Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century

Renowned twentieth-century experts made many educated guesses about what life in the early twenty-first century would be like, and many of those guesses turned out to be spectacularly wrong, notes freelance journalist Paul Milo in Your Flying Car Awaits. We’re now 10 years into the new century and have as of yet no bases on the moon, computers that think, flying cars, or any of the other marvels that scholars only three decades ago expected that we would have.

Milo reviews the leading forecasts across the twentieth century and infers what they say about their respective times — optimistic eras bred optimistic forecasts, while recession eras bore gloomy forecasts, for example. He also identifies lessons that forecasters today stand to learn from these erroneous forecasts. Forecasting is always a risky endeavor, he says. But if we determine how scholars in the past erred, we can alter our approaches to forecasting accordingly and guess the future with greater accuracy.

Your Flying Car Awaits is a light and conversational overview of forecasting through the decades, as well as a sharp evaluation of the limits to our abilities as humans to guess the future. Students of cultural history will appreciate it, as will any readers who want an approachable yet informative discussion about the discipline of making forecasts.