Imagine a world where strawberries are as big as apples and peas as large as beets. In this imaginary world, mosquitoes, flies and roaches have been exterminated, while horses are nearly extinct. Only a few high breed horses are kept by the rich for racing, hunting and recreation. It is a land where packages are delivered through a network of pneumatic tubes and the letters C, X and Q have been eliminated from the everyday English alphabet in order to simplify it.

These were some of the predictions by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. in a Ladies Home Journal article published in the year 1900 entitled, “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years.”

The illustrations in this post are predictions made that same year on souvenir cards produced for the Paris Exposition. They depict what life would be like in the year 2000 (I originally found these on Paleo-Future: A Look into the Future that Never Was. They come from tvhistory.tv).

Most of the predictions were wrong, although a few were correct.

The incorrect ones exemplify why it is so difficult to predict what is going to happen. Our predictions are fuzzy like seeing a giraffe in the distance. We leave out important details and place too much emphasis on the details we imagine. The reason we put so much weight on the accuracy of those imagined details is they are heavily influenced by our present attitudes, feelings and knowledge. We view the future through the lense of the present.

Take Watkin’s prediction that horses would become nearly extinct, for example. It is illustrated below, showing the horse was expected to be so rare it would be put on display as a curiosity.

In the year 1900, automobiles were not widespread, having begun commercial production only ten years earlier. Still, the automobile had sufficient momentum that a forecaster could conceivably project they would replace the horse. What is interesting is how turn of the century attitudes toward thrift and utility influenced that prediction, not to mention the stink a surging horse population was causing for cities.

If the car was expected to replace the horse, then the horse would no longer be needed for farming and transportation. So why continue to raise and feed horses if they have no utility. And if there are no horses, then there is no horse manure and the attendant flies. In 1890, the Times of London estimated by 1950 the city would be buried in 9 feet of horse manure. One estimate is three billion flies hatched per day in U.S. cities in 1900 with horse manure being the preferred fly breeding ground. The stench, the muck and the flies caused by horses was overwhelming. (Here is an interesting article by Eric Morris on the topic).

So the logical forecast for the future based on a late 19th century frame of reference is the horse would become nearly extinct, and it would be a welcome development. What was unseen is the car and other technological breakthroughs would lead to increased efficiencies, greater wealth and more free time, greatly expanding the demand for recreational horse use, not only for the rich, but for farmers, ranchers and many others. The U.S. horse population did drop from an estimated 19 million in 1900 to approximately 9.5 million today. Worldwide horse population today is estimated to be 58 million, far from being extinct.

The turn of the century frame of reference influenced Watkin’s other predictions. Many were agrarian in nature, mirroring the predominant but changing culture back then. Predictions of transportation advances were focused on trains, ships and cars, the modes of transportation experiencing the greatest expansion at the time while the only reference to man flying was air-ships (zeppelins), which were not expected to be competitive with ground transportation for passenger and freight traffic.

What gets left out of all predictions is the unpredictable – the unexpected events, the surprises. It is these surprises that have the greatest impact on the future. They are the game changers that can swamp the incremental improvements and current trends. Since most forecasts are simply extrapolations of current trends, it’s understandable most predictions are wrong because they are torpedoed by disruptive events and surprise technological breakthroughs.

If we can’t escape viewing the future through the lense of the present, are there any circumstances where we can get insight as to what may happen. Yes there are, and I’ll address them in my next post.

The joy of a Caribbean vacation. The white sand, the aqua water, relaxing with loved ones by the pool. Such were the things I looked forward to several years ago when we booked a holiday along the Mexican Caribbean coast. We were scheduled to leave snowy Idaho a few days before Christmas, fly to Atlanta for the night, and take a short flight to Cancun the next morning where a rental minivan would be waiting. We’d then drive south to an ocean side condo and be frolicking in the sand by mid afternoon.

For months leading up to our departure, I imagined the sunny days of calm and tranquility. Somehow in my mind’s eye I overlooked a few details.

We woke the morning of our departure to a massive snowstorm. Our flight out of Idaho was canceled so the airline bussed us five hours to Salt Lake City where we caught a delayed flight to Atlanta that arrived late at night. The next morning, having slept for less than four hours, we returned to the airport and found utter chaos. Thousands of travelers with their stacks of luggage snaked through the terminal, all having the same aim as us—to escape for the holidays. We barely made our flight.

Upon arrival in Cancun, we found the rental car company didn’t have our reserved minivan. They didn’t even rent minivans. Instead, they offered a subcompact to hold our three kids, five suitcases and an assortment of backpacks. It took an hour before the car was cleaned and readied.

We arrived at the condo too late to hit the beach, but the next morning we walked to a pristine stretch of sand in front of a neighboring hotel, laid out our towels and water toys and prepared to take a dip.

A Mexican security guard caught me before I hit the water.

“You have to move,” he said in broken English, adjusting his ill-fitting brown uniform.
“Por que?” I said.
“This beach is private,” he continued in Spanish.
“There are no private beaches in Mexico. They’re all public.” I sensed the condescending stares from my fellow sunbathers. They clearly thought we were beach interlopers.
“The boss says you must go. This is a private beach” The guard shifted his feet, apparently not used to gringos knowing Mexican laws.
“Tell your boss we won’t leave. This is public ground.”

He went to find his boss, who came and told me the same story. We still refused to budge. They then went after the hotel manager, who finally gave us permission to remain on the beach.

So we stayed, but the water seemed less inviting now. After an hour, we decided to return to our hotel pool where we didn’t need permission to swim. There we found a family from Spain with their three teenage daughters, who insisted on swimming and jumping off the diving board topless to the utter fascination of my young sons.

Except for major items like water and sand, my prediction of what our Caribbean vacation would be like wasn’t even close to what transpired. Dan Gilbert explains why in his fascinating book, Stumbling on Happiness.

When we see into the distant future we tend to think abstractly, leaving out many details and putting too much faith in the accuracy of the details we imagine. It’s like seeing a giraffe in the distance. We know it’s a giraffe by its neck, but we can’t see its spots, its mouth or its ears. Our brain knows this and compensates. Unfortunately, our brains are lousy at realizing our imagined future is as fuzzy as a distant giraffe. Hence, our predictions of what will be are invariably wrong.

During the frigid Idaho winter, my vision of spring bicycle rides is full of sun, pleasant breezes and smooth roads. When I actually get back on my bike come spring, I am startled by the ever-present headwind that howls in my ears, the bugs that fly in my mouth, the dogs that sneak up to snap at me and that once smooth roads have been chip sealed with gravel, making them as rough as cobblestone.

In 1908, Wilbur Wright was honored by the Aero Club of Paris. He spoke at a dinner in front of 200 guests, which included many of France’s premiere scientists and experts on aviation (Link to original New York Times Article).

Regarding the airplane, Wilber Wright said, “Ten years ago the world ridiculed the idea. As late as 1901, I told my brother men would not fly for fifty years, yet two years later we flew.”

How is it Wilbur Wright could be off by 48 years when he was a leading expert on flight? The writer Arthur C. Clarke said, “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

We, like Wright, get it wrong when imagining the future because the starting point for our predictions is invariably what we know and feel today. Our present feelings cloud our ability to see across time. Wilbur probably made his prediction about flight to his brother on a particularly frustrating day.

Of course, not all surprises as we move from the present to the future our unpleasant. Swinging in the hammock on the roof of our Mexican condo, watching a pair of Chiapecan boys wrestle poolside next the trinkets they were selling, eating delightful candlelight dinners along Lake Bacalar, and watching wild howler monkeys in the trees above the Mayan ruins of Calakmul were all unanticipated discoveries on our holiday vacation.

Living on the present’s edge means not worrying about the future or trying to predict what it will be like. Rather, it’s recognizing the future will be full of surprises, and like catching popping corn, we can latch onto the unexpected discoveries.