This extraordinary collection of postcards from the year 1900 proves how bad we are at predicting and imagining the future. They show a version of the year 2000 which doesn’t include computers, Google and E-mail. Not even cars, televisions or miniskirts.

Although we depend largely on imagination for our survival, we seem to be truly handicapped at foreseeing the future as Daniel Gilbert argues in his book Stumbling on Happiness. And, apparently, not only we are terrible fortune tellers but also, it seems, that the future is too complex to be predicted anyway. Reality looks more Mandelbrotian than Gaussian. According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, history is dominated not by the predictable but by the highly improbable, that is, by disruptive, unforeseeable events he calls black swans. We like to delude ourselves thinking that the future can be forecasted, that the world is knowable, and that risk can be measured and managed. That’s precisely why the effects of wars, market crashes, and radical technological innovations are magnified, because they confound our expectations of the world as an orderly place.

Personal Flying Machines

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