Dear People of 2021: What Can We Learn From Hindsight?
The New York Times
For the first series from the Headway initiative, we followed up on forecasts from decades past to ask what the passage of time has revealed.
Our forebears had a lot of ideas about where we’d be by now.
Go back just a few years, and you’ll find no end of prophecies about the world we’d inhabit today — tech fantasies of roads filled with self-driving machines, dire visions of critical water sources gone dry, projections of cities and markets growing and shrinking. In The Times of even a decade ago, the year 2020 was considered a rich canvas for visions of the future, “far enough in the distance to dream, yet seemingly within arm’s reach.”
Imagining futures — to pursue, avoid, or merely prepare for — is how we often wrestle with change in the present. Yet our ability to envision — and therefore shape — the future is constantly pressed in by the world we inhabit today.
