What we’re reading

“For work and pleasure combined, I’m reading about past and relatively recent predictions regarding technology of the future. From the past, I’m reading Ellul’s 1954 summary of predictions about the year 2000 by Cold War-era American and Russian scientists (as translated from the French by John Wilkinson in 1964). From the more recent past, I’m reading the Smithsonian magazine poll from April 2014 regarding Americans’ ideas about which technologies will emerge and what they’d like to see. It’s fascinating to consider how people’s views of the future reflect their contemporary preoccupations and to see which of their predictions came true. ”