The longer you cover technology, the more you realise how often we misjudge the future. Predictions have a habit of not coming true. Things that seem so clear now can shift and change, taking on entirely new forms we never imagined.
But even predictions we dismiss as so wrong often come true eventually. A good example of this is the Segway. (And, uh, bear with me.) Before Dean Kamen’s personal transportation was unveiled in 2001, hints of it began to leak out to the public. Among the most infamous was a statement attributed to Steve Jobs before the launch that the Segway would make people redesign their cities around it. When the device finally made its clumsy debut and turned out to be nothing more than an electric scooter, the Jobs quote was widely mocked—and sometimes used as an example of his fallibility at predicting the future.
And yet. Here in 2024, we’re doing pretty much exactly what Jobs predicted. Okay, the Segway never really caught on, but scooters and all sorts of other electric micromobility devices are everywhere. We’re developing infrastructure to support lanes and docking stations for scooters and e-bikes, writing laws about where and how fast they can be ridden, and fundamentally rethinking the way we get around – even in cities that already have great transportation infrastructure. Take Taipei, for example. In that city, banks are charging for scooters from Gogoro (a 2023 MIT Technology Review Climate Tech 15 Company) there are now more than gas stations and they can even be used as a source of electricity when the lights go out. In other words, we are finally designing our cities around these things.
That means that even if we get the navigation instructions wrong, we can at least point in the right direction. So in this issue you’ll find some of our best predictions about what the future might hold. We might not be entirely right, but we think we’re at least giving some clues as to where we’re headed.
In this edition, Casey Crownhart looks at our clean energy future and the resources we need to create and sustain it. Niall Firth examines the challenges archivists face as they try to preserve information about our current lives for the distant future. Antonio Regalado looks at how we might all be playing God in the years to come, thanks to the ability to alter our DNA. And nowhere do we get more prescient than in Kara Platoni’s story, which imagines the experiences a child born today will have dealing with AI and other new technologies over the course of their lifetime—that is, 125+ years to come.
You’ll also find an excellent pack of essays asking big questions about the future. Cliff Kuang and Lydia Millet both argue that it’s important to take matters into our own hands, whether it’s computer interfaces or responses to the climate crisis. Jessica Hamzelou tackles the question of (much) longer lives, Clive Thompson imagines the changing role of video, Ray Kurzweil believes machines will set us free, Katya Klinova questions what AI will mean for economic inequality, and Leo Herrera weighs in on the subject of, well, pornography.
And as in every issue, there is a lot to read about what is currently happening. I hope you enjoy reading it.
Mat Honan
