There’s something hauntingly poetic about kids trying to map out the future. It’s like watching a child draw a spaceship with crayons, unaware that their hand might be too small to grasp the scale of what they’re imagining. In 1986, a group of teenagers sat down with the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World and tried to guess what 2020 would look like. Some of their predictions were spot-on, others hilariously off-track, but all of them reveal something profound about how we humans—especially young ones—try to make sense of the unknown.
Personally, I think the most fascinating part of this exercise isn’t the accuracy of their guesses, but the reasoning behind them. When a 13-year-old in 1986 said, ‘Computers will run the country,’ they weren’t imagining AI-driven governance or algorithmic policy-making. They were probably thinking of something more tangible, like automated tax systems or punch-card bureaucracy. What makes this particularly interesting is how close they were to the truth, even if their mental model was decades behind the curve. It’s like if I told you in 2024 that ‘the internet will connect everyone,’ and you replied, ‘Oh, like a global library with pictures?’ You’d be right, but also tragically underestimating the chaos that would follow.
One kid predicted ‘brain waves to convert into radio waves’ as a form of telepathy. That’s not just a cool sci-fi idea—it’s a glimpse into how 1980s youth saw technology as an extension of human biology. They weren’t thinking about fiber-optic cables or neural networks; they were imagining a direct, almost mystical link between minds. What this really suggests is that our collective imagination has always been shaped by the tools we have. The ‘space tunnel’ idea, for instance, was born from the era’s obsession with Star Trek and the Cold War’s race to the moon. Yet here we are, 40 years later, still waiting for that tunnel to materialize, while our real breakthroughs—like SpaceX’s reusable rockets—are happening in ways no kid could have predicted.
What many people don’t realize is that these predictions weren’t just about technology. The fear of nuclear war, which both the 1966 and 1986 kids voiced, reflects a generational trauma. For the ’66ers, it was the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of mutually assured destruction. For the ’86ers, it was the Reagan-era arms race and the specter of nuclear winter. It’s wild to think that these kids, growing up in a world of Walkmans and Pac-Man, were already grappling with existential dread about humanity’s survival. In my opinion, this shows how deeply embedded the anxiety of our times is in the psyche of young people, even when they’re preoccupied with things like crushes and pop quizzes.
If you take a step back and think about it, the fact that these kids got some things right—like computers running the country, or the lingering fear of nuclear annihilation—while missing others (like the internet, social media, or climate change) is a testament to the limits of human foresight. A detail that I find especially interesting is how they didn’t anticipate the rise of ‘tower blocks’ as a solution to overpopulation. Instead, they imagined a future where people would be restricted to having fewer kids—a chillingly Malthusian view that feels both outdated and eerily prescient in an age of climate refugees and resource scarcity.
This raises a deeper question: Are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes, just with newer gadgets? The 1986 kids feared that computers might one day press nuclear buttons for us. Today, we worry about AI making autonomous decisions, from drone strikes to financial markets. It’s a different era, but the underlying tension remains: How do we ensure that the tools we create don’t outpace our ethical frameworks? The answer, I think, lies in recognizing that prediction isn’t about getting the details right—it’s about understanding the patterns of human behavior and the unintended consequences of our choices.
What’s most striking, though, is how little we’ve changed in our ability to predict the future. Back in 1986, one kid said, ‘I don’t think they’ll be living on Mars yet.’ They were right, but only because we haven’t managed to get there. The same could be said for flying cars, teleportation, or even basic space tourism. Yet here we are, still relying on Google Maps to navigate a world that’s somehow both more connected and more alien than anyone could have imagined. The future, it seems, is a mirror that reflects our deepest hopes and fears, but rarely the reality we end up with.
