Back in 1975, life expectancy in the U.S. was just 63.6 years for men and 72.3 for women, according to government statistics. The country has made significant progress since then, with the latest figures showing men can now expect to live to 75.8 and women 81.1 years. That’s lower than other wealthy nations, but it is much higher than it was 50 years ago.

But even though Americans are doing better on life expectancy than the good folks of 1975, we’re still not anywhere near where people of the 1970s imagined we would be. And it feels like a good time to look at those old predictions, given all the chatter from Silicon Valley right now. If you believe the tech industry, artificial intelligence is going to usher in such a golden age of advancement, people will be living twice as long in just 5-10 years.

The CEO of AI company Anthropic spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week and laid out his predictions for what could happen in the near future. “If I had to guess, and you know, this is not a very exact science, my guess is that we can make 100 years of progress in areas like biology in five or ten years if we really get this AI stuff right,” Amoedi said.

“If you think about, you know, what we might expect humans to accomplish in an area like biology in 100 years, I think a doubling of the human lifespan is not at all crazy. And then if AI is able to accelerate that, we may be able to get that in five to ten years,” Amoedi continued. “So that’s kind of the grand vision. At Anthropic, we are thinking about, you know, what’s the first step towards that vision, right? If we’re two or three years away from the enabling technologies for that.”

What were they predicting back in 1975 about the future of growing old? An expert on aging had some similarly optimistic ideas that were published in the Nov. 18, 1975 edition of the Shreveport Journal in Louisiana. Dr. Eric Pfeiffer was the associate director of programs at the Center of Aging and Human Development in Durham, North Carolina.

Pfeiffer predicted that average life expectancy at birth will have increased to 90 years by the year 2025, and be the same for both men and women. As you can see from both the 1970s life expectancy numbers and today’s women have and continue to outlive men.

Pfeiffer explained in the newspaper that the gender disparity in life expectancy was “largely due to an excess of mortality among men from diseases of the cardiovascular system.” He predicted that “increased understanding” would lead to better “control” of these diseases.

The doctor also predicted that all older Americans would be covered by “uniformly mandated health insurance” for “at least the majority of health care services by the year 2025.” Medicare had only started providing coverage in the mid-1960s and by 1975 it was still a shadow of the program that it would evolve into through the decades. Pfeiffer also predicted that doctors would increasingly be able to be more fully trained and offer better care to meet the needs of older Americans.

Pfeiffer predicted that health care costs as a proportion of GDP—then known as GNP or gross national product—would “nearly double” by the year 2025. The U.S. spent $4.9 trillion on health care in 2023, which accounts for 17.4% of GDP. For comparison, the U.S. spent 6.2% of its GDP on health care back in 1970. The U.S. spends more than any other country in the world, despite having some of the world health outcomes among wealthy countries.

Pfeiffer seemed to be very optimistic about the way that Americans would be informed about health in the future.

“There will be a vast amount of increase in health education on the part of aging Americans,” Pfeiffer is quoted as saying in the 1975 article, “a vast increase in self-assessment, both physical and mental, and in self-medication, on the basis of informed health education, through educational channels and through responsible media presentation.”

Responsible media presentation? That’s not exactly what’s happening right now if you turn on American TV and see endless drug commercials. The U.S. and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that allow for that kind of direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs. And given America’s abysmal health outcomes, it’s pretty clear that “education” of consumers is making us dumber and less healthy. And that’s to say nothing of the social media garbage fire spewing misinformation about countless health issues.

“We will retired mandatory retirement by the year 2025,” Pfeiffer said. “Flexible retirement ages will become the norm, based on individual interests and capacity.”

The article also claimed the term “aging” would by 2025 be “redefined to relate to functional ability of the individual instead of specific chronological age.” That’s a hugely popular idea with Silicon Valley titans who are obsessed with living forever.

Pfeiffer also believed that by the year 2025 “aging will have achieved first class citizen status, that is full participation in the mainstream of American life.”

“They will not do so from charity but from strength,” Pfeiffer said. “They will do so because the aging will be healthier, proportionately greater in number, better educated, better prepared for old age, more experienced, more adventuresome, with higher expectations of themselves. They will be equals among equals.”

Dr. Eric Pfeiffer died in 2021, according to a notice posted online by USF Health. Oddly enough, when I discovered this old article I first tracked down an email address for him to ask what he thought of his predictions before i learned he had died a few years ago. Unfortunately, I can’t find any info on how old he was exactly, but he was a practicing doctor in the 1970s, so he must’ve been reasonably old when he died in 2021.

I regret not finding these predictions years ago so that I could ask Dr. Pfeiffer about how he felt his predictions have held up. But writing about history, you don’t get to do that very often anyway. The best we can do is learn from these predictions in any way that we can.

What will the future look like in the year 2025? It was a question about the distant future for those of us who were alive to remember the 20th century. But now that we’re a few weeks into that year, we know exactly what it looks like. And it’s a bit depressing, I’m not going to lie.

I’ve long been obsessed with the predictions that kids made for the future. Here at Paleofuture we’ve examined predictions from the kids of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and even the decade of the 1900s. There’s something so interesting about how wild predictions from kids can be while also telling us something so pure about the era these kids were living through.

Today we’re taking a look at the predictions of kids who were in elementary school during the year 1999. I was just starting high school that year, but I’m still of that millennial generation that remembers the general optimism of the 1990s. The July 13, 1999 issue of the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania included predictions from kids in fourth and fifth grade for the year 2025. And they’re really interesting to read from the perspective of this crazy new year.

As is always the case, the predictions vary in quality. Some of them are very well articulated, while others are clearly written by children with very little skill at communicating. But that’s okay. What’s interesting about predictions from children is that they’re often channeling both the purest form of hopes and fears from any given era while injecting a certain chaos factor that only kids can bring. It really makes the entire mix very interesting.

“The will have machines that show you what you look like in the outfit you picked out,” one of the predictions from a fifth grader says. It’s not entirely clear where this kid may have gotten the idea for checking out a given piece of clothes in this way, but it has a long history dating from the 1960s to the 1990s. But, as always, things take a weird turn.

Take a prediction from the same child later in the paragraph: “If you don’t have a computer (which would be rare) you could pay a clerk that rides around to give you one for fifteen megaclicks (the money in 2025.)”

There are plenty of predictions about computers, including those about how the postal service will cease to exist because email will become so dominant. There are also interesting insights into class, like the kid who predicted that cars will “only be for poor people” because everyone else will be using airplanes to get everywhere.

Many of the predictions are ridiculous, like the kid who predicted he would have a “5,000,000,000 inch television” by the year 2025. But even ridiculous predictions can help us understand the priorities of a given generation. Obviously getting larger and larger TVs was a fixation of the late 20th and early 21st century.

There are also predictions that refer to pop culture of the era, like Beanie Babies, Furby's and Pokemon. And while those also may be silly on some level, they can also be revealing. How will Furbys actually conquer the universe? That seems to be about robotics. But who knows!

While the vast majority of the predictions are positive, which one would expect given the overall tone of the 1990s, there were some that are pretty pessimistic, including fears about acid rain and a potential World War III between “North America and Europe vs. Asia over religion.”

The Predictions

I think life in 2025 would be really scary. Cars would be flying in the air. Planes will be flying on the ground. Cows will be flying int he air. There will be man-eating plants and man-eating beds. Man-eating footballs, pencils and baseballs. There would be aliens that would say MOO MOW. There will be cows that run around in circles like they are dumb. Cats will be 1 centimeter long. Cars will be flying on the ground. Houses will be haunted by ants and it will be scary.

Andrew Baratucci

Fourth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

I think my life will be happier in the year 2025. I think little kids should get all the money. I hope my family gets along very good. People will think that there should be no school for kids. I think there should be no guns or knives. There should be nice people in the world. This is what I hope for in 2025.

Cornelia Reid

Fourth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

I predict that in the year 2025 life will be different. Not too different I hope, though! One of the things I hope to see is world peace. I know that there are a lot of people in their right minds who agree with me. Another thing I want to see is less homeless, hungry and dying people. We are getting close to solving this problem with caring organizations all over the world that are giving their time and money to them, but not close enough. I also hope to see less hate and more love among the human race. I think that we will be a lot further along in science and space discovery. We will probably have men and women stationed on the moon and maybe on Mars and other planets, too! We will have people on Earth, too, if it isn’t polluted too much. That’s another thing I’m hoping for: a cleaner Earth. I know I don’t want to live in a germ-proof bubble because the last generation didn’t care! I hope we clean up our act before anything gets too bad.

Erin Gough

Fifth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

Work would also be different. Instead of being payed in checks, we would be sent micromoney that would be sent to your home computer. If you worked with a space program, you’d probably be working on building a solar system living habitat that would just float around space. Farms would most likely be on Mars. Only the farms would be indoors in glass greenhouses. The food and supplies would be shipped back to Earth with the ORPS man. ORPS stands for Outer Relations Postal Service. Around the house there would be little robots and machines that would produce your own heat and electricity. They would also do simple chores. There would be a little button to push on everything. For example, on the table there would be a button on the edge, you would push the button and the meal would appear through a holograph picture. Mail boxes and the postal system would be much different. You would use tubes (like at a bank) to put your mail in. Press the red button and it goes straight to the post office, where they send it directly to the person that will receive your letter.

Jessica Famularo

Fifth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

Skateboards will hover above ground. Cars will be able to fly. The cars will also be able to serve your breakfast while you are driving. You could tell the car where you want to go, and the car would go at seven times the speed of sound to wherever you told it to go. People would have a card where all of their money was stored as tiny little bumps.

Max Friedman

Fifth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

I also think kitchens will have shopping centers. We will be shopping over the phone, and in 10 minutes, your food will be there. Kitchens will also have built-in TVs and refrigerators. Kid will have video games that you control by the movements of your body. Movies will be holographic. Hockey players will float in the air to make it more exciting.

Evan Whiting

Fourth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

Houses will be different too. The would have a total lock down security system. The rooms would be controlled with a push of a button. If you would step into the shower it would turn on automatically. The garage would be like [an] airplane hanger. Jobs will be changed a lot. Robots will do the work for you. At meetings you would meet by computer screens. Offices will be remote controlled by you. Also the pay checks will be higher too. Bedrooms will be robotic. The beds will be made automatically. Closets will be organized by computers. If you have a TV, it will turn on automatically. Also you won’t need to fix anything at all. Computers won’t have a keyboard instead you would speak into the computer. Also the screen will be 3D. Also the size will be small enough to fit into your pocket.

Ian Tambornino

Fourth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

The malls will be totally different. The will have machines that show you what you look like in the outfit you picked out. There will be a special bar code that you put in the machine to get the screen to show you what you look like. To pay for your outfit you have to go to the computer clerk and put your money in its slot. The entertainment will be totally different. It will have television that turns on by itself. The characters in the shows will be three dimensional figures. If you don’t have a computer (which would be rare) you could pay a clerk that rides around to give you one for fifteen megaclicks (the money in 2025.)

John Sullivan

Fifth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

I think in 2025 there will be no guns and drugs. I think there will be more cops. The world will be better without guns and drugs. There will be no bad people in the U.S. There will be no shooting. There will be no swearing or fighting. People will go to church and believe in Jesus. You will always pray at night.

Douglas Sweigard

Fourth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

I think in 2025 Furbys will try to conquer the universe. Also Poke’mon characters would be walking around, and would be kept as pets for protection. The schools would have their own rocket ships to take on field trips. The airplanes would have rocket boosters and go faster than the speed of sound. Also the movies will be fly-in instead of drive-in. Disney World will be the entire state of Florida.

Cassie Martin

Fifth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

In the year 2025, I think that sports will be played in stadiums that are raised into the air on poles. Sports will have special colleges for only people who play sports or want to play professionally. Schools in 2025 will be totally different. I think that the schools will be run half by robot and half by people. All of the classes will have white boards that flip to the other side when the one side is full and then it will erase itself at the end of the day so that the students won’t have to. I also think that the schools will be different because they will probably have personal limousines for each student, and the limos will take the students to wherever they need to go after school.

Courtney Loper

Fifth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

In the year 2025, I think that TV will have a screen on all of its sides. Our cars will be tie-dyed. I also think there will be malls all over the world and the prices will be low. For example, Beanie Babies will be $2.50 instead of $29.99. Schools will have two lunches and four recess periods for the fifth-graders and one recess for sixth graders. Every home will have puppies. Kitchens will have automatic cleaning devices. There will be a lot of friends. Scientists will discover a new planet. There will be oxygen so people could live there. Every poor person would be rich. All the greedy people will be poor. The new planet will be the opposite from Earth. Moms will be dads and dads will be moms. Cats will be dogs and dogs will be cats. Maybe there will even be a catdog with a cat on one side and a dog on the other side. We will have better cops and every prisoner will be captured. My brother will be on the other planet. Dolphins will be free.

Chanelle Kesler

Fifth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

I would probably be an architect. I would design hyperhouses. They would have Jacuzzis and an indoor pool and a 5,000,000,000 inch television. The outside of the house would have hydroelectric water hoses. The school my kids would go to would have TVs and computers on every single desk. Their seats would be Lazy Boy massaging recliners. They would ride water balloon buses.

Benjamin Wigton

Fourth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

There will be no postal service because all mail will be e-mail. Cars will only be for poor people because most people will use jets and real famous people will use big airplanes. There will be normal sports, like baseball, hockey, football and basketball, but there will be many new sports, like crossball and zero-gravity baseball. In 2025, World War III will be raging between North America and Europe vs. Asia over religion. More peple will die in World War III than ever before.

Ryan Wasserman

Fifth Grade

Paxonia Elementary School

In our bedroom in the morning, we would get up and the bed would tilt so we would slide off of it and fall through the floor. On the way down, you would fall into your clothes. Your pet could cook breakfast for you. At school, you could have a mini laptop about 2 inches high. It would also be a touch screen. School would only be 10 minutes long; you would get your homework and leave. It would make it a lot easier on us kids.

Andrew Vinton

Fifth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

They would have already found a cure for the buildings so they would not get damaged by acid rain. The tallest building int he world would be 10 times taller than the Grand Canyon. The watches could have a map, phone book, and a compass inside. They would also be $2,000 in an ordinary store.

Sarah Snyder

Fifth Grade

Paxtonia Elementary School

Back in 2014, I gave a talk at UCLA about the future of money that’s funny to think about now. Well, technically it was about the paleo-future of money. But the topic was particularly relevant in the early 2010s, given the fact that bitcoin was starting to enter the public consciousness after being invented in late 2008 and released into the world the next year. So with bitcoin recently hitting $100,000, it feels like a good time to look back at how people talked about cryptocurrency in the early years.

To be clear right off the bat, I don’t think bitcoin is a good thing for the world. I was more agnostic on the morality of crypto back in the early 2010s, even though I thought it was a silly way of playing with money. That said, I could’ve made a decent amount of money if I had bought some bitcoin in those early years. The price when I gave my talk at UCLA’s Digital Cash conference in 2014 was about $350.

It’s interesting, if perhaps expected, that some of the earliest newspaper articles about bitcoin were the most supportive of the technology. After all, the people who are most likely to understand and experiment with new tech are the people who are willing to give it a shot as something that could be useful and beneficial to them personally.

The July 19, 2011 edition of the Ottawa Citizen included an article by Ari Altstedter that included a subhead reading “How the geek set hopes to create a new world currency, one that relied on a network of users, not a central banker.”

This presentation of bitcoin really emphasized the supposed decentralization of bitcoin, quoting early adopters who liked the idea of ripping power away from the concentration of very wealthy people. The writer talked with Jered Kenna (misspelled as Jared in the article), a founder of the crypto exchange Tradehill.com, about what the future might look like.

“Financial and economic power has always been concentrated with a very few people,” Kenna said.

And while Kenna was correct, that didn’t really change much with bitcoin. Currently 1.86% of wallet addresses, which account for about 1 million wallets, hold more than 90% of all bitcoin in circulation, according to Coin Telegraph. But that wasn’t the case when it first stared out. And Kenna was speaking at a time when bitcoin was trading for only about $15. The price today is hovering around $100,000, and all-time high.

“If we remember, 15 years ago if you were doing anything on the Internet you were going to make millions. It think it could be the same with bitcoin,” Kenna said.

Kenna was an early bitcoin miner and was there from the very early days, accumulating huge sums when the price was just a few cents, according to Forbes. But Kenna lost millions of dollars in bitcoin to a SIM swap attack in 2016. Hackers targeted him, gaining access to his wallets and email accounts and took everything. At least that’s his version of the story.

The Aug. 26, 2011 edition of the UK’s Independent was far more jokey with its assessment, writing “The bitcoin? It sounds like the kind of thing Judge Dredd would use to pay for an energy drink.”

But then the paper got to the heart of the matter.

“It’s actually virtual currency that exists online and can be used on smartphones. The US dollar-to-bitcoin currency rate is currently fluctuating wildly—and with the currency being used online for slightly nefarious means, ie buying Class A drugs, it’s unsure whether this virtual reality cash will retain its legality. Probably a safe bet than the euro at the moment…”

The Aug. 1, 2011 edition of the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania featured an article that included the sub-heading: “Cashless society? The virtual currency, unknown to many computer geeks a few months ago, is being accepted by more merchants.” The Patriot-News talked with a bitcoin miner named Mike Moceri who was using a couple of computers to mine the crypto.

“I expect Bitcoins to replace, or at least be adopted on a scale large enough where I won’t have to worry about, dollars in two years,” Moceri said. “If you don’t like what the Federal Reserve is doing inflating the dollar […] Bitcoin is really going to be able to help people with that.”

The same article featured some people who were worried about price fluctuations which would make it an unstable form of currency. The newspaper quoted Ethan Huff, who was said to be starting an “electronic cigarette company from his Susquehanna Twp. home.”

“As a merchant accepting them, it worries you to accept something at a $10 value that was worth only $6 the day before,” Huff told the paper. Huff went on to say he was worried about hacks that might allow someone to steal your bitcoin.

There were other skeptics who expressed concern about the crypto in 2011, including Market Watch’s Charles Jaffe who was syndicated in newspapers around the country.

Bitcoin, right now, has the feel of a mania, where supporters appear ready to suspend rational though to throw money into something that they desperately want to believer can maintain its growth,” Jaffe wrote.

The price of bitcoin when Jaffe wrote that article was hovering around $10. Which means if you invested $100 into the crypto at the time your investment would currently be worth about $1 million. And while Jaffee noted how bitcoin exchanges had recently been hacked, he said an investment now might pay off.

“The bitcoin world shook it off,” Jaffe wrote on the hacks. “You have to figure that Bitcoin investors are buying with the hope that being an ‘early adopter’ pays off." They might be right. There may well be a global financial role for this kind of currency going forward. But until the execution is as sound as the concept is cool, there’s too much risk of a total loss.”

As we sit here from the perspective of 2025, what will happen to bitcoin? Your guess is as good as mine. in fact, it’s almost certainly better. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I wish I had bought a bitcoin back when it was a few hundred dollars. It seemed like such an obviously ridiculous scam to me. And my opinion hasn’t actually changed on that. Bitcoin is a way to extract wealth from other people without having to look them in the eye. But that’s fundamentally what capitalism is as well. And if you’re good at capitalism you can make quite a bit of money with very little effort.

Bitcoin is no more useful as a currency than it was back in the early 2010s. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make a good deal of money on it. We’ll just have to see how that goes when Donald Trump takes off, with his newfound love of crypto. My prediction is that it pumps like crazy for a year or two and then comes crashing down. But don’t take my word for it. I wasn’t smart enough to buy a decade ago.

The future can be presented in a lot of ways. Sometimes we imagine it in the darkest of terms, a dystopian hellscape that shocks our sense of safety, making us fearful about what’s to come. Other times we imagine the future as utopian—joyful and wondrous with all of the things we could ever want at our fingertips any hour of the day. But every once in a while our predictions take a weird turn into the absurd. And there was a musical instrument from the 1910s that spoke to this absurdity quite well. It was called the Follyphone.

The Follyphone appeared on stage in London during the fall of 1912 during orchestral concerts conducted by H.G. Pelissier. And all of the newspaper accounts from the time make it sound like an interesting prop to deliver a message about anticipation, elaborate planning, and ultimately disappointment.

From the Sept. 20, 1912 edition of the South Wales Echo:

The chief humour of the piece centred round the “Follyhpone.” It had stood all the afternoon in the orchestra, looking like a huge shower-bath swathed in grey, and was formally unveiled by its inventor, Mr. Lewis Sydney, when it stood revealed as a sort of Positive organ, with a great many stops, a device like a trombone valve working sideways, innumerable serpentine pipes, and a huge gramophone receiver atop, pointing to the stars, with a lid which opened a shut at the most inopportune moments.

When Mr. Pelissier, who conducted, called on Mr Sydney (who was manipulating it) for a great crash, it first made no sound at all, and then emitted a few tiny tinkles, which gave rise to one of the characteristic exchanges of repartee to which these gentlemen have accustomed us.

The Sept. 20, 1912 issue of the Daily Telegraph was similarly amused by the Follyphone’s absurdity.

The final Babel was glorious, evenn to Mr. Lewis Sydney’s magnificent “Follyphone,” a weird and wonderful creation of a kind of gramophone bell with missapen horns emerging, two keyboards, and no end of non-”speaking” stops. Right through this piece of delightful folly kept the audience in roars of laughter.

Fundamentally, it was a nod at the future, perhaps inspired by the big-F Futurist art movement that was emerging in Italy. It wasn’t too long before the Americans got wind of this silly contraption. The January 1913 issue of Popular Mechanics ran a photo of the set-up, calling it a “dreadful instrument.”

But Popular Mechanics understood that it might be something to keep an eye on for its Futurist inspiration: “It might, judging from the dreadful look of it, be an instrument for producing the ‘futurist’ type of music, which is so raucuous that nearly all who hear it are impolite enough to hiss.”

Whether the Follyphone was a true representation of Futurist music remains unclear, but whatever it was we know for certain it was ridiculous. And there seems to be no shortage of that ridiculousness in our own lives right now, with the global rise of fascism and very few things making sense. What will be our Follyphone? Only time will tell, I suppose.

There are so many things I take for granted here on the verge of 2025. When I turn on the faucet, water comes out. When I flip the light switch, there’s illumination. And when I press one of countless buttons during the day, the thing that corresponds to that button generally happens.

But there are times when I’m snapped out of this mindset. Oddly, this doesn’t happen when something fails to work. In that case, I just get frustrated and try to make it “work” without much thought behind the invisible process happening behind the action. The times that I am most snapped out of taking these modern contrivances for granted are when I’m reading old media and get a reminder that just about everything I interact with on a daily basis was designed in a specific way and could have been designed differently.

Exactly this happened to me as I was reading an article in the September 1937 issue of Radio-Craft magazine. I have a number of issues from the 1930s and ‘40s and they’re absolutely fascinating to flip through. The article promoted the “new” technology of push-buttons for radios. And while the patent for push-buttons for tuning radios to the proper station was a decade old at this point, the mid-1930s was indeed the era when buttons started to become popularized in radio.

Electric push-buttons for the home first emerged in the late 19th century and exploded in the first two decades of the 20th century as American homes became electrified. But the button as a default input device wasn’t a given. The article that really made me step back and reconsider other design choices is below. And while it’s not revolutionary in the ideas it’s presenting, it just serves as a great reminder that technology doesn’t come out fully formed.

Radio existed for many years before the push-button became a dominant form of finding the station you wanted to hear. And even after it became commonplace, there were still plenty of radios that required spinning to find your channel, as many of us old folks can probably attest to.

Radio-Craft

September 1937 (Article uncredited)

Engineers of the RCA Victor laboratories have perfected a new electric tuning system, which has been incorporated in many of their new radio and radio-phonograph instruments, by means of which one need merely press a button and his favorite radio station is tuned-in instantly and more precisely than he could do it manually. It is as easy as all that and there doesn’t seem to be any catch to it.

There are 8 of these buttons. Each of them can be pre-set to different radio stations and these stations precisely tuned-in by pressing their respective button. The development of automatic frequency control, more than anything else, is responsible for this new electric tuning feature.

Reduced to its simplest terms, this means that, in automatic operation, the radio circuit will actually adjust itself to compensate for any variation in the mechanical system so that the station is precisely tuned to its most resonant point. Pressing any of the buttons sets a motor into operation, which turns the tuning condenser to the approximate position of the station wanted. The action of the automatic frequency control circuit then adjusts the frequency of the oscillator to bring the station exactly to resonance.

As an added luxury, a remote tuning "arm-chair control" is available. This control consists of an attractive but unobtrusive little box on the face of which is duplicated the push-button arrangement of the radio receiver. This control box may be inconspicuously placed on the arm of a chair or on an end table and connected to the radio set by a thin cable that lies flat under a rug or along the wall molding.

Another interesting feature is the "overseas dial," which tends to simplify the tuning of short-wave stations. The four most important short-wave bands have been spread out in a straight line across the dial in front of the radio set. For instance, the popular 25-meter band, which formerly occupied a space on tuning dials never more than ½ inch in length, has been spread out to 9½ inches, and the important foreign stations are marked by name on the dial. The same arrangement holds true for the 49-, 39-, and 19-meter bands.

Another development, Magic Voice tone quality, which attracted a great deal of attention last year, has this year been brought to an even higher state of perfection. The space immediately surrounding the loudspeaker unit has been scientifically sealed in a chamber shaped like an arc. The back waves from the speaker are thus controlled, directed, and released through a number of measured openings to blend with the sound coming out of the front of the set and create a truly “natural tone” quality. This new “Sonic-Arc Magic Voice” eliminates the boominess and overemphasis of the low tones found in many other receivers.

Added to all of these new developments are innumerable other features, such as the Magic Brain and Magic Eye, which with almost human intelligence direct and control the functions of the radio set.

Elon Musk spent at least $250 million to help re-elect Donald Trump as president this year, making him one of the most powerful oligarchs the U.S. has ever seen. Trump is a fascist and Musk unabashedly supports his fascist agenda. Musk even tweeted in support of Germany’s AfD political party this past week, which has ties to neo-Nazis.

But there was a time in the very recent past when people tried to pretend like Musk’s politics were hard to pin down. And in the spirit of looking at bad predictions for the future, it’s worth looking at how badly some analysis of Musk’s politics has held up in a relatively short period of time.

The New York Times arguably had the worst analysis of Musk’s politics in an article from Dec. 10, 2022. To put that timeframe in context, Musk had just purchased Twitter in late Oct. 2022, and had already made clear that he had voted for Republicans in the Nov. 2022 midterm elections. And it may be the most poorly aged article to come out in recent years. In a word, it’s idiotic.

The article was titled “Critics Say Musk Has Revealed Himself as a Conservative. It’s Not So Simple.” Right off the bat the article, written by Jeremy W. Peters, simply takes Musk’s word for things:

He has called himself an independent and a centrist, yet “economically right of center, maybe.” He has said he was until recently a supporter of only Democrats and voted for President Biden. He’s encouraged people to vote Republican, which he said he did for the first time this year. Last year, he once even declared himself indifferent about politics, saying he’d rather stay out of it altogether.

The writer insisted that Musk was filled with contradictions that made it tough to pin down his politics, and insisting that it was only his critics who believed he was revealing some kind of conservative bias with his tweets.

Elon Musk, ever a bundle of contradictions and inconsistencies, has long made his politics tricky to pin down. To many of his critics, though, his relentless flurry of tweets in the six weeks since he took over Twitter has exposed his true conservative bent, and intensified their fears that he would make the social network more susceptible to right-wing misinformation.

There is one way in which I’d argue this is correct. Musk isn’t a conservative. Most Trump supporters aren’t conservative. They’re fascists, racists, right-wingers, any number of descriptions can fit. But they are not conserving anything and have no model of conservatism that would be appropriately described as such. It can be a useful shorthand for people to call Republicans or Trumpers conservatives. But technically, they’re anything but.

The New York Times writer then finally conceded the ways in which Musk had revealed right-wing biases.

And at times, he’s made it hard to argue with that. He has said he’d welcome former President Donald J. Trump back on Twitter; suggested that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was lying about the attack at their home that left him hospitalized; and reinstated accounts that have trafficked in offensive ethnic stereotypes and bigotry, including for the artist formerly known as Kanye West. (Mr. Musk later suspended Mr. West’s account again after the rapper-entrepreneur posted an image of a swastika.)

The writer then muddies the waters further by trying to insist Musk’s tweets are erratic and tough to decipher. They’ve been erratic for sure. But just because

His copious tweeting has generated huge amounts of attention. In a 24-hour period late this week, he tweeted more than 40 times, often with little rhyme or reason. He criticized the Biden administration’s deal with Russia that freed Brittney Griner, the Women’s National Basketball Association star. He asked Elton John to clarify his complaint about misinformation flourishing unchecked on Twitter. At times, Mr. Musk was acting like Twitter’s in-house customer service representative, boasting about new features and improved functions.

And maybe that is a big part of the point — improving the image of his new $44 billion property, which he has said repeatedly is in dire financial straits.

It’s kind of funny to look back at a day when Musk tweeting “more than 40 times” was notable. The billionaire regularly tweets hundreds of times per day now. Then the article launched back into insisting Musk was hard to pin down.

Yet Mr. Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, continues to defy easy political categorization. His views have been described as libertarian, though these days his politics seem more contrarian than anything else. He is more clear about what he is against than what he is for.

It’s true Mr. Musk certainly sounds a lot like a Republican — and, sometimes, a lot like Mr. Trump — with his missives on Twitter against “woke” politics and Covid restrictions, his attacks on “elite” media and his efforts to draw attention to allegations that Hunter Biden profited from his father’s political clout.

But where Mr. Musk has seemed most in line with the G.O.P. of Mr. Trump is in the tenor of his political commentary, which if anything seems more spiritedly anti-left than ideologically pro-right. While he has not been shy about sharing his disdain for many Democrats, his enthusiasm for Republicans has been more muted. He has stressed repeatedly that his problems are with extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.

It was rather transparently ridiculous in 2022 that Musk may not be “pro-right,” but it’s downright hilarious from the perspective of 2024. There is perhaps no person more responsible for Trump’s win in 2024. Trump was the star of the show, but Musk mobilized an enormous online army to “flood the zone with shit” as Steve Bannon has referred to it, and he spent real money on people and ads in swing states. Musk is still paying for ads to get guys like Pete Hegseth confirmed, a move that appears to be working. And don’t even get me started on Musk’s $1 million per day giveaway. He was literally buying votes. But the article was still way too credulous even before Musk officially signed up to support MAGA.

“To be clear, my historical party affiliation has been Independent, with an actual voting history of entirely Democrat until this year,” he wrote on Twitter the day before the midterm election. “And I’m open to the idea of voting Democrat again in the future.”

As with many people who describe themselves as politically independent now, the hostility Mr. Musk harbors toward Democrats appears to have drawn him closer to the Republican Party over the last few years. He considers himself as part of the “center 80% of people, who wish to learn, laugh & engage in reasoned debate.”

He has eagerly encouraged his followers to weigh in with their views on the country’s culture wars and traded tweets with some of the right’s favorite punching bags, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. When she criticized his plan to charge Twitter users $8 a month to have a verified account with one of the social media service’s signature blue check marks — “Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that ‘free speech’ is actually a $8/mo subscription plan,” she wrote — he dismissed her.

“Your feedback is appreciated, now pay $8,” Mr. Musk shot back.

Musk has only ramped up his attacks on AOC, including a recent tantrum where Musk was creating disgustingly sexist images with his AI generator Grok.

Many of his recent tweets have had that kind of “own the libs” tone, the shorthand on the right for when conservatives think they’ve deftly, often sarcastically, swatted down a liberal. A couple of weeks ago, he posted video on Twitter of a closet full of T-shirts with the slogan “#stay woke” that he said he had found at the social media company’s headquarters. Then he followed up with a tweet that linked to a Justice Department report that undercut one of the central narratives of the mass protests against police brutality: that Michael Brown, a Black teenager killed by the police in Ferguson, Mo., had his hands raised when a white officer shot him.

Again, none of this was new in 2022. Musk had been positioning himself as the anti-woke crusader for years before 2022.

On occasion, his remarks have raised concerns that he has planted himself firmly among right-wing conspiracy theorists. When he tweeted about the attack on Ms. Pelosi’s husband, he shared the unfounded claim that there was “a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” He later deleted the tweet, which linked to an article from a fringe website.

The ironic thing about Musk’s tweets about the attack on Pelosi’s husband are just how precious he became over the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Political violence is a danger to humanity only when it’s directed at Trump, in Musk’s eyes. The conspiracy theories promoted by Musk have only gotten worse in recent months.

The article then acknowledged that Musk supported Ron DeSantis, essentially Donald Trump without the charisma.

He also said he would support Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for president in 2024, though his endorsement was not especially resounding. He merely replied “Yes” when someone on Twitter asked him. Mr. DeSantis, a hard-line conservative, would be an odd choice for someone who professes to want centrist governance in Washington.

Musk’s purchase of Twitter was first and foremost about building a space for the billionaire to hang out and hear how great he is from his biggest fans. Every change he’s made to the platform has been largely in service of that. But the secondary reason is just as important for us here on the edge of a second Trump term. Because we know now that Musk was able to manipulate the platform to silence liberals and amplify the far-right.

Mr. Musk has always claimed his concerns with Twitter’s previous management were about the ability of a small group of the company’s employees whom he described as “far left” to censor content. And over the past week, he has cheered on tweets about internal communications before he took over. The communications, which were given to two writers who have posted their findings on Twitter, calling them the Twitter Files, showed how the company went about deciding what information got suppressed.

The changes Musk has made and the voices he’s amplifying aren’t just confined to the U.S., obviously. And with Musk very loudly saying he wants to influence politics in the UK, Brazil, and Germany, those countries are taking notice.

It’s been a mixed bag of revelations. Some showed how Twitter employees made it harder to see tweets from a Stanford University professor who warned about how Covid lockdowns could harm children — a view many public health experts have come around to accept well after the fact. Other documents show how more conventional, conspiracy-theory-embracing conservatives were shut down, like Dan Bongino, the radio host who was one of the biggest amplifiers of lies about the 2020 election.

Mr. Musk has not professed to have any profound attachment to Republican policies, though, which is consistent with his posture before taking over Twitter.

That last line is yet another that is so incredibly amusing knowing everything we know now.

He has been highly critical of climate change deniers and said he’s proud of how Tesla forced the rest of the automobile industry to embrace electric vehicles. In 2020, he revealed that he’d spoken to Mr. Trump numerous times about the importance of developing sustainable energy, which the former president dismissed in favor of traditional fossil fuel-based sources. And Mr. Musk quit Mr. Trump’s business councils after the administration pulled out of the Paris climate accord.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, he described his politics as “middle-of-the-road.” “I’m socially very liberal. And then economically right of center, maybe, or center. I don’t know. I’m obviously not a communist.”

His political giving supports that claim. According to the Federal Election Commission, which reports spending in federal but not state races, he has donated just shy of $1 million since 2003 to candidates as conservative as former President George W. Bush and as liberal as Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat. More recently, in 2020, he donated to senators of both political parties — including Chris Coons and Gary Peters, both Democrats, and Susan Collins and John Cornyn, both Republicans.

The closest this article got to in capturing reality was in the next line about how Musk seems to be driven by personal drivers over broader political principles. That’s how all oligarchs operate. They’re opportunists as much as anyting.

Often, it seems, his posts are motivated by personal pique, not political philosophy. He’s criticized the Biden administration, for instance, as “not the friendliest” and for excluding Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle maker, from a White House summit on zero-emission vehicles in August 2021. His speculation on the reason for the exclusion: General Motors and the other car companies invited are union companies; Tesla is not. “Seems to be controlled by unions,” he complained at the time.

As many people who follow Musk closely have pointed out, Biden’s refusal to meet with Musk over his anti-union policies have clearly weighed on the billionaire’s mind. The article then veered yet again into nonsense that asked you to deny the political trajectory everyone was witnessing with their own eyes.

Many of the views he has espoused on Twitter over the last two years have become popular in today’s Republican Party but are hardly exclusive to card-carrying Republicans. His criticism of progressives he views as overly censorious and sanctimonious is a sentiment many on the left have expressed. And his public condemnation of strict Covid containment measures in 2020 channeled what would become a growing skepticism of widespread public health restrictions. Though he was more exercised about them than most. “Fascist,” he once declared.

And then as the cherry on top, the writer suggests that maybe Musk is just doing it to court controversy and be the center of attention.

Often, his tweets can seem to imply he leans in one direction when it’s just as likely that he is trying to court controversy. How to interpret, for instance, a post last week of what he said was an image of his bedside table? It had a revolver on it and a musket in a wooden case decorated with an image of George Washington crossing the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War.

“Greetings, I’m Musket, Elon Musket,” he wrote.

A few days later, he sounded pleased with himself as he remarked on the way Twitter had changed since his purchase was completed in October. “So many interesting posts on Twitter these days!”

What an incredible document. I’ve seen bad predictions look ridiculous very quickly. But this article is truly next level and will only get more funny (in the worst possible way) as Trump retakes power to enact his fascist agenda. We’ve got less than a month left. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was concerned about Trump and Musk have planned.

On the morning of July 18, 1889, Professor Edward D. Hogan went up in what can only be described for the time as a futuristic piece of airship technology, launching from Brooklyn, New York. Hogan had spent the past twenty years working with flying machines and told people he’d done hundreds of ascensions in that time. But that day was the last that anyone would ever see him.

Born in Moretown, Canada in 1852, Hogan was fascinated with flight from an early age. His older brother William Hogan was a well-known aeronaut and Edward made his first balloon ascension as a teenager after traveling to Jackson, Michigan. He devoted his life to aeronautics and building all kinds of crazy airships.

Newspapers of the time tell the story of how his balloon was carried over Lake Michigan in 1870, not to be heard from for two days. Friends of Hogan eventually found him sleeping in a farmer’s barn on the third day, according to the newspapers of the 19th century. It wasn’t long before Hogan got a reputation as a “daring aeronaut.”

Hogan’s flights were filled with theatrics, and he clearly had a flare for showing off. As the July 20, 1889 edition of the Evening Star described his recent fun:

In August of last year he made semi-weekly ascensions from one of the music pavilions at Rockaway Beach, and from an altitude of 5,000 feet dropped to the ground by means of a parachute. Both the balloon and the parachute which he used were made by himself. The balloon was inflated with hot air.

The newspaper went on to describe the design of this 1888 airship, making it sound like Hogan was quite the nimble figure, described as being of medium height with dark hair, brown eyes, and weighing 171 pounds “though he looked much lighter” and was a “good athlete.”

From the neck of the big bag was suspended a trapeze, on which Hogan sat. The parachute was suspended from the top of the balloon by a slender cord. It was shaped like an umbrella, with ropes representing the steel ribs and a hoop two feet in diameter, to which the ropes were tied, for the aeronaut to hold to. When he reached the desired height Hogan would clutch the hoop tightly and leap from his seat. His weight would break the suspension cord and at the same time turn the ballon over, quickly discharging the hot air and causing the bag to fall to the ground. Hogan made twenty-nine descents like this in 1888, and each time his performance attracted a big crowd.

That all sounds very involved and entertaining, of course. But it wasn’t without danger, however talented Hogan was. The article goes on to tell how Hogan would sometimes fall into the ocean during these demonstrations, often almost drowning. Another time, Hogan fell from a height of 100 feet into the mud, the paper reported, narrowly surviving after a long recovery.

That was the year before Hogan disappeared. So what was the actual airship he used last like? It was described as being an oblong balloon, 50 feet long and 24 feet in diameter. The balloon had a capacity of 18,000 cubic feet, according to the Evening Star, and was made of oiled silk.

The car that held Hogan was suspended from an iron bar and was even capable of holding four men, according to the paper. The car had a propellor underneath, and the newspaper described how it was launched in Brooklyn in the neighborhood of Williamsburg.

Hogan’s last airship adventure, wasn’t of his own construction. It was designed by Peter Campbell, and dubbed the Campbell Dirigicycle, and an illustration in Scientific American showed what it looked like from a distance. The entire cost of the airship was $3,000 or over $100,000 adjusted for inflation.

The issue of Scientific American even noted that the airship had been tested at Coney Island previously and seemed to be functioning just fine.

Scientific American explained what happened that day July 18, 1889:

Hogan entered the car and gave the word to " Let her go," when the ropes were cut and the air ship shot upward, amid the cheers of a crowd of spectators which had collected in the vicinity. The start was made in a southeasterly direction, owing to a brisk wind from the northwest, although the aeronaut was seen to be vigorously turning a crank which kept the steering apparatus and propelling wheels revolving rapidly, with the evident intention to compel the ship to face the wind. When about a mile distant the large bottom wheel, intended to raise and lower the ship, became detached and fell to the ground.

That’s obviously not good. The article continued that the airship was spotted heading toward the Atlantic Ocean at a height of several thousand feet. And while it was hard to tell, some onlookers worried that it appeared Hogan might have been clinging to the netting of the balloon. A couple of hours after launch, the airship vanished from view.

What happened to Hogan? Nobody knows for certain. But there was a report from the captain of a ship that was arriving in New York from Rio De Janeiro on that day. one Captain Eades from the steamer known as Hogarth reported that around 11:30 a.m. that morning, just off Egg Harbor to the north of Cape Henlopen he spotted something that could be the wreckage of Hogan’s airship.

The newspaper reported that Eades “observed what appeared to be an oblong white mark on the surface of the water.” And while the captain and crew “did not think it worth while to get close up to the object,” the captain apparently said in an interview during routine quarantine that he had “no doubt that the object he saw in the water was the Campbell airship.”

The U.S. and Canada both have long histories of forced sterilizations for people deemed “undesirable.” Roughly 70,000 Americans were sterilized in the 20th century, according to official figures, with black people being disproportionately affected by the racist program. And while this dark chapter in history is often regarded as something that was perhaps done by people who were abusing their power, there’s a harder truth to consider: Forced sterilization was incredibly popular among the public. And that popularity has lessons for us today.

I was recently looking through a book called Public Opinion 1935-1946 which included polls from the 1930s and ‘40s. And they’re absolutely fascinating, covering topics from gun laws to attitudes on fascism. One of the most shocking polls comes from January 1937 and was categorized in the book under the title “Defective and Delinquent Classes.”

“Do you favor sterilization of habitual criminals and the hopelessly insane?” the poll asked, without giving definitions of “habitual” crime or the “hopelessly insane.”

Nationally, 84% of Americans said yes, they did support sterilization for people in those categories. Just 16% said no or didn’t have an opinion on the topic. The poll even included a breakdown by region, with the Pacific coast and Mountain regions being the most in favor of sterilization, while New England had the most people who didn’t favor sterilization.

• New England: 75% yes, 25% no

• Middle Atlantic: 80% yes, 20% no

• East central: 88% yes, 12% no

• West central: 83% yes, 17% no

• South: 84% yes, 16% no

• Mountain 92% yes, 8% no

• Pacific coast: 92% yes, 8% no

Another poll in the same book from July 1937 used language that was much more explicit about why these people would be sterilized and it’s interesting to see that fewer people supported it when you explained why they’d be sterilized.

“Some people advocate compulsory sterilization of habitual criminals and mental defectives so that they will not have children to inherit their weaknesses. Would you approve of this?” the question asked.

• For habitual criminals: 63.2% yes, 17.8% no, 8.3% for some, 10.7% don’t know

• For mental defectives: 66.3% yes, 15.1% no, 8% for some, 10.6% don’t know

These statistics are jarring to read today, but they’re also very relevant given what happened in the U.S. on Nov. 5, 2024. That was the day Americans decided that Donald J. Trump should be president again. I’m honestly still in a state of shock about it all.

Granted, the vote totals still show Trump didn’t quite breach 50% of the voting population. As the tally stands now, Trump won 77.2 million votes, which brings him to 49.91%, according to the New York Times. Kamala Harris got 74.9 million votes, meaning she received 48.43% of the tally. Harris was close, but Trump won more. And the fact that he was a contender at all is an indictment of the country I live in.

But it’s old polling on stuff like eugenics that can help put some of this in perspective. Just because most Americans support something doesn’t make it right. History will be the final judge of us all, but it’s still not very comforting to know that more Americans bothered to show up for the fascist than for the moderate Democrat. And given the way Trump talks about genes and human reproduction, those ideas about eugenics are very much in the mainstream right now. X, formerly known as Twitter is filled with this garbage, white supremacist thinking.

Americans don’t know exactly what’s going to happen when Trump takes power again on Jan. 20, 2025. But it’s important to acknowledge that even if more Americans support him, it doesn’t make what he’s doing morally correct. In fact, Trump is already aware of how he could face obstacles with public opinion when it comes to stuff like his mass deportation plan. Trump told Meet the Press on Sunday that he already knows how the media will cover his regime’s deportation of families.

“I’ll tell you what’s going to be horrible,” Trump said. “When we take a wonderful, young woman who’s with a criminal and they show the criminal and she can stay by the law. But they show the woman being taken out, or they want her out, and your cameras are focused on her as she's crying as she's being taken out of our country and then the public turns against us."

Old futures are filled with ridiculous contraptions for getting around. You’ve got the automobile-powered yacht, the enormous four-legged mech-pedicab, and the gyroscopic rocket car, just to name a few of my favorites from decades gone by. But at least all of those absurd ideas had something that made sense. Other ideas are so weird it’s hard to imagine how they’d work in the real world.

Take, for instance, the “water sport wheel” of 1925. It looked really fun, you have to give it that. But I’m having a really hard time understanding how it would’ve worked. And the short article about the invention doesn’t provide nearly enough clues.

The June 1925 issue of Science and Invention magazine included this idea for our transportation future on its front cover. The invention was credited to Charles F. Erickson, dubbing it a “sport wheel” that happened to be amphibious. But it would be for both land and water, according to the magazine.

“It is driven by a small two-cylinder gasoline engine and overcomes the difficulty inherent in former unicycles, in that it is easily balanced whether the machine is moving or standing still. The body of the car is completely enclosed,” the article explains.

Okay, so this thing has a gasoline engine and it’s completely enclosed. That’d be fine. Except that I don’t see any place for exhaust. Take a look for yourself at the first illustration from the inside of the magazine, reproduced below.

Am I missing it? Where would these gasoline engines be pumping out their exhaust? Because that seems pretty dangerous. Unless, of course, we just assume it’s the magic of futurism that will solve that problem. Sometimes you just leave the hard part up to the future, since you’re presenting a fanciful vision of tomorrow. But the article doesn’t really make it clear this is supposed to be something that’s far into the future.

“The wheels themselves are capable of being extended from the body when so desired by the operator,” the article continued. “Illustration 2 on this page shows a side view of the machine and the steering control, as well as the position of the engine and operator. Notice here that the gasoline engine is swung beneath the seat.”

“A large cone clutch transmits the power from the engine to a differential, and thence to the driving wheels,” the article explains.

Again, no idea how the fumes aren’t going to kill you. But let’s move on to the way this thing would float. Am I nuts for believing this would have a hard time staying upright? And even if it could stay in the correct position, it would be hard to propel forward with that kind of design?

“Both wheels are equipped with brakes, and when it is desired to steer the mechanism, the operator turns his steering wheel, tightening the brake on one side, which stops the movement of the corresponding wheel. The other wheel free to move the differential, travels a bit faster and consequently the entire mechanism is turned,” the article explained.

Well, that design is certainly giving off Georgia O’Keefe vibes, isn’t it.

“The gear rack pushes the wheels outward when desired. Fig. 3 shows sectional rear view of the mechanism and illustration 4 shows the device standing still,” the article continued.

It’s completely ridiculous, but I can’t help but love it. Especially on land. Just an absurd idea that would be impossible to really make work with 1920s tech, let alone doing something practical in 2020s. And yet that’s what can be so much fun about past visions of the future. You just have to go for it sometimes. And the good folks behind this monstrosity went for it. We salute you, silly geese of the past.

Time capsules are fascinating to me. They can be incredibly boring, as people often stuff them with rather mundane items like coins, American flags, and bibles. But every once in a while they can be thrilling, with unique items just waiting to be uncovered.

Today, we’re taking a look at some of the time capsules that are scheduled to be opened in 2025. Pulled from newspaper articles, these time capsules were sealed with the idea they would be opened in the far-off year 2025, which, if you take a look at the calendar, is coming up very shortly.

To be sure, not all of these time capsules will be pretty, even if they were originally stuffed with very cool objects. There’s basically no worse way to preserve something for the future than burying it underground. And when people finally dig them up, they’re often just a soggy mess. And sometimes thieves got to the capsule at some point. But that’s party of the fun too. You never know what you’ll uncover, even if you have a good inventory from the year the capsule was created.

1) The Seward Time Capsule (1975 and 1985)

Easily the most famous time capsule that’s scheduled to be opened in 2025 is the Seward time capsule in Nebraska. It’s been billed as the world’s largest capsule, since it’s a 45-ton concrete vault that measures, 20 feet by 8 feet by 6 feet. But the story of how it got to be the biggest is kind of funny.

Back in 1977, two years after the time capsule was built, the man who built it, Harold Davisson, wanted to get it certified as the world’s largest by the Guinness Book of World Records. They determined that Oglethorpe University’s time capsule, the Crypt of Civilization, was actually larger. So Davisson built a second time capsule in 1983 over the first one in the shape of a pyramid. That portion was sealed in 1985 and he was declared as having the world’s largest.

What’s actually inside this one? Most notably, there’s a 1975 Chevy Vega. That’s right, an entire car. But the other items are not too shabby either, including a Kawasaki motorcycle, and lots of booze. The capsule also contains letters from Nebraksa residents about their predictions for the future, among its 5,000 or so items.

Davisson died in 1999 at 91 years old, so he won’t be around next year to see his creations get opened. Davisson’s dauther Trish Davisson will be in charge of opening it up next year, according to the Star-Herald newspaper in Nebraska. Incredibly, Davisson reportedly wanted to stuff a skeleton in the time capsule along with about 25 pounds of hamburger meat to give the impression that someone had accidentally been locked inside. But it seems he thought better of that dumb idea, given that rotting meat probably wouldn’t be great for items that you’d like to preserve for future generations.

2) Future Shock and Audio Cassettes (1975)

Students from Mrs. Pat LeJeune’s high school science fiction class assembled in Crowley, Louisiana on Feb. 10, 1975 to bury a time capsule. They filled it with a letter from the class, photos, a tape cassette, an LP record, and “various other artifacts” from the era, according to the Crowley Post-Signal newspaper. And the goal was to open it in 50 years, during the year 2025.

The science fiction course was dedicated to answering the question of what the future would look like, according to the newspaper article, which makes this one particularly interesting for us. The fact that time capsules often contain predictions for the future is precisely why I became interested in them to begin with.

But it wasn’t just the science fiction class. Other classes helped, with the shop class welding the capsule, the American literature class donating a scrapbook, and the agriculture class helping with the burial, making a concrete form to encase it in.

The capsule is made of quarter-inch metal, according to the newspaper article, and the lid was fitted with a rubber gasket. Given the fact that so many people just bury a shoebox that will never withstand the elements, it seems like this one actually has a good chance of being found in-tact.

Curiously, the newspaper article says the capsule contains “a copy of Future Shock magazines.” I did a search, and it doesn’t look like Future Shock, the 1970 book by Alvin Toffler, was ever spun off as a magazine. But I could be wrong! It was made into a documentary hosted by Orson Welles. It’s entirely possible there was a magazine I’ve never heard about. Though it does seem more likely that the person writing the article was simply confused and it just has a copy of the book. I hope we get to learn next year what’s inside.

3) Women’s Lib and a Bunch of Money (1976)

In 1976, the entire U.S. was celebrating the American Bicentennial, making it a popular year for people to make time capsules. Many of those time capsules had different target dates to be opened, with some simply indefinite and open ended. But one time capsule buried during those celebrations in Vicksburg, Mississippi set their target opening date for 2025.

A letter “To the People of the Year 2025 AD” was included in the time capsule, but also published in the Vicksburg Post newspaper in July 1976. Right off the bat the letter gets political.

As Bicentennial Co-Chairman, it is my pleasant duty to extend greetings to you in the year 2025. There is much hue and cry at the present time concerning "women's lib." Some of my friends, for example, would prefer I call myself Chairwoman. I'm personally unimpressed with their arguments. How does Vicksburg and the nation stand on this burning problem in the enlightened year of 2025?

It’s not entirely clear what else might be in the time capsule, aside from one thing: Money. Or, at least, the promise of money. The people of Vicksburg and Warren County donated between one and five dollars to a fund placed at First National Bank, the Merchants National Bank, and the Bank of Vicksburg, according to the Vicksburg Post.

“The fund has drawn interest for the past 50 years and, according to our calculations, has increased to a very princely sum,” the letter reads. “We realize that inflation has considerably reduced the buying power of our gift to you, but it is a gift given with every good intention, and it will provide you with at least some funding for your celebration in 2025.”

I haven’t been able to figure out how much money has been collected, nor who will actually have access to any money that’s still being held. But it’s certainly an enticing mystery that may get revealed sometime in 2025.

4) Mystery Capsule in New Jersey (1999)

Three families got together and buried a time capsule on Dec. 31, 1999 in New Jersey, according to the Coast Star newspaper in New Jersey. And they wanted it to be opened in 2025.

“So many significant things have happened in the last millennium, even during the last 100 years,” Julia Miller was quoted as saying. “All of the parents wanted our kids to remember that we lived in that last millennium, that our lives happened then. So we all got together to to do something with them, to celebrate the year 2000.”

Everyone made their own envelopes that were sealed shut in a plastic cylinder with the date Dec. 31, 1999 written on the outside. That time capsule was buried in the ground, but the families didn’t disclose exactly where. They just said it was in the Manasquan area.

They planned to meet up in Dec. 2025, so whatever is inside won’t be uncovered until then. But hopefully the families, which include the Miller family of South Street, the Hannah family of Church Street, the Dibble family of Morris Avenue, and Gage O’Connell, all remember where they buried it.

5) Pogs in New Jersey (1995)

“In the year 2025, St. Mary Magdalene fourth grader Andrew Van Hook will be 40 years old,” the Millville News in New Jersey wrote in 1995. And that line hits pretty close to home, given the fact that I’m a 41-year-old guy who could’ve just as easily been burying a time capsule like these kids.

What did they bury? The newspaper article isn’t very detailed. But it mentions books and pogs. That latter being a game of cardboard disks where kids would try to flip over a stack of pogs using a heavier object known as a slammer. Sound boring? Yeah, it probably was. Look, we didn’t have social media yet.

We often think of the internet as a piece of infrastructure that cannot be changed. But people built the internet and all the devices we use to connect ourselves to it. People made conscious choices about the way we interact with our devices and the way that the internet is structured. And with that in mind, we have a short list of old ideas that may be worth reconsidering as we move forward into the future of our interconnected life.

These may not be the best ideas in the world. But, if nothing else, they can help us think about the ways our experience of the internet could change, from odd input devices like the light pen to vintage computer-brain hook-ups. The point is that everything about the internet, and any infrastructure you know and use today, was the result of a choice. It could have been different. And not taking anything for granted can help jar are brains into thinking about problems in new ways.

It’s going to be very important to think about alternative futures, as Americans press forward into the second Trump era. And I’m doing my best to not get too depressed about how many people are going to suffer when Donald Trump takes the oath of office again on Jan. 20, 2025.

These kinds of futures—the ones that almost came into being but didn’t quite arrive—will become valuable in the coming months and years not just for pushing our understanding of what’s possible. They will also serve as fantasies that allow for some kind of mental escape as things deteriorate around us.

Light Pen Interface

Today, our main way of interfacing with the internet is through a keyboard, assisted by a mouse when we’re using a desktop computer, a trackpad when using a laptop, and our fingers on tablets and smartphones. But what if the main input device for our devices wasn’t any of those things, and was instead a light pen?

The light pen was imagined in the 1960s as a valuable tool for interacting visually with our computers. But the mouse came to be a dominant form of interacting with PCs until some devices of the 1990s, like the PalmPilot, introduced a touch pen.

Obviously the pen has seen a controversial reintroduction with tablets, but there are so many other applications of the pen with our devices that should be reconsidered. The light pen literally worked with light to communicate with the screen. And it’s worth thinking about how weird technologies like this, plucked from the 1960s, could be used today.

Standalone Internet Devices Outside Our Pockets

From the 1950s to the 1990s, most depictions of technology like the videophone imagined that it would be a standalone device. You see it in everything from the 1960s TV show The Jetsons, to AT&T concept videos from the early 1990s. But we skipped that evolutionary step in the videophone progression. Most Americans never had a standalone videophone device, which went through limited trials in the early 1970s.

So what if we start to think about ways that we can liberate ourselves from our devices, without losing access to the internet in public spaces? The 1990 AT&T concept video “Connections” is useful in this regard. We see examples of standalone devices like video payphones, which seem unlikely to emerge in our connected age, but are fun to think about.

When we think about ways to unplug, that might mean completely ditching our digital devices that we carry around in our pockets, bags, and purses. Or, at the very least, minimizing their functionality. But people will still want a way to reach this bizarre and ephemeral thing that we call the internet. Maybe the answer lies in something with a more public square-focused solution?

The Two-Screen Device

The devices we use to access the internet are typically a lone screen. But as we can see from this two-age spread in the 1980s children’s book World of Tomorrow: School, Work and Play, sometimes two screens are better than one.

In the case of this homework machine, we see an older student working on harder chemistry problems, while the younger student works on basic math. But it’s easy to see how this could have lots of other applications for our modern internet. Could we find ourselves more connected physically through a device that allows two people to both use it?

Calling the Internet the Catenet

There’s no reason that we had to call it “the internet.” In fact, it was almost called the catenet (pronounced cat-en-et). From the mid-1970s until the early 1980s, there wasn’t a definitive name for the internet and we almost wound up with some alternatives.

Internet, which comes from the term inter-networking, became the dominant name by the mid-1980s, but it didn’t have to be that way. You could have been reading this on the catenet. And given its pronunciation, that seems much more pleasant, doesn’t it?

Plug In Your Brain

The December 26, 1965 edition of the comic strip Our New Age predicted that by the year 2016, humans will directly link brains to computers. Today, we often think of these kinds of links as a way to provide input into the computer. But here the idea is different. The strip clearly wanted humans to gain information from the computer. And I say let’s do it. Get jacked in, friends.

More than half of Americans in 2024 say they have a side hustle to earn extra money in addition to their main job, according to a recent report from Marketwatch. A whopping 54% of Americans are doing jobs on the side, something that in the late 20th century used to be known in some form as moonlighting, a reference to doing a job at night under the light of the moon.

Having a second job isn’t new, of course, especially in the U.S. But more and more people seem to be trying to turn their hobbies into a side business. I know, because Paleofuture was something I maintained for years simply as a hobby before I was able to quit my day-job and write full-time.

But I recently came across an article that really got me thinking about how people of 100 years ago saw side hustles and what they might be like in the future. An article by Charles P. Steinmetz in the Sept. 1915 issue of Ladies Home Journal was filled with predictions for life in the future. And Steinmetz thought many people of the future would try to turn their hobbies into money-making opportunities.

“We often lose sight of the fact that when a man has a hobby and produces something as the result of that hobby the labor does not cost anything,” Steinmetz wrote. “Hobby labor is the cheapest labor in the world. It is also pleasure and recreation.”

On this opening point, Steinmetz was largely correct. Most hobbies don’t have much overhead in the traditional business sense. And even if they cost a decent amount of money, the enjoyment derived from doing it in the first place doesn’t really make it overhead as any other business owner would understand it.

“You will frequently see a man who has developed a hobby for raising chicken,” Steinmetz continued. “He takes a lot of pleasure and pride in looking after all the work himself. He finds that raising chickens on a small scale is profitable. This is true, but the profit lies in the fact that the labor is cheap; it does not cost him anything. But he doesn’t figure on this, and, thinking that the business itself is profitable, he invests in a larger plant, employs his labor—for which he has to pay—and then loses money.”

Obviously Steinmetz seems to swerve into pessimistic territory at this point, seeming to suggest that scaling a side hustle is hard, which is very true. But he ends his prediction by predicting it will be common and have a real impact on the future as more people try to make money from hobbies.

“The production of a great many things by people carrying out their hobbies will greatly affect our economic life,” Steinmetz concludes.

Steinmetz, a brilliant thinker who was friends with Thomas Edison, was the kind of guy that newspaper reporters turned to in order to get his opinion on the future. And sometimes he would write his own articles in the popular press, like this Ladies Home Journal article. Steinmetz was fundamentally an optimist about the future, and thought that electricity would allow for tremendous progress, lessening the workload for everyone and opening the door to more economic equality.

Steinmetz was right about the first part, obviously, given the fact that we’re not all churning butter anymore. But Steinmetz’s ideas about economic equality would pose a problem since that’s dependent on political systems rather than technological advancement.

But if you’ve been a long-time subscriber, you’ve seen that come up again and again, whether it’s depictions of the leisure society from the 1910s with the robot servants of tomorrow, the 1960s with George Jetson’s button-pushing, or the wild UBI-obsessed technological optimists of the 2020s. Steinmetz saw a future where people were able to make money from the hobbies. But he didn’t anticipate the things that would set Americans back when it came to their personal finances, given the lack of progress in the political arena.

And on that note, how are we all feeling about the re-election of Donald Trump? Absolutely terrified? Me too.

I’m nervous. The U.S. presidential election is Tuesday and it’s all I can think about. Because if Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris, some extremely dark forces are going to be unleashed in a country where society is held together by little more than chewing gum and off-brand sticky tape. But aside from Trump, there’s one name I really hope I never hear again after November 5: Allan Lichtman.

To be clear, I want Lichtman to be right. He’s the guy who’s been on TV and in print constantly and predicts that Kamala Harris will win the presidency against Donald Trump. But it’s the coverage Lichtman gets that really frustrates me.

To understand what I mean, all you need to do is look at a recent headline from the Economic Times: “Allan Lichtman, presidential election ‘Nostradamus’, who predicted all U.S. elections correctly over the last 40 years, says Kamala Harris will win.”

This obviously isn’t Lichtman’s first rodeo. He’s an incredibly popular figure on TV during every presidential election year, claiming he accurately predicted every win dating back to 1980. You can see it in the credulous headlines he gets just about everywhere. But just how accurate has Lichtmann been with his predictions? Less accurate than he makes it appear, that’s for sure. His model is based on “keys” that are just criteria for helping figure out who might win. They include things like whether the party is an incumbency and boring things like that. But Lichtman presents it as a very formulaic science while it’s very much dependent on how he decides to interpret his own model.

Lichtman was asked by Canada’s CBC back in September about his prediction that Biden dropping out of the race could be a tragic mistake for the Democrats. By September, Harris was surging in the polls and Lichtman clearly had to revise his ideas.

“Well, what I was worried about was they were the Democrats publicly trashing their nominee and sitting president,” Lichtman said at the time. “So I was worried they would push him out, which would cost one key, the incumbency key, but that they would make a big mistake and have a big party brawl. They seemed to be moving to that, which would cost them a second key, the contest key. And I warned against that.”

Lichtman rationalized his change of heart as something that was logical because the Democrats had… shorn fortitude? Or something.

“Well, it turned out they did somehow grow a brain and a spine,” Lichtman said. “They united behind Harris, which saved the contest key. So they only lost one key. And it seems as well since then that Harris has had a positive effect on two of the keys, making perhaps a less attractive the third party candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. since voters don't have to choose between two old white guys. Hate to say it, being an old white guy myself. And his campaign is fizzled. And I think having Harris front and center, rather than the sitting president, Biden has dampened the incentive for big protests, helping with the social unrest key.”

This speaks to the big problem with Lichtman. His “keys” are not a formula anyone can use. He’s centered himself in the process and people wait for his prediction. If his model was really so objective and straightforward we could plug in the data ourselves and just see what it says. But that’s not how it works.

The biggest problem, from a Paleofuture perspective, is that Lichtman has changed his criteria for a “correct” prediction well after the fact in some cases. For instance, Lichtman predicted in 2016 that Donald Trump would win the popular vote. That didn’t happen and Hillary Clinton won the popular vote tally by almost 3 million votes. So Lichtman retroactively said that he had actually just predicted a Trump win, not that he would win the popular vote. It’s this kind of shady nonsense that makes me wish people would stop taking him so seriously. Or, at the very least, to place some more skepticism in headlines about the guy.

Again, this election is all I can think about and I apologize that so much of Paleofuture has been politically focused recently, especially to subscribers who live outside the U.S. But this could be very bad if Trump takes power again in a fair election. And if he loses, he’s certainly going to claim he still won, setting up some terrible scenarios for violence. I’ll admit that even focusng on anything else right now feels silly, but I’ll try to do my best after the election on Tuesday.

If you’re an American and haven’t voted yet, please do that. And if you’re not an American, please cross your fingers for us. We’re going to need all the luck we can get on Tuesday. I really hope that starting Wednesday I can focus on the silly flying cars and jetpacks again, with Trump in ideally sitting in prison somewhere.

If you asked kids of the 20th century what inventions they’d like to see in the future, there are always a range of creative answers, from robot servants to bubble-top cars. But there’s one idea that you see pop up perhaps more than any other. It’s the homework machine.

“If I ever was a scientist I would invent a homework machine,” sixth grader Crystal Turngate wrote in 1998. “The homework machine would work like this: there would be three buttons, one to turn it on, one to write the homework, and one to eject the pencil. If I invented a homework machine I wouldn’t have to do homework. It would be really cool.”

Young Crystal’s idea was published along with other predictions for the future in the Feb. 9, 1998 edition of the Pantagraph newspaper in Bloomington, Illinois. And at the time she wrote about this idea, it was a fantasy. There wasn’t any such machine, obviously. But that’s changed.

Today, kids have a machine that can do their homework called ChatGPT. Generative AI, which allows users to ask questions or prompt for various answers, can produce all kinds of text and images in the blink of an eye. The tech, which is little more than a plagiarism machine, is often wrong, making up all kinds of nonsense. But that doesn’t really matter to the kids who are using it for their homework. The homework machine actually exists now, and it’s become quite a real problem for educators.

How do we know kids are using tools like ChatGPT to do their homework? Aside from all the anecdotal stories from teachers, OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, has data that shows use of the product soars when school is in session.

From a recent post by Marc Watkins at Substack:

OpenAI’s Education Forum was eye-opening for a number of reasons, but the one that stood out the most was Leah Belsky acknowledging what many of us in education had known for nearly two years—the majority of the active weekly users of ChatGPT are students. OpenAI has internal analytics that track upticks in usage during the fall and then drops off in the spring. Later that evening, OpenAI’s new CFO, Sarah Friar, further drove the point home with an anecdote about usage in the Philippines jumping nearly 90% at the start of the school year.

It really is incredible that kids today have a homework machine, because it’s been something that schoolchildren have been dreaming about for the future for decades.

The Sept. 21, 1982 edition of the The Island Packet newspaper in South Carolina included several predictions from fourth graders at Sea Pines Academy.

“My homework machine can do anything. It can fold up so I can put it in my pocket,” young Bucky Elliott wrote back in 1982. “When I have to do my homework, I just press a button and it does Math, English, Reading and any subject I want. It can make money, too. I just hope my mom doesn’t find out because it is hers.”

And Bucky has hit on a problem that has been solved thanks to handheld computer devices and the internet. The homework machine of 2024 isn’t really a standalone machine as kids of the 1980s would have envisioned it. But Bucky imagined there was an even worse problem for this homework machine of the future. Apparently it needed to be fed.

“But my homework machine gets hungry,” Bucky wrote. “If I don’t fee it, it will eat everything. It ate my homework, and I had to do it all over again. The next day I came home from school, and my homework machine ate everything in my refrigerator and my refrigerator, too!”

Yikes, little Bucky. That sounds like a dangerous homework machine, my guy.

The idea for a homework machine wasn’t just confined to the 1980s and 90s though. The photo below ran in the May 2, 1967 of the Daily News in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and showed just how kids of the 1960s were dreaming of this futuristic kind of machine.

Going back further to the 1950s, there was the kids book Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, written by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin, published in 1958. Illustrated by Ezra Jack Keats, the book told the story of a boy who invented his own homework machine to do all his schoolwork for him. As you can imagine, it doesn’t work out quite like he expects, and ends up doing even more homework in the end. Which, if we’re being honest, might be the best prediction of our current era. Every single time that I try to use ChatGPT about a topic I don’t know well, I always end up forced to do more fact-checking. And that just leaves me to do more work than I wanted to do in the first place.

But that’s the way it goes, doesn’t it? All of these machines of the future are supposed to make our lives so much easier. And in some ways they do. But often they just set a new baseline for what’s expected. It wouldn’t be shocking to see the kids of 50 years from now expected to learn little more than prompts to make machines work. Because that’s in many ways precisely what’s happening as this type these words right now. I don’t know how this computer really functions insofar as I would be lost trying to build one myself from scratch and pushing it out into the infrastructure of the internet without a lot of help. Same as it ever was.

The year 2006 wasn’t that long ago in the grand scheme of things. But when you look back at the predictions of that time, it’s an interesting year, if only because it was just before the mainstream explosion of two things we take for granted today: smartphones and social media.

Facebook, previously available only to college students, opened to the public in late 2006. And the iPhone was introduced in 2007. So within that context it’s really interesting to see what kids were thinking about the future. And by “kids” I mean the millennials that are now in their 30s and 40s.

The 2006 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index provided a fascinating snapshot of what American teens thought about technology and what they imagined would be obsolete by the year 2015. The top of the list? The gasoline-powered car, which a third (33%) of teens thought would be obsolete by the middle of the 2010s.

How well did that prediction pan out? Well, electric cars still accounted for less than 1% of car sales in 2015. And the electric vehicle market accounted for just 7.6% of sales in 2023. So we still have quite a ways to go before we can consider gas-powered cars “obsolete.”

The teens of 2006 also predicted compact discs would be obsolete, with 26% of American teens saying as much would happen by 2015. This prediction was arguably way more accurate than the one about cars, but incredibly CDs were still being sold in some fashion by that year. In fact, CDs accounted for 21.5% of music sales in 2015, with streaming accounting for 34.7% and digital downloads accounting for 33.7%.

Best Buy stopped selling CDs in stores in 2018. Streaming accounted for 84% of music consumption in 2023, but vinyl is currently the biggest selling physical format. In the U.S. 43 million vinyl records were sold in 2023 compared with 37 million CDs. And the compact disc has been making a rebound in recent years, with Deadline noting that CD sales jumped 11% to $537 million in 2023.

The survey also saw 22% of American teens of 2006 say that the desktop computer would be obsolete by 2015, something that probably assumed the dichotomy between desktop and laptop computers rather than desktop versus smartphone, as we might imagine the question today. Again, the iPhone wasn’t released until 2007, kicking off the smartphone revolution in mainstream American culture. And the iPad wasn’t released until 2010, helping push out the tablet experience as a mainstream thing for millions of people.

But the question that interests me most in the survey actually had to do with landline phones. Just 17% of American teens thought the landline phone would be obsolete by 2015. And that was a huge shift that apparently few kids of 2006 saw coming. In 2004, more than 90% of American households had a landline phone. As of late 2022, just 1.3% of American phones just had a landline phone, with 25.4% having both a landline and a wireless phone. A whopping 72.7% have just a wireless phone, according to the Washington Post.

Experts of 2006 recognized the comfort that kids had with technology, as well as their general optimism about what it could deliver.

"Perhaps more than any preceding generation, today's young people are completely comfortable with rapid technological change," Lemelson-MIT Program Director Merton Flemings said back in 2006. "The rate of innovation, as reflected in U.S. patent applications, has more than doubled during their lifetime."

But there was also some concern that kids of the era were too optimistic, believing somehow that the big problems would somehow fix themselves.

"Teens' belief that science and technology may hold the answers to our biggest societal challenges is encouraging, but it also begs the question: Is this generation properly equipped and motivated to invent solutions to these mind-boggling challenges?” Flemings said at the time.

And that’s a sentiment I can definitely understand. As a generation, millennials have been pretty earnest compared with other generations that came before, like Gen X, historically known in their youth for never taking things too seriously. But there was also a complacency present in both generations, simply from two different angles. Gen X, because they cynically believed there was no point in changing anything, broadly speaking. And Millennials, because they were simply too optimistic that things would work out if everyone just worked hard and played by the rules.

Given how often we now see people not playing by the rules (Trump, anyone?), that seems to have been a bad bet. Just like the millennial assumption that landlines would still be around.

U.S. senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was asked on the radio program “Who Said That?” in 1949 what she’d do if she woke up in the White House one day. The senator replied: “Well, I’d go straight to Mrs. Truman and apologize. Then I’d go home.”

Mrs. Truman, of course, was First Lady Bess Truman, the wife of President Harry S. Truman. And while Smith’s response was humorous, and precisely the kind of snappy thing radio listeners expected in that era, it spoke to just how foreign the idea of a female president was in the 1940s, to say nothing of the decades that came before or after.

Today, Americans are closer than ever to seeing a woman ascend to the nation’s highest political office. And yet there’s a very real possibility Kamala Harris could lose to Donald Trump. The choice is between a racist convicted felon who promises to become a dictator on day one and a moderate Democrat who’s currently serving as vice president. And it’s close somehow.

Americans have been talking about a female president for a very long time. Over 150 years, in fact, based on predictions I’ve found. Some of the predictions are firmly in the negative, and there were plenty of ideas floated about a woman president that were intended simply to ridicule the idea. But even those are interesting to look at because they provide some context for just how far we’ve come.

Today I’ve collected predictions that I’ve found centered around the idea that the U.S. would one day have a female president. They range from the light-hearted (though predictably sexist) comedy movie Kisses for My President released in 1964, to the nervous laughter of insecure men in the 19th century. And here’s hoping we finally make this long-talked about dream a reality on November 5. Because if Trump wins this one, we’re in for some very bad years ahead.

1872: The First Woman to Run

Victoria C. Woodhull officially became the first woman to run for president in the U.S. in 1872. And that inspired plenty of comments in the popular press, as you can imagine. The Weekly Trinity Journal in California reprinted some comments from an unnamed eastern newspaper in 1872, saying that if a woman were to be president it would be great, “if she’s pretty.”

“What fun to be under petticoat government, without any danger of a broomstick or a scolding?” the article said. The entire thing was clearly meant to mock and demean the very idea of a woman as president, and included ideas for slogans that could appear on banners including “Full Bosoms Forever” and “Hurrah for Full Garters.”

1884: Not sooner than 100 years

Belva Ann Lockwood, a lawyer who became the first woman to argue a case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1879, was a presidential candidate for the National Equal Rights Party in 1884, but the newspapers called her campaign little more than a joke. The Philadelphia Inquirer argued that Lockwood would need to secure electors for the Electoral College votes to become president and all of those electors were men who would “laugh at the idea of a woman for President.” The paper also said to expect court challenges over a woman becoming president.

The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote in 1884, “In view off all these difficulties the shortest time that can be allowed in calculating her chances for a seat in the Presidential chair is one hundred years, provided the country moves on during that time in the ordinary course of events. It is not even a blunder to nominate a woman for President at this stage of the movement; it is only a joke.”

Susan B. Anthony didn’t even support Lockwood and instead supported Republican James G. Blaine. And the prediction that a female president wouldn’t happen for at least 100 years turned out to be correct. The year 1984 was 40 years ago.

1924: “If a bad man is put up against a good woman…”

Women didn’t have the ability to vote in the U.S. until 1920 and when suffrage for women (well, white women) finally happened it led to a lot of speculation about whether a female president might be next. Columnist Kathleen Norris wrote in 1925 about how she believed a woman would be running by 1932.

“From the president trend of things it is easy to see the first woman president is already somewhere in our midst. And she is not in a high-chair either. She will probably run in 1932,” Norris wrote.

“If a good man and a good woman are nominated on opposing tickets for the same office, either, of course, may naturally win. If a bad man is put up against a good woman, the betting odds would favor the woman.”

That prediction feels particularly relevant here 100 years later as we just so happen to confront a very bad man facing off against a good woman. And yet it’s neck-and-neck.

Norris, it should be noted, wasn’t a champion of women’s right in other respects. She was adamantly against birth control and was involved in the American Nazi movement, even giving a Nazi salute at a rally in 1941 with Charles Lindbergh, as you can see below.

1934: Eleanor Roosevelt says not yet

On September 4, 1934, Roosevelt was featured on the radio show The Simmons Program, broadcast on the NBC Blue Network,

“I do not think that it would be impossible to find a woman who could be president, but I hope that it doesn’t happen in the near future,” Roosevelt said, according to a transcript in the 2014 book The First Lady of Radio.

“There are exceptional women just as there are exceptional men, and it takes an exceptional man to be a successful and useful president. Though women are doing more and more, and are proving every year that they are capable of assuming responsibilities which were considered to be out of their province in the past, I do not think that we have yet reached the point where the majority of our people would feel satisfied to follow the leadership and trust the judgment of a woman as president.”

Roosevelt went on to explain that is was this lack of faith in women that was the problem.

“And no woman could, therefore, succeed as president any more than could any man who did not have the trust and confidence of the majority of the nation, for this is a democracy and governed by majority rule,” Roosevelt continued.

1939:“Well a woman would be better than what we have in there now!”

The August 20, 1939 edition of the Johnson City Press and Staff News in Tennessee quoted people on the street about the idea of a woman president. And the overwhelming majority, both men and women, said they would never vote for a woman candidate. But there were a handful of people who said they thought a woman could do the job, with some volunteering the idea of the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, as a possible president.

“I’d certainly vote for Mrs. Roosevelt. Women have as much common sense and executive ability as men,” one person only quoted as F.G. Gross wrote.

“I’d vote for a good sensible woman like Mrs. Roosevelt,” one man identified as Mr. Robert Harless said.

But his wife was also quoted, saying “I wouldn’t vote for any woman.” Interestingly, we only know the man’s first name because the two were identified as “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Harless of Elizabethton” in the newspaper article.

One Miss Nell Barnes of 110 West Maple Street was quoted as saying, “Well a woman would be better than what we have in there now!”

1963: Getting a Republican woman on the ballot Richard Starnes

Writing an endorsement for president in 1963, columnist Richard Starnes said that Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine would be the woman for the job. You may remember Smith from the beginning of this post, when in 1949 she said she didn’t want to be president.

Starnes pointed out how she had stood up to Senator Joe McCarthy and his communist witch hunt, voting to censure him in 1954. She had bucked her own Republican Party too oppose cuts to President Truman’s budget, and Starnes notes she even made a speech “a few hours after breaking her arm in a fall on the ice,” presumably a line to make it clear that women were no wimps and could be tough on the job.

Smith actually competed to be president the following year, but only received a handful of votes at the 1964 Republican National Convention, back when presidential candidates were chosen in backroom deals rather than public primaries. The play was an attempt to ultimately become the VP candidate, according to chatter at the time, but that didn’t pan out. Barry Goldwater become the Republican candidate that year and lost to incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson, who became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in late 1963.

1964: Kisses For My President

In 1964, when President Johnson was running against Goldwater, Hollywood gave movie-goers its take on a woman president in the movie Kisses For My President. Starring Fred MacMurray as the First Gentleman and Polly Bergen as the first female president, it was filled with all the hack jokes you’d expect. The man is emasculated and is forced to confront all the roles typically reserved for First Ladies in the White House.

The September 4, 1964 issue of Time magazine described the plot rather bluntly. “In the end, he takes a stand against petticoat government, reasserts himself as the master of the White House and makes the President pregnant. Unable to carry a child and the burdens of office, she resigns,” the reviewer wrote.

1970: What if she gets her period?

Hubert H. Humphrey’s personal physician argued against a woman for president with the kinds of hypotheticals you may have heard in stupid jokes of the time. Dr. Edgar Berman reportedly told a congresswoman from Hawaii at a meeting of the Democratic Party’s Committee on National Priorities that women couldn’t be president.

“Suppose that we had a menopausal woman President who had to make the decision of the Bay of Pigs or the Russian contretemps with Cuba at the time?” Berman reportedly said, according to the August 10, 1970 issue of Time magazine.

Berman apparently went on to say concede that women might be fine in leadership positions after menopause, because they wouldn’t be “subject to the curious mental aberrations of that age group.” Berman eventually resigned the committee after being called out as a “bigot,” but he left in the same manner that a spoiled child might, reportedly saying “the whole world seems uptight.”

1972: By the Year 2000

In 1972, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm of New York became the first black woman to make a play for a major party’s ticket. Chisholm didn’t secure the nomination, but it again got people talking a lot about the prospect of a woman taking the White House.

The March 10, 1972 issue of Time magazine saw what was happening and was certain that there would be a woman on a major party ballot by the year 2000.

“There will be eight presidential elections between now and the end of the century; the only surprise would be if there were not a woman running for President—or at least Vice President—on a major ticket well before the year 2000.”

The year 2000 was obviously a big deal for people of the 20th century as a kind of shorthand for the future. And this prediction was technically correct, since Geraldine Ferarro would appear on the Democratic ticket as vice president in 1984. But her running mate’s loss would prove to be a crushing blow to the prospect of a female president for the next several decades.

1974: A Republican view of women in government

One of the more fascinating things I kept coming across while looking at predictions about a female president is that some of the biggest advocates were often women aligned with the Republican Party. That’s odd on some level, given the fact that conservatives are the ones most typically advocating for women to stay at home and have “traditional” roles. But it also makes sense that Republican women would embrace the idea that they could be in charge, simply because class interests often outweigh ideology in these matters.

The magazine Saturday Review World dedicated its August 24, 1974 issue to predictions for the future, written by just such a woman, Clare Boothe Luce. The entire issue of the magazine was devoted to imagining what the world of 2024 would look like, involving everything from space travel to medicine.

Luce, who was liberal on many social issues like race and gender, was a member of the U.S. House from Connecticut (1943-1947) and served as President Dwight Eisenhower’s ambassador to Italy (1953-1956). She also served as a member of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) for Richard Nixon starting in 1973.

From Luce:

In the 54 years since women were enfranchised, only 3 women have been elected to the Senate, and 78 women have been chosen as representatives to the House. There have been only 3 women governors, 2 women Cabinet members, and 14 women ministers and ambassadors. And only one of these was appointed to a major country.

The situation looked even more dire if you looked at how many women held political office in 1974, rather than throughout U.S. history.

Today there are no women in the Cabinet, no women in the Senate, no women governors, and only 16 women representatives (fewer than in several previous Congresses).

How are we doing here in 2024? There are currently just 25 women senators, of the Senate’s 100 members. Currently, the U.S. House has just 126 women, accounting for 29% of the House’s 435 seats. Luce notes repeatedly that women seemed to be going backwards when it came to social progress from the perspective of 1974.

1984: Geraldine Ferarro Runs as VP

Geraldine Ferarro became the vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket with Walter Mondale in 1984, facing off against incumbent Ronald Reagan. Ferarro wasn’t competing for the top role, but it obviously created a lot of discussion about the possibility of a female president one day, especially if something happened to Mondale.

Mondale would lose to Reagan in a 49-state sweep in the Electoral College. Mondale only won his home state of Minnesota and it would set back the nation at least mentally as many people saw the dreams of a woman executive dashed for a generation.

1989: President Gerald Ford

President Gerald Ford predicted in 1989 that the American people wouldn’t directly elect a woman as president. Instead, she’d be VP first and then become president after something happened to the president she was on the ticket with. Ford was asked by a young girl in the audience about the possibility, phrasing it as “what advice would you give a young lady wanting to become President of the United States?”

Ford responded by first stating, “Well, I hope we do have a young lady at some point become President of the United States,” before explaining how he thought it would happen exactly.

“I can tell you how I think it will happen, because it won't happen in the normal course of events,” Ford continued. “Either the Republican or Democrat political party will nominate a man for President and a woman for Vice President, and the woman and man will win. So you'll end up with a President, a male and a Vice President, a female. And in that term of office of the President, the President will die, and the woman will become President under the law or Constitution.”

2016: Hillary Clinton

Well, we know how that turned out, don’t we folks?

The world of tomorrow

Hillary Clinton “won” the 2016 election by the standards of any normal wealthy country. She beat Donald Trump by almost 3 million votes, but because the U.S. has an antiquated system known as the Electoral College (which was established to placate southern slave-owners in the 19th century) we don’t choose our president by something so silly as who got the most votes.

At least 94% of Americans say they’d vote for a woman as president, according to a Gallup poll from 2019. Well, we’re less than a month away from the presidential election and the people of 2024 will get the opportunity to vote for a woman on a major party ticket for just the second time in U.S. history. Things didn’t work out so well for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but it’s look like Kamala Harris has a real shot at the White House. But she’s polling dead even, which is a worrying sign for people who care about the U.S. existing as a liberal democracy.

When I look back at the The Jetsons, a show that debuted in 1962 and lasted just one season during its first run, it’s easy to see how it inspired so many visions of the future that would occur in the 1960s, 70s and beyond. But what inspired The Jetsons?

From the vantage point of the 2020s, we can forget that The Jetsons didn’t invent the idea of an optimistic future. Many of the ideas for futuristic transportation, home life, and even building designs, were coming from somewhere. So it makes sense to take a look at the late 1950s and early 1960s futurism that clearly inspired many of the people who were living and working in Southern California at the time. Because the animators at Hanna-Barbera in Burbank were drawing inspiration from their surroundings, including the newspapers, TV shows, cartoons, and architecture of the era.

One place to start is the newspapers of the time. The November 4, 1956 issue of Southland magazine, packaged with every copy of the Independent Press-Telegram in Long Beach, California, included predictions about the future of the American home that clearly helped give animators inspiration for The Jetsons.

The magazine imagined a family called the Joneses, who would be living a luxurious futuristic lifestyle by the year 2000. The article imagined how for Mrs. Jones, the “tedium of housework has been reduced by her electronic aids.” The Jetsons, of course, was all about the gadgets that were going to make housework by humans a thing of the past. Not only did that animated show delight with Rosey the humanoid robot, there were countless gadgets that were constantly doing the cooking and cleaning to reduce the amount of housework humans needed to do. It was a central promise of tomorrow, as presented by the 1960s show.

The magazine also tells about how Mrs. Jones “plans to catch the monorail into downtown Long Beach to do some shopping.” Many of these ideas would then find their way into the Disneyland TV show episode “Magic Highway USA” a couple years later, which was another direct inspiration for The Jetsons, albeit without the local Long Beach tie-in.

The promotional art below from “Magic Highway USA,” which aired on May 14, 1958, could be mistaken for The Jetsons if it hadn’t been created before the classic animated TV show debuted, complete with the monorails of tomorrow.

The Southland magazine also described the TV set of the future which sounded very similar to what would pop up in episodes of The Jetsons: “The Television Set—with quality comparable to mid-20th century wide screen, color transmission—occupies a large picture from on the wall, out of the way when it’s not in use.”

The Monsanto House of the future clearly drew some inspiration from this TV, as you can see from the photo below taken in 1960. The attraction opened at Disneyland in 1957, just a year after that prediction in Southland magazine.

What did the TV look like in the 1962 version of The Jetsons? Pretty darn close, as you can see below.

Magic Highway USA also included scenes of a woman with her child riding on a moving sidewalk, another depiction that likely found its way into the first episode of The Jetsons.

Below we see the way that Disney’s animators envisioned it in 1958.

And then we see the way that Jane Jetson rides the moving sidewalk in 1962.

There’s also the comic strip Closer Than We Think, which ran in over 200 newspapers across the country from 1958-1963. Illustrated by Arthur Radebaugh, it’s one of my favorite pieces of retro-futurism of all time and you can see how it influenced The Jetsons with every strip.

The idea behind Closer Than We Think was to take the most cutting edge science being talked about in the newspaper and turning that into futuristic ideas. For instance, the idea above was inspired by an automotive designer and exec at a car company. It ran in newspapers on Sunday, April 6, 1958.

Look, pa, no wheels! Use of a thin layer of compressed air may allow autos to hover and move just above ground level.

A pipe dream? Not at all. The concept (already proved) comes from scientist Andrew Kucher, vice-president of engineering at one of our major motor companies. His people are studying how to maintain stability. Special highway engineering is one way. Another is skillful design, evidenced already in experimental ideas from the staff of motor stylist George W. Walker.

Today's earthbound cars won't turn into low flying carpets right away. But it may happen sooner than we think!

The architecture of Southern California clearly got its hooks into the minds of the Jetsons animators as well. Gin D. Wong, an architect in Los Angeles, had a big role to play, as he was responsible for working on structures like the Theme Building at the Los Angeles Airport (pictured at the top) which gave The Jetsons some aesthetic inspiration. The Theme Building opened in 1960, two years before the premiere of The Jetsons in 1962. And it’s not hard to picture the creators of The Jetsons driving around Southern California with all this Googie-style (not Google, Googie) architecture and drawing so much of their ideas from there.

The Jetsonian architecture wasn’t just at the airport. The amusement parks of the 1950s, including Disneyland which opened in 1955, also clearly helped provide a jumping off point for the Jetsons creators. One very cool example is Pacific Ocean Park, opened in 1958 by CBS in Venice, California, which is pictured below.

Obviously the creation of any new piece of media is going to involve inspiration from a number of sources. But it’s important to remember that nothing is made in a vacuum. The people who created The Jetsons were making a show that was fundamentally a comment on what was already happening in the culture. Sometimes that was culture in the form of architecture, while other times it was newspaper articles or TV shows. But whatever it was, they ultimately created something that would resonate far beyond the 1960s. So much so that The Jetsons would get a reboot in the 1980s.

Even the jokes on The Jetsons were sometimes directly pulled from things that had come before. Take the mother-in-law joke in the third episode of the show, “The Space Car,” which originally aired on Sunday October 7, 1962. The car and even the gag is identical to that of Tex Avery’s “Car of Tomorrow” cartoon short from 1951. Below you can see the Jetsons on the left and the Avery short on the right, demonstrating how a mother in law might get her own seat away from the main cabin.

At the end of the day, the most exciting idea presented in The Jetsons is that we’ll all have more free time to do the things that we want. And the Southland magazine article makes that explicit, stating “Mr. Jones industrial job is made easier, through automation. They have more free time, more ways in which to spend it. They’re saving their money, perhaps looking forward to their planned visits to Mars when passenger space travel begins in the next few years.”

We’re still waiting on that vision of the future, presented in The Jetsons and all the things that came before it. But it’s not simply going to be technology that delivers any potential leisure society of the future. As always, the problem is political, not technological. If you want to work just a few hours a week you need to built the political machine to make that happen. Because every new innovation that increases productivity is just going to help the bosses get rich, not allow you to actually work less at your job. That’s the part that the media which inspired The Jetsons never mentions.

Last week OpenAI rolled out its new virtual assistant, dubbed Advanced Voice Mode, that allows users to have a conversation with an AI bot. There’s some controversy about the technology, not least because actress Scarlet Johansson threatened a lawsuit when the tech was first demonstrated earlier this year. The early demo voice sounded an awful lot like the actress, whose character in the 2013 film Her was a disembodied voice that people fell in love with.

But all of this new tech got me thinking about the historical analogues of the 19th century. What was possible centuries ago to reproduce what sounded like human speech with a solely mechanical method? One early experiment was a brilliant invention by one Joseph Faber in the 1840s. Faber built a machine that could produce sounds that were remarkably similar to human speech. And Faber understood the theatrics of his public presentation, dressing up the machine to look like human figures.

The contraption went by many names, including the Euphonia, or sometimes just Faber’s “speaking machine” or “talking machine.” Periodicals of the late 19th century would describe the machine as “very imperfect” and “most unsatisfactory” but all the coverage in the 1840s was from people who were quite impressed.

The device worked by purely mechanical means, pushing air through musical reeds and rubber tubes that could be manipulated to produce different sounds that would mimic human speech. The device even had a tongue that could help the air flow in much the same way a human might.

The machine was resurrected by Faber’s nephew and toured in 1870, which is why the top graphic, republished in the May 1939 issue of Popular Science, refers to that year rather than the 1840s. And an 1872 issue of the Chicago Medical Journal arguably explained how it worked better than the people of the 1840s imply because they’d had a few decades to digest what was happening.

“The machine proper is mounted upon a table and operated by a key-board and levers, like a piano,” the journal wrote. “Under the table is a treadle that works the bellows, supplying air to the larynx. The latter is formed of india-rubber, with a movable glottis of thin lamellae of ivory to give the necessary tension. The upper jaw is wooden and stationary, having a lip of leather. The under jaw, which is movable, is made of gutta-percha, as is the roof of the mouth.”

To be honest, I was initially skeptical when I first read about Faber’s machine, if only because there were so many robotic fakes in the 19th century. Any time someone claimed to have produced a robotic device that sounded marvelous and just so happened to be something that humans could do very well, it usually turned out to be fake. But in this instance, it really does seem like Faber’s invention was legit.

And the Chicago Medical Journal was convinced that the machine was creating those noises because everything seemed very plausible, even decades after it was first created:

The tongue is made of rubber, is flexible and movable, and can be pressed either against the palate or back into the throat. As the mouth is unprovided with teeth, a narrow metallic band is made to fall from over the upper lip and close the fissure of the mouth whenever the dental sounds are required. There is no soft palate. The nasal opening which permits the production of the sounds of m and n is formed by a tube proceeding from the larynx, beyond the vocal cords, and when the lips are closed, as for b. In the same way the n is made by the d. A little shuttle-wheel is so contrived as to be dropped into the current of air proceeding to the glottis, where its rapid revolution produces the sound r.

The lungs are represented by a pair of bellows. The instrument speaks phonetically, and therefore can utter words in any language. Fourteen sounds are used—viz., the vowels, a, e, i, o, u, and the consonants, l, r, w, f, s, sh, b, d, and g. In some instances remaining sounds are obtained by variously combining these, and in others they are modified by opening the glottis.

All of that said about skepticism, it does give me pause that the machine would adopt the accent of the operator, though that could just be explained by the fact that the person using the machine was trying to recreate sentences phonetically rather than through a written script.

The operator, Madame Faber, being a German and not speaking a word of English, the accent of the former tongue is readily distinguishable in the utterance of the machine. A mask, with a tubular nose, is slipped over the mouth when the machine speaks French, so as to give the nasal sound peculiar to the pronunciation of that language. The instrument is also able to speak in a very high or in a deeper tone; but all parts of a complete sentence must be intonated alike.

If it was a fake, it was one that convinced some very educated people.

During the 1840s demonstrations, sometimes Faber would dress up the front of the machine with a caricature of a Turkish person, called a “Turk,” not unlike the infamous Mechanical Turk of the 1770s. The Mechanical Turk could supposedly play chess, but actually worked by concealing a person who actually moved the pieces. We know for certain the Mechanical Turk was a fraud.

What do you think? Was Joseph Faber’s talking machine legit? I have yet to come across any evidence that it’s fake, but I always try to keep my guard up about these things. And one thing that makes me think it could be real is the fact that people were first impressed with the device but then decades later others thought it wasn’t very good. If you really wanted to make it sound like a human, you could hide one somewhere and just fake the entire thing.

But, then again, maybe that was the genius of the scam. Perhaps by diminishing the quality and making it sound less than perfect, that was what made it so convincing. If you can’t tell, my mind is incessantly asking about whether something is fake or real, due in large part to my day job at Gizmodo debunking so many viral stories online. And given the election season, there’s been way too many fakes to expose. Especially from this guy who goes by the name Donald John Trump.

When the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles featured a new “coffee robot” in October 1967, the newspapers covering it sounded both excited and terrified.

“Experts contend that, as a group, robots are actually harmless enough,” the October 3, 1967 edition of th e Los Angeles Times explained. “And as employes [sic] they are courteous, stable and willing to perform both menial and sophisticated chores without a complaint. Certainly the 3,500 pound ‘portable’ model that was uncaged Monday at the Biltmore behaved itself in an exemplary manner.”

“But there was something vaguely ominous about the dull inner churning of its hydraulic pumps,” the newspaper continued, “the hiss of its pneumatic fingers, the way it shook the floor while cleverly pouring a cup of coffee.”

The robot was made by a company called Unimation and dubbed Unimate. And having the robot serving coffee at a major hotel in Los Angeles was its west coast debut.

The article quotes Joel Strasser, the public relations director of Unimation, who keeps trying to straddle that line between something that he knows people will be excited about and something that will make people afraid.

“Welcome to the temporary home of our beast,” Strasser is quoted saying the Los Angeles Times article.

Strasser pointed at the robot’s 7.5-foot claw when describing the machine’s “arm” to the newspaper. “This is the turret assembly, this is called the wrist and these are the fingers.”

But one of the most interesting moments in the article is when the robot company representative told the newspaper that “a number of firms already use the robot,” but they “often won’t admit it because they fear the reaction of organized labor.” Going even a step further, he insisted that the design was made very consciously to not appear human because there was “sensitivity to labor.”

And none of those fears were new. The release of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey was still five months away when the article came out, but there were already decades of fear about what robots might be capable of doing in the near future, from taking our jobs to leading an uprising. And there are many different ways that those fears will play out in the popular media. But how it’s sold by those in power can vary too.

If you listen to the wealthiest man in the world, humanoid robots are about to take over the planet, and in turn put a lot of people out of work. Elon Musk makes a lot of big promises as the head of companies like Tesla and the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. But there’s no promise more out there than his idea that we won’t have to work at some point in the future, all thanks to robots.

“Probably none of us will have a job,” Musk said at the VivaTech 2024 conference in Paris back in May.

“If you want to do a job that’s kinda like a hobby, you can do a job,” Musk continued. “But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want.”

Musk went a step further, saying that everyone would get large incomes in this scenario, bypassing the common idea of a universal basic income paid out by the government, and insisting society would achieve a “universal high income.” And that’s not all. Musk claimed that incredibly, “there would be no shortage of goods or services.”

Importantly, Musk has never explained how any of this would work. And it sounds very similar to claims we’ve heard repeatedly over the past century. Robots were supposed to cut back on the number of hours people would work, according to the experts of the 1960s. When the coffee robot was introduced in Los Angeles, serious TV shows were telling everyone that robots would provide a life of lesiure.

“Technology is opening a new world of leisure time,” legendary TV anchor Walter Cronkite said in 1967. “One government report projects that by the year 2000, the United States will have a 30-hour work week and month-long vacations as the rule.”

That same year, a newspaper quoted philosopher Sebastian de Grazia who said 30-hour weeks would be a given, but the workweek might even be shorter for the average person. In fact, it could be just 21 hours, according to de Grazia.

But we know now that all of those promises were garbage. You might be working shorter hours here in the year 2024, but the average person isn’t making more money for those hours. At least not in the U.S. And that’s the part guys like Musk can never explain properly. It’s always that robots will take all the jobs, but obviously we’re not going to let all those people who are put out of work just starve on the street. Except that’s exactly what happened. And it’s what’s going to happen again unless major changes are made.

It’s been 10 years since I wrote about the scam of the leisure society that’s been peddled by tech boosters. And nothing has changed. Yes, we have coffee robots in some capacity, but they’re not the norm and they didn’t really put significant numbers of people out of work. Even if they had, those people were not going to get a guaranteed wage from the government. That’s just not how our system works. It’s not how technology works and it’s not how it’s ever going to work because a guaranteed wage is a political problem, not a tech problem.

The astronauts who are currently stuck in space thanks to Boeing's little mishaps will soon be voting in the upcoming U.S. presidential election between vice president Kamala Harris and convicted felon Donald Trump. They were supposed to come back to Earth after just eight days and given the latest schedule to get them home, it’s probably going to be about eight months meaning they won’t be back until February 2025. And that means they won’t be on Earth in November and they’ll need to cast their vote from the International Space Station.

When the first astronaut cast his vote from space in 1997, he did so via email from Russia’s Mir space station. It was quite a futuristic moment, using the internet from the orbit of space to make your voice heard for democracy. But it took some special things to fall into place first.

Astronaut David Wolf holds that “first” distinction and if you’re wondering why someone was voting in an odd year, given the fact that presidential and midterm federal elections all happen on evenly numbered years, it’s because Wolf was voting in local elections. Texas, where most astronauts live, had recently passed a law allowing anyone who needed to vote in the state to do it from space, paving the way for this very odd democratic ritual that astronauts could take part in without being on the ground.

“A person who meets the eligibility requirements of a voter under the Texas Election Code, Chapter 101, but who will be on a space flight during the early-voting period and on Election Day, may vote,” the law reads.

Wolf voted vie email, and the astronauts up there today, Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, will be doing something similar.

From NBC News:

Election officials in Harris County, Texas — where NASA’s Johnson Space Station is located — said they work with NASA to send astronauts a PDF with clickable boxes to make their choices. The PDF is password protected to ensure a secret ballot.

And reading out it this week got me thinking, has anyone ever voted for Donald Trump in space? And what would be going through the mind of an astronaut who did that?

Astronaut Shane Kimbrough voted from space in 2016, when the choices were between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Kate Rubins voted from space in 2016 and 2020, listing her address as “low-Earth orbit.” But given the fact that it’s a secret ballot, we don’t know how Rubins or Kimbrough voted. And while I’m not about to guess, I really hope they didn’t vote for Trump.

“The astronaut receives the password-protected document in an email, fills it out and sends it back to the county clerk, who copies their choices onto a standard ballot. Only the clerk and the astronaut will know how the astronaut voted,” an article from the Washington Post explained in 2016.

And if you’re wondering about that “voting booth,” in the NASA photo above, it obviously wasn’t a dedicated voting booth, in case the handmade sign didn’t give it away.

"It's our small little area where we sleep and have our computer," Rubins explained in a video from 2020. "It's a private area on the space station and it seems like it would be about the right size for a voting booth back down at home."

To be clear, I kind of doubt any astronaut has voted for Trump, either in 2016 or 2020. Astronauts are intelligent people and voting fro Trump is not something that an intelligent person does. There were a handful of otherwise smarter-than-average fascists who may have voted for Trump in 2016 or 2020, but the vast majority of people who have ever voted for Trump are not intelligent people.

Trump is a unique danger to the safety and security of the United States, as any decent person understands. And the polls are looking good for his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris. The most reputable national polls taken after the recent presidential debate have Harris up by solid margins.

But obviously the U.S. doesn’t choose presidents through a normal system like “who gets the most votes.” We have something called the Electoral College, a system devised to give slaveholders more power in the 19th century, and while Harris is doing well in the battleground states she needs to win, like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, the election is still much closer than it should be.

There are also a lot of wild cards that the universe could play between now and Election Day on November 5. On Sunday, for example, there was another attempted assassination of Trump at his golf course in Florida. It sounds like the potential shooter didn’t get a shot off before the Secret Service scared him away, but it’s a great reminder that a lot of weird things could happen in the next 50-something days. The weirdest thing that could happen, in my opinion? An astronaut voting for Trump. I really hope it doesn’t happen. But you never know. The world is a very strange place.