When the American financier J.P. Morgan hired the inventor of the lightbulb, Thomas Edison, to wire his mansion in New York, his father Junius Morgan warned him that electric light was only a passing craze. In 1903, Horace Rackham, the personal lawyer of automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, was told that cars would never replace horse-drawn carriages. And in his 1961 book The Wonderland of Tomorrow, Brendan Matthews announced that, soon, technology would allow us to eliminate aging and bad weather.
Predicting the future with any degree of accuracy is difficult, but certainly not impossible. As Czech writer Karel Čapek, whose 1920 play RUR is believed to have coined the term “robots,” once said, “Some of the future can always be read in the palms of the present.” The greater your understanding of science, society, and human nature, the more you can read. While some are more well-known than others, there is no shortage of books with shockingly accurate predictions of the future.
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