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One in every four Americans believes in astrology, according to a 2022 article published by YouGovAmerica, so no matter how times change, what doesn’t seem to change is our collective penchant for predicting the future. With the advent of new AI technologies like ChatGPT and Midjourney, many of us are predicting (and worrying) about the impact these can have on the way we structure society and distribute resources over the years.
But we aren’t the first ones to do this.
Back in 1923, experts in technology, engineering, and sociology-related fields were predicting massive changes in how society would operate in 2023. Paul Fairie, an instructor at the University of Calgary, Tweeted a viral thread listing clips of newspapers from 1923 that predicted everything from the four-hour workday to everyone looking like a supermodel. But how many of these actually came true? Or to be more precise, how many of them could have been true and which ones came true in a way people in 1923 didn’t expect?
1. No More Hard Work by 2023
“No more hard work by 2023!” is the enthusiastic proclamation of a newspaper article about Dr. Charles P. Steinmetz’s predictions for this year. The newspaper reports that Dr. Steinmetz thought electricity would free us from drudgery and to that, we in 2023 say “We wish!”.
Dr. Steinmetz isn’t the first, nor will he be the last, person to predict that work hours would shrink because of technology. Open Culture reports that his contemporary, economist John Maynard Keynes, also predicted that his grandchildren would only need to work 15 hours a week. Contrary to their predictions, we’re actually working more hours than ever as work begins to encroach on private life, according to the BBC, to the point that ADP statistics show that one in 10 people are doing at least 20 hours of free overtime work for free.
The predictions made by Dr. Steinmetz are being echoed online today by practically anyone who has a job responsibility they can automate with artificial intelligence. But will AI’s time-saving capabilities actually reduce our work hours? History shows us that probably won’t be the case.
2. Women Will Shave Their Heads, Men Will Wear Curls
A 2023 prediction from the 1923 newspaper Savannah News claimed that women “will probably shave their heads and the men will be wearing curls”. The prediction may have been set a little too late. Cosmopolitan reports that some women were shaving their heads during the 2020 quarantines.
“Because this pandemic feels like a shift for the entire globe, I felt it only right that part of my shift was to cut off my hair.” Then 22-year-old Gabrielle Garcia shared with Cosmopolitan.
As for men wearing curls, that’s one we haven’t seen as much as women with shaved heads.
3. Radio Will Replace Gasoline as a Power Source by 2023
American engineer and aviator Glenn Hammond Curtiss had a bold prediction for 1923: We would be using radio instead of gasoline to power aircraft. Clearly, as of 2023, this prediction is far from coming true. According to Statista, the total fuel consumption of commercial airlines in 2022 was 60 billion gallons.
4. No More Beauty Contests in 2023
Another prediction listed in Fairie’s Twitter thread was an article that claimed beauty contests would cease to exist because people would become too beautiful to choose between. Amusingly, they also predicted the end of baby contests. While Toddlers & Tiaras was finally canceled in 2013, according to The List, we still have beauty contests today such as Miss Universe which had its 71st competition on January 14, 2023.
Since then, we’ve had new predictions about what people will look like. An article published in National Geographic predicted that people would have more mixed racial heritage (via Mic).
5. Life Expectancy Will Increase
Another newspaper clipping in Fairie’s thread claimed that an unnamed scientist had predicted the average human life expectancy would increase to 300 years. Life expectancy has been rapidly increasing worldwide, according to Our World In Data, with life expectancy having more than doubled since 1900 to over 70 years old. Statistics from Scitable by Nature Education show that life expectancy has only increased steadily for the past 200 years so while we may not quite be living to our 300s yet, our trend of delayed death makes it a likely outcome in the coming years.
On that note, transhumanism, a movement that calls for Homo sapiens to transcend itself through technology, may be the key to our 300-year-old future but who knows for sure if that will be the case?
6. Newspapers Will Have Been Out of Business for 50 Years
One clipping claimed that in 2023, we would no longer be reading the news but listening to it as newspapers will have been out of business for 50 years by 2023. In some ways, this is true, but that isn’t the full picture. While the newspaper industry has been in decline for the past few years, according to Forbes, and has been suffering a year-on-year 6% loss in readership, the news business model isn’t quite dead as media companies have moved online.
If you’re wondering how media companies make money without selling print material, here’s the basic gist of it: Media companies make money from ads, sponsorships, affiliate marketing, and subscriptions, among other things. This is generally true regardless of whether you read or listen to your news since even small news channels on YouTube, for example, rely on ad revenue and product sponsorships.
7. In 1923, People Thought There Would Be Now Private Kitchens by 2023
The idea of eating out for every meal might seem horrifying in today’s economy, but a clipping from the thread predicted that the private, in-home kitchen would disappear altogether as people come to rely on ready-to-eat meals. By ready-to-eat, the clipping meant more than the microwavable dinners we see today but food that stays fresh for indefinite periods of time and is packed with intense flavors that — okay, that one actually exists in the form of today’s fast foods which are loaded with sugar, fat, and salt to get you hooked on them, according to NPR, and chemically engineered junk food (via Hungry for Change).
8. We’ll Be Communicating With Watch Sized Radio Telephones
If there’s one prediction that people in 1923 got right about 2023, it’s the existence of “watch-sized radio telephones” or as we call them today, the smartphone. As claimed by the newspaper clipping, this technology has allowed us to communicate with each other no matter which end of the earth we happen to be at.
If smartphones aren’t an accurate enough equivalent for you, there’s the smartwatch, a device whose market Apple dominated in 2021 with a 30.1% share of global smartwatch shipments, according to Statista.
