In 2024, it feels as if our society’s technology is propelling forward in an unknown trajectory. Just this week, a person had a computer chip installed in their brain.
Commentators and reporters annually try to predict where technology will go, but many fail to get it right year after year. Who gets it right? More often than not, the world resembles the pop culture of the past’s vision for the future. Looking to retrofuturism, an old version of the future, can often predict where our advanced society will go.
The reason for this is that technologists are often inspired by the vision of the future they grow up watching. Comic books, television, and movies have a knack for predicting the future, often because they are giving innovators a guidebook for what to build. Elon Musk built his AI chatbot, Grok, to resemble the omnipotent helper in The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy. Upon inspection, much of our technologically advanced reality seems to be built on the futuristic ideas from the past.
