In 1994, the World Future Society Predicted Life in 2025. How’d They Do?

In 1994, a Bethesda organization called the World Future Society sent out a press release announcing a report that predicted what life would be like in 2025. One local journalist stuck the release in a desk drawer at the time, and he recently came across it and sent it our way—just in time to take a look at how accurate the group’s crystal ball turned out to be. So we tracked down the full report, “The Highly Probable Future,” written by a now-deceased futurist named Joseph F. Coates as part of a project exploring how science and technology would reshape the world. How did Coates do? A few highlights:

What It Gets Right

Coates does best on technology. He sees that the internet—a “worldwide, broadband network of networks”—will soon explode, and he’s on top of AI: “The learning of machines, systems, and devices will mimic or surpass human intelligence,” he writes, though his example (a toaster that intuits its user’s preferences) is underwhelming. Coates is right that “communication will be available to any place at any time from anywhere,” and he writes that there will be “countless virtual communities based on electronic linkages.” He also glimpses some of the downsides of the digital future. People in advanced nations, he writes, will become “computer literate” but also “computer dependent.”

What It Gets Wrong

Coates predicts that advances in genomics will help people “live to their mid-80s while enjoying a healthier, fuller life”—but in reality, life expectancy in advanced nations has gone down. Genetically modified foods, he figures, will be more like “low-cholesterol, cancer-busting french fries” than pest-resistant corn. He thinks prefabricated homes will become the norm, making housing “more flexible as well as more affordable.” In the United States, he suggests, we’ll have universal healthcare by now. But perhaps the prediction that aged the worst is that the emergence of a “worldwide middle class” will be “a powerful force for political and economic stability and some forms of democracy.”

What It Totally Misses

The report whiffs on the global rise of authoritarianism and the precarious state of democracy. It misses the ways that technological progress will be motivated more by profit than by the desire to engineer an ideal society. Coates doesn’t foresee how the internet will make people lonelier, erode trust in institutions and information, and stoke global unrest. He believes we’ll end up having a global currency as well as powerful international governing bodies (if anything, nations have become even less cooperative). It makes you a little wistful, actually, to imagine the world Coates envisions: one in which tech companies help us more than exploit us, where people live longer, get along better, and—due to widespread automation—have much more time to relax. Maybe in another 30 years?

This article appears in the February 2025 issue of Washingtonian.