OMNI's predictions for the year 2000 (from 1989)

A few weeks ago, my mom dropped off another “I-don’t-want-this-stuff-in-my-garage-anymore” box of childhood artifacts. At the bottom of the box, under a pile of space shuttle mission patches and data sheets from JPL (I spent a lot of time by myself), were a dozen old issues of OMNI.

From the late 70’s into the 90’s, OMNI magazine ruled. It was a WIRED-meets-Fortean Times mash-up of hardcore science, speculative metaphysics, and everything in the middle. Before our wildest dreams became our realities, OMNI captured the excitement and wonder of science for leagues of devoted nerds like myself.

The best of my collection was from October, 1989:
Trends and Predictions for the Year 2000 and Beyond.
(I’ve arranged the highlights into two categories.)


HAPPENED (more or less):
• By 2001, nearly all college textbooks and many high-school and junior-high books will come with computer disks (with a “k,” as in “floppy”) to aid in learning.
• Computers will provide access to all the card catalogs of all the libraries in the world by the late 90’s. (And all the free porn in the world.)
• Modular plastic housing will allow people to move more easily (Plastic? Not exactly a bull’s eye on this one, but a trend indeed.)
• Mass media will be more personalized as consumers use pay-per-view television to select movies. Viewers will download their choices from a “teledelivery” service, paying for the program when they see it.
• Job mobility will increase. People will get more used to the idea of changing jobs several times in their lifetimes. (Thank God for plastic houses).
• Portable computers will give us wireless access to data wherever we go inside our computer network.
• Supercomputers the size of three-pound coffee cans. (PS3? Mac Mini? What constituted a “supercomputer” in 1989?)
• By 2000 there will be three major corporations making up the computer hardware industry: IBM, Digital (Who?), and Apple.
• About half of all service workers (43 percent of the labor force by 2000) will be involved in collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, structuring, storing, or retrieving information as the basis of knowledge. (That’s us! And we do it for free. This practically defines Web 2.0.)

NEVER HAPPENED:
• Videodiscs (!) will enhance books by providing visual and audio information and even recordings of smells and tastes. (An LP-sized book that you could taste? Sweet!)
• Fewer very poor and very wealthy will exist in our society. (Sorry, more poor, more wealthy.)
• The Social Security system will be reformed. (From a system into a memory.)
• Personal robots in the home. (Does a Roomba qualify?) Mundane commercial and service jobs, and repairs of space station components will be done by robots.
• Artifical blood could replace the world’s blood banks.
• Lackluster performance of U.S. students on standardized tests will prompt inevitable reforms. (Well, this one is half right).
• Companies will be judged on how they treat the environment.

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