December 29, 2025
With the new year just a couple of days away, we’re right on schedule to start thinking about the future. We make predictions. We set resolutions. We look ahead with a familiar mix of hope, anxiety, and misplaced confidence. If we’re feeling especially reflective, we also glance backward, trying to figure out how we got here - and what we completely misread along the way.
That habit of looking forward and backward at the same time reminds me of something from my childhood.
When I was a kid, one of the attractions at Disney World was the Carousel of Progress. I wouldn’t call it a favorite - it was pretty tame compared to roller coasters or space rides - but I still look back on it fondly. It was slow, air-conditioned, and oddly comforting. You sat in a rotating theater while scenes from “the modern family” advanced through time: the turn of the century, the 1920s, the postwar years, and finally… the future.
The future, it turned out, was always a little dated.
That was part of its quiet charm. Each update promised a world made better through technology - new appliances, voice-activated conveniences, fewer chores. And yet even as a kid, I sensed something slightly off. The gadgets changed, but the assumptions didn’t. Families looked the same. Roles looked the same. Life itself followed familiar rhythms, just with shinier tools. Progress meant comfort and convenience, not transformation.
Looking back, that ride feels like a perfect snapshot of how we tend to imagine the future - and how consistently wrong we are.
We’re surprisingly bad at predicting what will matter. We fixate on the visible problems of the moment and miss the shifts that quietly rewrite the rules. Early 20th-century urban planners worried about cities being buried under piles of horse manure. They did not foresee that cars would eliminate that particular problem - while introducing congestion, pollution, sprawl, and cities designed around vehicles rather than people.
Even our visions of style age badly. The fins and wings on 1950s and 60s cars were meant to look futuristic, like rocket ships poised for liftoff. To modern eyes, they point not toward the future but toward a very specific imagined one - the Jetsons version of tomorrow that never quite arrived. It turns out that the future rarely looks like we expect, even when we dress it up in chrome.
I’ve loved science fiction since I could read, and I’m sure my long-standing affection played a role in my becoming an engineer. Science fiction enticed me to imagine. It treated the future not as a destination but as a question. Authors were paid to ask “what if?” - and many did so brilliantly. But even there, the blind spots are fascinating.
Isaac Asimov once pointed out that early science fiction was full of moon missions and full of television-like devices, yet rarely combined the two. The idea that people would sit in their living rooms watching a moon landing live simply didn’t occur to most writers. Technologies were imagined in isolation. What was missed were the secondary effects - the ways inventions intersect, reinforce each other, and reshape everyday life.
I’ve seen that play out firsthand in my own lifetime. When I was very young, shopping malls barely existed. By the late 1970s and 80s, they were everywhere - and they weren’t just places to shop. They were social hubs. You went to the mall to see people, to be seen, to wander. Today, many of those malls are hollowed-out relics, casualties of online shopping.
The same is true for media. There was a time when everyone gathered around the same television at the same hour to watch the same shows. That shared experience felt permanent. Now it feels almost quaint. I honestly can’t remember the last time I went to a movie theater. At home, I can pause for a bathroom break, rewind if I missed something, and avoid the gamble of sitting behind someone who talks through the film or kicks the seat.
Perhaps the most striking example is the device we all carry in our pockets. We walk around with access to more of humanity’s knowledge than any generation before us. As a teenager, we could sit in a living room arguing about what actor played a particular role, and the conversation would simply… end. Nobody knew. Today, that question would last five seconds. And yet, despite this astonishing capability, we often use these devices to watch silly TikTok videos or scroll endlessly through distractions.
That, too, is a future no one really predicted.
All of this points to the same underlying truth: we are not good at forecasting outcomes, especially second- and third-order ones. The future isn’t built from single inventions or grand plans. It emerges from millions of individual choices colliding, combining, and amplifying one another - often in ways no one intended.
Which feels especially worth remembering at this time of year.
As we stand on the edge of another calendar reset, making our predictions and promises, it’s worth holding a little humility alongside the hope. The Contours of Tomorrow lens of Emergence reminds us that the most important changes rarely arrive the way we expect. They form gradually, through interaction, adaptation, and surprise.
The future, it turns out, is always a little dated by the time it shows up. But the contours are still being shaped - quietly, collectively, and often in ways no carousel, resolution list, or five-year plan could ever fully capture.