What the future holds

Welcome to our 125th anniversary issue!

With this issue, we wanted to celebrate our milestone as a publication without dwelling too much on our own past. Victory laps are for race cars, not magazines. Instead, we decided to try to use history as a way to explore what things may look like over the next 125 years. 

The longer you report on tech, the more you realize how often we get the future wrong. Predictions have a way of not coming true. The things that seem so clear now can shift and change, rearranging themselves into wholly new forms we never thought of.

But also, predictions that we laugh off as having been so wrong often have a way of coming true eventually. One great example of that is the Segway. (And, uh, bear with me here.) Before Dean Kamen’s personal mobility device was revealed in 2001, hints of it leaked out to the public. Among the most notorious was a claim attributed to Steve Jobs ahead of its unveiling that the Segway would cause people to re-architect cities around it. When the device finally made its awkward debut and was revealed to be nothing more than an electric scooter, the Jobs quote was widely derided—and sometimes employed as an example of his fallibility when it came to predicting the future. 

And yet. Here in 2024, we are doing pretty much what Jobs predicted. Okay, so the Segway never really did catch on, but scooters and all manner of other electric micromobility devices are everywhere. We’re developing infrastructure to support lanes and docking bays for scooters and e-bikes, writing legislation about where and how fast they can be ridden, and fundamentally reimagining the way we get around—even in cities that already had great transit infrastructure. Take Taipei, for example. In that city, charging banks for scooters from Gogoro (a 2023 MIT Technology Review Climate Tech 15 company) now outnumber gas stations and can even be used as a source of grid power when the lights go out. To put it another way, we’re finally redesigning cities around these things.

Which is to say: Even when we get the turn-by-turn navigation wrong, we can still manage to at least gesture in the right direction. And so, throughout this issue you’ll find some of our best bets as to what the future may hold. We may not get it exactly right, but we think we’re at least pointing toward where things are headed. 

In this issue, Casey Crownhart looks at our clean-energy future and the resources we will need to create and maintain it. Niall Firth examines the challenges that archivists face as they try to preserve information about our current lives far into the future. Antonio Regalado investigates the ways we may all play God in the coming years, thanks to the ability to change our very DNA. And nowhere do we get more predictive than in Kara Platoni’s story, which imagines the experiences a child born today will have interacting with AI and other emerging technologies over her lifetime—all 125-odd years of it. 

You’ll also find a superb package of essays asking big questions about the future. Cliff Kuang and Lydia Millet both argue for the importance of taking things into our own hands, whether it’s computer interfaces or responses to the climate crisis. Jessica Hamzelou takes on the question of (much) longer life, Clive Thompson imagines the changing role of video, Ray Kurzweil believes machines will make us free, Katya Klinova interrogates what AI will mean for economic inequality, and Leo Herrera weighs in on, well, porn.

And as in every issue, there’s plenty to read about what’s going on right now. I hope you enjoy it.