Predicting 100 years into the future in near accuracy is difficult because future technologies can't be envisioned the same way as...
Predicting 100 years into the future in near accuracy is difficult because future technologies can't be envisioned the same way as people who has not yet encountered the primitive predecessors of it. Besides, some future technologies predicted in the past have yet to be invented in present-day technologies that we have. Until now, we don't have flying cars but we have already landed on the moon.
In the 1857 edition of a popular British publication "The Leisure Hour," an article "London a Hundred Years Hence" is imagining a 1957 London with high hopes of a utopian future city. A century later, poverty and crime would have been eradicated and the city will be smoke-free while the Thames will be crystal clear with all the fishes and clear, white pebbles lying at the bottom. Which is not necessarily the case in our real timeline. Interestingly, the author managed to made some surprisingly accurate predictions in some aspects of future London. He predicted the vast geographical expansion of the city in which "Kew and Hammersmith were London; Lewisham and Blackheath were London; Woolwich and Blackwall were London," it also gets it right with specifics, such as the building of the Embankment (which would actually begin only five years after the piece was published): "instead of shelving shores of mud, I saw solid walls of granite, … part paved for wheel-carriages, and part a graveled promenade for the citizens."
He also envisioned the presence of shopping malls in the future: "I beheld vast associative stores, the depositories of the skilled worker in every craft, where all that talent could invent or industry produce was displayed in magnificent abundance beneath one ample roof. One shop of this kind for each single branch of commerce sufficed for a large district, and the decreased expenditure in rent, fittings, and service, reduced the cost of management, and consequently the price of products … The purchaser walked through long galleries, where, ranged in orderly array, glittered and gleamed the gold, the gems, the jewels of every clime."
He even went on further to envision a pre-Internet version of online shopping: "I observed that from each of these district shops innumerable electric wires branched off in all directions, communicating with several houses in the district to which it belonged. Thus, no sooner did a house-keeper stand in need of any article than she could despatch the order instantaneously along the wire, and receive the goods by the very first railway carriage that happened to pass the store. Thus, she saved her time, and she lost no money, because all chaffering and cheapening, and that fencing between buyer and seller, which was once deemed a pleasure, had been long voted a disgraceful, demoralizing nuisance, and was done away with."
Finally, the author foresaw the advent of long distance communication with the telephone and the Internet: "The electric wires ran along the fronts of the houses near the upper stories, crossing the streets at an elevation at which they were scarcely visible from below; and I noticed that the dwellings of friends, kindred, and intimates were thus banded together, not only throughout the whole vast city, but even far out into the provinces, and, in cases where the parties were wealthy, to the uttermost limits of the realm."
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