Back to the future as we rewind to 1999 and look at predictions for tech 25 years on
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As the 20th century drew to a close, pundits and futurists envisioned the 2000s as an era of drastic change due to a technological revolution. Many of their forecasts - especially those predicting that computer devices would become integral to daily life and portable enough to carry everywhere - have materialised in one way or another.
However, not all of these 21st-century visions have been accurate. A 1999 prediction suggested that every home would have a "smart box", a lockable, refrigerated box outside each front door for storing post and perishable items after delivery. While delivery lockers and pick-up points are now commonplace, this forecast did not foresee the rapidity of deliveries or how logistics companies would innovate ways to keep food and other items cool during transit. Before becoming a globally recognised tech billionaire, Jeff Bezos predicted that by the early 2000s, computer chips would be embedded in everything from dinner plates to clothing and even medicine packaging, with these systems using collected data to inform users about the healthiness of their food or whether two medicines should be mixed.
In a 1999 interview with 60 Minutes Australia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted that computers would become powerful enough to perform human tasks. He suggested that there would come a time when people wouldn't be able to distinguish between speaking to a human or a computer on the phone, possibly foreseeing the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) that we're witnessing in the 2020s.
