Rewind to 1996. Hackers had just hit the big screen, we still capitalised the word "Internet" and the US edition of Wired published a visionary paperback called Reality Check - adorned with a suitably acid-neon cover.
Based on a Wired column of that name, the book asked specialists not simply to predict innovations to come but also to tie them to a particular year, from 1996 to 2225 and beyond. From human cloning to house-cleaning robots, personal jetpacks to the orgasmatron, Wired's precisely anchored forecasts risked the professional reputations of every participating Nasa executive and nonlethal-weaponry consultant.
Still, this vision of the future did seem rather 90s in concept.
Take this exhilarating prediction: "Imagine owning an [affordable] CD player that not only plays music, but, like a cassette-tape deck, enables you to record it as well." Imagine! By affordable, the authors meant $250-$500, but Roger Dressler, the technical director of Dolby Laboratories, was certain this would "never" happen.
Well, times have changed, and so has Wired. The "World Wide Web" is no longer a revolutionary new idea but the air our culture breathes. Our design, albeit still elegant, has taken a detox. Plus, Wired has gone international, with an Italian version joining this new UK edition as major Condé Nast launches for 2009.
What hasn't changed is our curiosity about the future, so we have gone back to the experts for an updated reality check.
They are almost all new experts this time, with firm convictions about ideas and products we never dreamed of 13 years ago. We consulted professional futurists who work with the world's biggest corporations, and near-term trend-spotters. We co-opted BT's ex-futurist Ian Pearson and renowned future-scenario planner Peter Schwartz.
We spent time with future-gurus such as Marian Salzman (CMO at Porter Novelli) and Richard Watson (from the Future Exploration Network), and enticed marketing consultant Faith Popcorn out of her BrainReserve. We exchanged ideas with Anne Skare Nielsen (of Future Navigator) and had intense discussions with Microsoft's Eric Horvitz.
And we spoke to best-selling authors and futurologists Alvin Toffler and Douglas Rushkoff, computer scientists and engineers such as Vint Cerf and Gordon Bell, and leading figures in the commercial world like Lord Foster and Sir Martin Sorrell.
It wasn't always easy to ask them to put their credibility on the line and specify precise dates for their predictions. But with a bit of encouragement they were good enough to play the game. And it is just a game. No matter how forward-thinking our panel members are, they are neither time-travellers nor psychics.
Fortunately, our experts have relied on solid research and careful reasoning. Pearson reckons on 85 per cent accuracy and Popcorn dismisses any suggestion that she might tend towards vagueness.
Still, their approaches differed. Richard Silberglitt from RAND says that to ensure rigour in a forecast, it must be rooted in the present: "The kind of foresight we do is based on literature review and discussions with people who are actually... producing products." But some, such as James Bellini, looked to the past. "I'm an historian of the future," he says, "which sounds a bit glib, but I mean it. I don't think human behaviour changes that much."
We asked for views on food and nutrition, architecture, transport, sex and longevity, and on the healthcare we can come to expect.
Many answers threw up even more questions that were themselves debated among the panel. Inevitably, there were disagreements among our sages - some of them quite heated.
So what, then, is the role of futurism if it isn't to chart the forthcoming decades? It's about getting a sense of the possible topography that we might encounter. As the Finnish futurist Elina Hiltunen says, "Our task is to make people think about different possibilities of what might happen in the future." This enables strategic planning and, more importantly, inspires the world of tomorrow. As Toffler told us, "It's not only OK to think about the future but, the more you do, the more ideas you'll have about the present."
Take Minority Report. For the film, Steven Spielberg asked Peter Schwartz for ideas on how mid-21st-century life would look. And, if it wasn't for that shopping-centre scene, perhaps we might not be so intrigued by the idea of personalised billboard advertising.
That said, we may find that newer world sooner than we think.
Schwartz is convinced that "advances in science, particularly in biology, are likely to create a radical change in the human condition over the next 50 years."
If you find some of the predictions outlandish, just think how unreal that affordable CD recorder seemed only 13 years ago. (And you can flick to the end of this piece to see what else we got right - and wrong - back in 1996.) In the meantime, until you can do it through your active contact lenses or using the power of thought, get out your iPhone and join the discussion online here at Wired.co.uk.
So here it is. The future: 2009 to 2049. Not quite guaranteed. Now, how do we turn off this orgasmatron?
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
