food and comfortable clothing.
@blogdiva @ubik @paulisci have you noticed the soullessness of a common futurist place in images? Glass-clad buildings, monotone grass and plants, no shape consistency, no color or diversity. But - flying cars. It's, like, everything tasteless today but MOAR.
@paulisci well, they get half credit for predicting that most people would be so overworked as to not have time to sit down for a proper dinner.
@paulisci Innnnnn the yeeeeeearrrrr twennnnty-five twennnnty-fiiiiiiiiive…!

@paulisci partly true

Our supermarket has bottles of stuff labeled “this is food”

Arguably, if it were, you wouldn’t need the label

@paulisci
I seem to recall an MST3K gag about this. They encountered a hyper advanced alien race who had replaced food with pills...

But it didn't reduce the volume. For every meal, giant bowls of pills.

@paulisci finally one that came true 😛
@paulisci This one was certainly on the money.
@paulisci
Prediction: some random person in the year 2126 talking about predictions from the year 2026 will talk about this post.

@lethe @paulisci …while researching early infowar, when everyone with a networked device was able to talk to each other (which alongside traditional birth control caused population decline).

2026’s “netizens” debated whether “agentic AI” would ever become trustable.

In 2126, we can now look back with regret on all the hopeful dreams of the Mad Generation—who fell in love with unregulated chatbots trained on stolen, illegal, and unvetted wild corpora—and lost their minds while the world burned.

@paulisci i agree with this old newspaper clipping
@paulisci People will wonder why a technology was new once upon a time
@paulisci "...in trump's economy, people will eat old newspaper clippings."
@paulisci They accurately predicted degenerates using the Pokémon Ditto to transform into waifus.