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How the experts thought we should have lived in 2000 (without the Internet)

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On December 27, 1950, a surviving North Carolina newspaper, the Robesonian, published a report from the Associated Press news agency. titled How experts think we will live in 2000.

Fifteen predictions about a future that looked “fantastic” through “the dark clouds” (World War II had just ended). The tone was very optimistic: “Hopes and dreams will prevail over war and new threats … many millions of people will see peace, prosperity, health, a longer life, more pleasures and luxuries than we can imagine ”. And, added the author of the article, “a woman could become president!” (prediction, yes, this is wrong, because it has not yet happened in the US). Some forecasts are very centered, like the one on life expectancy: “Medicine by the year 2000 will have advanced the length of life of women to an expectation of nearly 80 and of men to over 75”.

Others have not gone far from reality. In fact it is somehow said that the telephone would have incorporated the television (“the telephone will be transformed from wire to radio and will be equipped with the visuality of television. Who’s on the other end of the line will seldom be a mystery. Evey pedestrian will have his own walking telephone, an apparatus by a combination of the X-ray and television”). E si immaginava una forte reduction of working hours, con una settimana cortissima (“tell your children not to be surprised if the year 2000 finds 35 or even a 20-hour work week fixed by law”).

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Incredibly, but not too much, there was no Internet among the 15 forecasts.

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