Wild tech predictions from 1999 and how many are coming true in 2025
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As Y2K and the new millennium loomed, scientists, commentators and futurists started looking to the 2000s as a time of rapid change. Thanks to the tech revolution, many of the predictions in 1999 – most notably the idea that computers would become small and portable enough to take everywhere with us – have come to fruition.
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But some of those visions of the 21st century are yet to materialise fully in reality. One prediction from ’99 was that every home would get a so-called ‘smart box’, a lockable and refrigerated box outside every front door to allow post and perishable items to be stored after delivery.
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Delivery lockers and pick-up points have become widespread, but the prediction failed to anticipate how quickly deliveries could be made, or how logistics firms would develop ways of chilling food during transit. Before becoming one of the world’s best-known tech billionaires, Jeff Bezos predicted that computer chips would be in everything from dinner plates to clothing and even medicine packaging by the early 2000s.
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He reckoned those systems would use the data they gathered to tell users how healthy their food is, or if two types of medicine can be mixed or not. The Amazon founder also suggested computers would eventually become powerful enough to take on tasks for humans, and when speaking on the phone, people would not be able to tell if they were communicating with another person or a computer.
