Notes from the Future
The Future of Last Year
In 1997, Joe Coates, the famed futurist who was half of Coates and Jarrett Inc, teamed up with John Mahaffie and a baby-faced Andy Hines to publish a book boldly peering into a strange and distant future—the world of 2025! Luckily for you, the whole thing is freely available online. Naturally, the end of 2025 provides a good opportunity to reflect on the work.
The work is basically showing how all the forecasts they and others had been doing, taken in aggregate, paint a picture of a future that’s more radically different than most people expect. It doesn’t follow Dator’s First Law, in that it only offers a single future (dare I say prediction?), rather than a set of possibilities. But in most other respects it feels consistent with current best practices: it mixes quantitative and qualitative work, combines big-picture ideas with on-the-ground illustrations using reasonable personas, and connections to the weak signals of change.
Take, for example, Chapter 15, on what daily life and the human lifecycle might look like in 2025. There are some pretty impressive hits:
- The rise of remote and hybrid work
- The death of newspapers as everyone gets their own personal filter for current events
- Increasing focus on sleep hygiene, including via lights and melatonin
- The rise of trying to make babies and fetuses smarter by exposure to classical music etc.
But also some glaring misses1. If I were to try to describe to someone from the 90s how the world had changed by 2025, I think I would mention the following as the most important:
